Not everyone is reacting to the comic.
I know myself and many other ladies are off in the corners laughing and dying of irony-poisoning. 
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Well-behaved women seldom make history.
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Or you’re a journalist who got stuck covering CPAC.
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“I wonder what it means?” is a rhetorical question, it is not necessarily used for starting a conversation. The statement used to ask someone specifically is “What do you think it means?”
I actually didn’t mean to say that the woman or the man in the panel are upset. In my ideal post, the one I tried to write, the ones who are upset are the readers, possibly kaibeezytentroy who I was replying to.
So yes, we agree 
Same joke in 4 panels:
Panel 1. Woman says, “I wonder what it means.”
Panel 2. Man opens guide he picked up on his way into the exhibit, “Apparently this represents the artists’ struggles with learning to cook.”
Panel 3. Woman stares at man. Blankly.
Panel 4. Man turns around and leaves.
But no, this was always intended to be a one panel gag, the cartoonist has no interest in whether the man-splainer is knowledgeable or not.
What I find most interesting is that he gave the man a man-bun though which can be understood as shorthand for the man being a certain “type”. My feeling is that was meant to put distance between the male mans-plainer reader and the heart of the joke, it should have allowed the man-splainer to recognize the behavior without actually having to cop to it.
It failed. Possibly because men aren’t mad that shrill women shoot them down, but because they are at a loss at what to do next. Which Is why I emphasize that this isn’t panel 3, it’s panel 1, whiny men who can’t get over themselves don’t stick around for panel 2:
Panel 1. Woman says, “I said, ‘I wonder what it means’, not ‘Tell me what it means.’”
Panel 2. Man says, “I like you.”
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And that’s why I’ll never have Doris Kearns-Goodwin over for another dinner party. “A little club soda will get that out” my ass.
I’ll throw myself out.
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Men? Upset by a cartoon? C’mon. Not THIS man.
Let’s take a look…
…WHAT THE FUCK!!!
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"Oh. Well, now that you’ve splained it to me… "
Oh, I knew we agreed, even though it felt like we didn’t agree a little bit, I was pretty sure that was because I wasn’t properly understanding at least one sentence you wrote.
Doesn’t matter if they were knowledgeable, but I think it’s a far stretch to think they were blameless. I think back to (I think) grade 9 English when my teacher explained that the fundamental question of a story is “why this story?” Why start when you start, why talk about this sequence of events?
So I was looking at it through that lens. There’s no season of 24 where the first 8 episodes of him fast asleep and the 9th episode is a shower, breakfast and tooth brushing.
A one panel comic is often going to show me comeuppance, it is pretty much never going to show me an unanswered wrong that doesn’t transparently mock the wrongdoer. I just find the idea that someone could read that comic and think that it is a comic about a woman being unreasonable/aggressive/crazy must think that:
- a funny joke is “Women are unreasonable, you know what I’m talkin’ about fellas!” [Wait for audience to laugh];
- the distinction being drawn between wondering and asking for an explanation to be so inherently unreasonable as to be obvious mockery; or
- the comic is deeply experimental in form.
If we imagine the lives of these characters before and after this event, it seems very deeply uncharitable to women as a group to think that the man has behaved totally reasonably and the woman has not. It turns it into an imagined Chick Tract - a totally reasonable protagonist faced with mad caricatures of something the writer doesn’t agree with. So it makes me feel like the sort of person who reads the comic this way is the sort of person who would find Chick Tracts compelling on their face.
But I really like your point, that a problem for (certainly many) men who have been called on mansplaining is that they just don’t know what to do or say. They become angry because they are at a loss.
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“…best thing for everyone, I’m right there with you”
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I am NO mansplainer!!
I think @Sagoli is spot on. I’ve been a dev for nearly 20 years. I love playing with code, learning how other code works, learning how various efforts succeed and fail. To me it is living and vibrant thing that I love to explore and share with others. After too many interactions like you describe (with both genders) I have accepted that most non-technical people do not want a technical explanation when they are complaining about something technical that is making their day suck.
Regardless of what language they use most times they want sympathy and some human understanding. If they continue to use language that sounds like questions to me I will offer to explain in technical terms “why” something is the way it is but add that I too find said feature awkward, frustrating, tedious, etc… Almost always they laugh and say no thanks on the deep dive. To which I respond that I really do find the offending feature confusing, frustrating, or difficult. This tends to get a big sigh of relief that a technical person has the same issue. I think it helps dispel a common fear of regular users that they are “dumb”. To which I respond that I have been doing this stuff daily for a long time and I get confused and frustrated all the time.
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The first thing I thought when I saw this is that people are simply presuming that the woman is the speaker here, annoyed with the man’s attempted explanation. But who’s to say the roles aren’t the other way around, and it’s the woman who was trying to explain? And are we supposed to be sympathetic to the rhetorical question asker or are we supposed to find them ridiculous? It’s ambiguous.
(And not worth anyone getting anooyed over, really. And yeah, people getting annoyed over it shows exactly what they’re reading into it and they probably are jerks in the first place…)
More in general, I find the word “mansplaining” almost as obnoxious as the practice.
In a meeting at work an hour ago, a programmer was tediously and patronizingly trying to explain/argue a point about structural engineering to a licensed PE in exactly the way that would have been called “mansplaining” had the engineer been female. But since they were both male, it’s not mansplaining…? There’s something twisted about that logic.
My spouse and I, both geeks, explain stuff unnecessarily to each other all the time, not knowing whether the other already knows the bit of information. More often than not when she does it to me, I pretend I just learned a fascinating thing instead of cutting her off 
Neither of us is “mansplaining”, though I suppose if I weren’t non-binary then I could be guilty of it, while she couldn’t by definition.
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“Something something something snowflakes.”
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Well, it’s a pretty established comicking convention that when word balloons aren’t being used, that the one with the mouth open is speaking the line beneath. And there’s the subtler left-to-right conversation rule, come to think of it (that’s harder to break than you’d think). It’s still a presumption (lots of artists enjoy pushing the form), but there are established sequential art conventions in play here.
That’s not to comment on the intended audience response to the question-asker at all, but I feel that the cartoon itself is pretty strongly signalling that the character on the left is the one speaking the caption.
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Thank you. That is all
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upset … the ones who are upset are the readers, possibly kaibeezytentroy
how in the world did you infer i was upset from that sentence fragment?
why so angry, people on the internet?
‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ caption version: I didn’t ask it as a question, I was expressing an emotion. I get that when you think you hear a question you’re wired to try to give an answer. That’s all cool. I can recognise your explanation for what it is. You may wish to try to recognise my emotion for what it is.
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