Mansplaining
Gender Dissonance is becoming a much more visible phenomena in the world today. It has always been with us, and is perhaps less inflictive than it was in the past because women have begun to call it out and some men are responding in responsible ways. Other men have doubled down. Most men continue to blindly go through their lives like bumper cars at an amusement park. It is a willing blindness. These bumblers are not excused. I was one and have to catch myself all the time from steering blindly ahead in conversations with women.
There is no art in Mansplaining. It is an age old, almost genetic, way males talk to females. I believe that most men want women to be receivers of their wisdom, their ideas, their news, and eventually, their sperm. They think that this will shape the females into the right kind of woman for them. They believe that the woman is naïve and inexperienced. They believe the woman they desire is a virgin in both body and mind. They are woefully wrong.
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Women in the world have to endure an amazing array of assaults on their bodies and minds. They have to move through life like acrobats avoiding the fires of male behavior. Some are good at it, some are lucky, and some suffer a great deal of trauma. All of this before they become adults. When they become adults the great societal pressure to pair, usually assisted by parental pressure if the parents are still in the picture, beats on them almost daily at work, at school, at social events they go to with friends. In these places they encounter adult boys who have not, for the most part, had to be acrobats, and who may contribute to the fires of male behavior.
The newly adult women, not girls, are treated like receivers. Bad jokes, bad physical attempts at unwanted intimacy, and mansplaining of a world she knows far more than she would want to know. These adult boys have never truly learned to listen unless their mothers drilled the concept into them. The adult boys’ fathers just kept the mansplaining going on with both sons and daughters. There are a great many women who have relationships with men, live with men, marry men and do not bother to have a meaningful conversation with the them. They talk with women instead. They do this because the women listen with few exceptions. The feedback varies from good to bad, just like all feedback, but it is not condescending drivel like mansplaining.
I am not a young man. It has taken me years to stop myself from interrupting women with my solution to a problem they have not voiced. I listen and see if there was a question in what was said. If there is no question, I may make a remark agreeing with their experience. I work to not fill the verbal space with my wisdom. I like to talk, so it is a conscious challenge for me. It is a work in constant progress. The key for me is that I believe that women are superior sublime humans with much more to impart than to receive. Making eye contact and listening is the most important aspect of being human and we men fail miserably at it.
