If it was stupid the question would not need to be asked… seriously. Sometimes it takes just asking out loud for the light bulb to go on in your head.
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This is so true. Half the time when I ask a question I realize the answer before the person I asked finishes their first sentence.
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Only a fool is afraid of looking like a fool.
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Yes 
A like wasn’t enough.
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When a woman does that, it is… after all, men, by their very sack-having deserve to be listened to more and addressed more respectfully than women do… Speaking “back” to a man is harmful to his ego, didn’t you know? /s
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Wait. Why is the inverse of your statement not true as well? If you’re a woman, why would you have any idea if he treats men the same as women? If men can’t have enough empathy to put themselves in a woman’s place, then surely women don’t have enough empathy to put themselves in a man’s place.
Frankly, what you’re describing sounds a lot more like mind reading than empathy to me. The idea that anyone, absent any other information, can tell if someone is just patronizing them because they don’t respect woman or patronizing them because they don’t respect people in general seems like a ridiculous mental leap.
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You sound just like a lot of men I know.
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You must know a lot of disappointed men.
Disappointing, you say? Yes, sadly so, I do know a lot of disappointing men.
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Why? So you can respond with something even more infantalizing?
It often doesn’t take a mind reader to know which way the wind is blowing. Especially when one has been exposed many times to a certain fetid masculine windiness, and when that air is indeed flowing ladyward again, from yet another mansplainer’s explaining hole.
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Why is it “juvenile” to be disappointed at being treated poorly solely based on our gender? Is calling out racism equally juvenile?
Oddly enough, this quote came up today in the book I’m reading…
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Infantilizing? Sigh.
I stated you must know a lot of disappointed men because you deflected instead of answering questions which is incredibly disappointing when someone is trying to have a conversation.
It appears you’ve taken that as some sort of personal attack and decided to make a grade-school attempt at a barb by intentionally misunderstanding the difference between disappointed and disappointing.
I should have taken the high road instead of calling you out for your childish response, but good god you’re making claims that you can tell the motivations of others which is a classic cognitive distortion with mountains of books dedicated to the subject.
So I’ll just say this outright. You do not have the ability to tell why someone does something. No one does. Hell, most of the time the person performing the action doesn’t know why they’re did it and creates explanations for their behavior retroactively that fits with their worldview.
You do not know how it feels to be a man that is the target of a patronizing person. You do not know if someone is being patronizing to you because they disrespect you, they disrespect women or they disrespect people in general absent other evidence.
What you’re doing is guessing.
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So, does the outcome matter at all then? It doesn’t matter if someone acts in sexist manner, as long as their intentions were not?
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How you feel is all that matters to you. If you want to feel like someone was patronizing to you because they were sexist, ok. If you want to feel like they were patronizing to you because they don’t respect you specifically or people in general, fine.
If one had to choose, I think it is probably healthier to assume it is because they are sexist than it is because of they specifically don’t respect you, but I think the most healthy thing is to not fall into the cognitive distortion that you know why someone is doing something and just take their actions for what they are.
Of course, that’s just in instances where you’d have to be mindreader to know what’s going on. If someone actually makes sexist statements, that’s a whole different situation.
What I’m saying is that people may not have the idea in mind that they dislike or think women are lesser creatures, but they can still act in ways that negatively impact others. I’d suspect a fair amount of guys who do end up acting in sexist ways don’t intend to do so, and they don’t believe themselves to be sexist in general. They make the assumption that a man would indeed be a better fit for a job, for example, and they defer to men more often in meetings. their intent might not be sexist, they might not think they are being sexist, but over the long term the pattern of behavior is still sexist. We’re talking about patterns of behavior and how they are subtly reinforced, not necessarily behaviors that are overtly sexist. It’s about the outcome of actions, not mindreading. And just because someone is generally condescending to everyone, it doesn’t also mean they aren’t also acting in sexist ways.
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Dude, did you even read this thread, or did you just stop when you found something to object to?
Good goddess, read a different book why don’tcha??
And if that’s too much effort, try listening to women in professional settings (like the one described above, to which I responded) when they describe how many men treat women in patronizing (commonly patronizing) ways that are different from how they treat men in patronizing ways.
People in an office work together, so they see many instances of how people treat each other, and of course, whether they treat each other differently. And men often treat women condescendingly, often without even realizing that they’re doing that. And many, many women can see them doing that, because they’ve been subjected to it before, and thus they can see something about those men that those men fail to see about themselves.
QFT
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Well, actually the technical term is splainhole.
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We’re talking about patterns of behavior and how they are subtly reinforced, not necessarily behaviors that are overtly sexist.
I think I was responding to different conversation thread. It started out with someone painting a scenario that didn’t involve a pattern of behavior that anyone could draw extra information from.
@anon15383236 specifically went into how she could tell some kind of extra special flavor of patronizing behavior in that situation which, absent any sexist statements or addition information, is mind reading.
Perhaps when she responded she was having a different conversation or mixing people’s replies together or something. I don’t know. Sometimes I get a sense that she is responding to years worth of conversations whenever a topic comes up. What I do know is that she can’t read minds.
Now, if you’re talking about a situation where someone has demonstrated sexist behavior or a pattern of sexism and then they are patronizing to you as a woman, then sure… you can link their behavior to the fact that they are sexist.
But goodness, the person who coined the very term mansplaining did it after talking to someone they had never met before during a conversation which seems to have included no sexist remarks and decided based on that the man was only bringing up the topic of the book because she was a woman and he was sexist. If that isn’t a classic example of the mind reading cognitive distortion, I don’t know what is.
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Are you talking about Solnit?
She didn’t come up with the term, and that’s a crap summary of the incident described in her essay.
Seems to me you may well be demonstrating a different cognitive distortion: male-pattern deafness.
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