Member-only story
Stop Explaining Things She Already Knows.
Mansplaining what it actually is, where it comes from, and how to check yourself before you do it. Again.
She is a doctor. She has been a doctor for eleven years. At a dinner party, a man she has just met spends four minutes explaining to her how the immune system works. She does not interrupt. She nods. She says “mm” in the right places. She goes home and tells her partner what happened and her partner says “again?” because yes, it is again, it is always again, it has been again since she was twenty-two years old and people started talking to her at professional events.
This is mansplaining. Not in the overly broad internet definition where the word has been stretched to cover any man explaining anything to any woman. In the original, specific, entirely real sense: a man explaining something to a woman who knows more about it than he does, without checking whether she already knows it, because the assumption is that she probably does not.
The assumption is the problem. Not the explaining. Explaining is fine. People explain things to each other all day long and most of it is useful and welcome. What is not fine is the assumption, which is the leap from “I know about this thing” to “she probably does not know about this thing” with no evidence other than the fact that she is a woman and he is the one currently doing the…
