A man mansplains mansplaining
The topic of this article is “mansplaining”, yet the fear of “mansplaining” is itself so overpowering it encourages me to suggest that 51% of potential readers stop reading right here. Yet even saying that is problematic. Am I mansplaining in my eagerness to avoid being accused of mansplaining? And even right there, am I doubling down? Am I mansplaining the inadvertent mansplaining I engaged in during my intense self-conscious desire not to be mansplaining?
Like lots of mansplainers, I suppose I should just shut up and go sit in the shed…
But you see my problem and the problem of about forty-nine per cent of the population when debating across the gender divide? Can a man ever debate with a woman without him being accused of “mansplaining”? After this week’s Conservative leadership debate on the BBC, one begins to doubt it.
Rishi Sunak had good reason to be on the offensive on Monday night and it wasn’t because he was packing a Y chromosome. It had more to do with him packing the A chromosome, as well as the B, I, and O. Being an Arrogant Billionaire, in an Insincere yet Overpowering way, isn’t a winning look. Yet to accuse him of mansplaining, as some of Truss’s defenders did on Tuesday, felt like a particularly low point of this extremely bitter contest. It is one of those rhetorical dead ends to which there’s no obvious rebuttal. It’s like accusing your opponent of being a fascist (or indeed a Marxist), “agreeing to disagree”, and the good old ad-hominem attack. What is the defence? That he’s not a man? That his opponent isn’t a woman? That he’s not explaining but challenging a point of view?
It’s a difficulty that has existed for as long as the insult has existed. The term “mansplain” seems to originate in an online debate from 2008. A user called “phosfate” on the website journalfen.net had written”Oh, gosh, thank you so much for mansplaining this to us!” to which another user, “count_vronsky”, asked, “Why is it ‘mansplaining’ and not me just having a difference of opinion and expressing it to you?”
The answer is perhaps obvious. Mansplaining wraps old-fashioned habits in the new language of contemporary identity politics, as well as the legitimate complaint emerging from the #MeToo movement that women’s voices are listened to less often than those of men. Yet, like #MeToo, the legitimate complaint leads to some questionable applications of the new rules. Sunak’s sin is more than adequately covered by other words, such as arrogance, rudeness, and condescension and it needn’t be rooted in gender for it to be relevant. Those of us blessed (for want of a better word) with an accent other than RP will have moments in our lives when we’ve had things explained to us because people assume we are (again for want of a better word) “a bit slow”. Age too offers examples, as well as wealth, education, and class. The offender’s motives are various. Sometimes people are simply trying to be helpful. At other times, they are showing off their knowledge. Sometimes it is welcome and other times not. But the point is, to reduce this uniquely to gender is to overlook the greater human dynamics at play.
Yet the purpose of reducing it to gender is also to make it impervious to defence. That might well be its chief appeal. It’s the slipperiest kind of attack. A man accused of mansplaining would naively try to explain why it’s not mansplaining (as I’m probably doing here), therefore repeating the sin. It makes the accusation so overpowered. Once labelled a mansplainer, the man has no recourse other than to shut up.
It’s particularly odd, then, to see it thrown into the middle of a Conservative leadership contest. It’s the Tories who normally object to this kind of identity politicking. It also demeans Liz Truss by assuming that her arguments need to hide behind this cheap defence, or, indeed, that she can’t stand toe-to-Gucci loafer with Sunak. It also runs counter to the prevailing tone of her campaign which is that she’s the new Thatcher. Hard to imagine the first Thatcher needing the mansplaining defence.
Sunak certainly interrupted the Foreign Secretary too many times (The Guardian covered “mansplaining” in their usual non-critical way, this week, also accusing him of “manterrruption”) but that is a constant factor in these debates. You could argue, rather, that if Sunak weren’t so blind to Truss’s gender, he would have opened himself up to this accusation. This underlines that gender often has nothing to do with the power dynamics at play. Trump did it to Biden in their famously tetchy presidential debates, trying to rile the former Vice President who tends to stumble over his words when under pressure. That ultimately proved to Trump’s detriment and it’s easy to think that Sunak will feel the same when it comes to the final vote. Rishi Sunak was desperate to gain an advantage and, in the process, came across as a bit of a prat. That’s all it was.
Yet perhaps all this unwelcome addition to British political debate need not be a bad thing. It could be an obvious boon if deployed on the world stage. Prime Minister Liz Truss (get used to hearing that) would be able to go into a meeting with any male world leader and have them immediately on the defensive on the basis that none of them would want to be mislabelled. “Tyrant” might be a badge of honour and “genocidal maniac” a matter of perspective. But “mansplainer”? Could Vladimir Putin ever live that one down?