Manterrupting Mansplaining And Manspreading

Tweet

I only heard the expression Mansplaining a few days ago though it has been around since 2015. Mansplaining is where a man addresses others, most often women, in a patronizing, condescending way, as if feeling a need to sound authorative and more educated on some matter than they are. This might be mentioning a car engine and going into a long dumbed down explanation of how spark and combustion work, even if the person / people addressed indicate that they already know this information. While the term was coined to refer to men treating women as somehow less knowledgeable or intelligent, such a Narcissistic way of speaking (and writing)can be used by self-appointed alpha makes to other men, or mixed groups of men and women too. Manterrupting is a related practice of cutting into other people’s conversations to take over the discussion / discourse to draw attention to the new speaker, effectively bullying the original speaker off the pitch to dominate other listeners or present the original speaker with a relentless barrage of accompanying mansplanation. It is a very cowardly and intimidating practice, vain, narcissistic, intimidating and just plain rude though sadly few people dare to speak up against such activity, which only encourages he manterrupting mansplainer to do it even more. Some men watch for a group of friends or conference / convention attendees to engage in some kind of conversation, makes a dramatic entrance with phrases like ‘Are we having fun yet?” hijacks the conversation and fixes himself as the life & soul of the party so that whatever he is talking about he is really just promoting himself. The Manspreader is someone who spreads himself out as much as possible on seats that should take two or more people, expecting others to make use of the remaining space or even stand up. The Manspreader might spread his legs wide, or place shopping, luggage, etc. on the seats and benches to dominate the territory. It is easier to deal with Manspreader than manterrupters, as a firm insistence that they make more room for you or other potential sitters will usually make them reluctantly oblige. There are undoubtedly female equivalents of manterrupters, mansplainer, etc., but it is often the male ego that feels a need to dominate, rudely marginalizing others, even showing jealousy when others either gain attention naturally or prove even more dominant and effective at the same cruel, insensitive, petty, pedantic games of trivial one-upmanship. I like to think I am not guilty of such practices. I do put my bags on seats next to mine but only when there is no one else in need of the seating. If a park, bus, train, etc., fills up, I move my things away. I am more likely to be interrupted, shut down or subjected to tedious mansplanations than give them. I easily get tongue tied or hesitant in sharing information, unless working to a script, and manterrupters often behave in a predatory way to hijack conversation, rather than trying to ensure everyone involved gets a say. Manterrupting can be unintentional habit but it can often be a predatory form of bullying, aggressively blocking others from communicating, despite the unhappiness and alienation it might cause. There are a few occasions when I have felt like dragging persistent offenders aside, slapping them and telling them to shut the Hell up. Conversation should flow naturally, not feeling force or contrived. Some manterrupters seem on the brink of presenting slides, lecture notes and Powerpoint. I often find myself wondering why so few others around me notice how blatant and obvious such behaviour can be, which can leave me and others doubting the worth or value of anything we have to say. It is like having friends arrange chairs in a circle right in front of you but wilfully leaving no room for you (as someone I trusted actually tried to do to me once, an act he never explained or apologized for). Maybe we are boring, so our friends would rather hear the loud, flamboyant manterrupters more. Manterrupters are not critics, they are hecklers. They rarely have anything fresh to present to a group. Much of their discourse is a scathing nit-pick of what others are saying / have said, and few of the ‘facts’ they present are really remembered or checked or followed up on later. Once a conversation is left ruined, the Manterrupter moves on to someone else to Manterrupt instead, coming back your way when there is a fresh conversation to vandalize and ruin.. Arthur Chappell