Mansplaining

About three years ago I published a post called Remove the Man. That essay was prompted by Washington state Governor Jay Inslee signing on the final installment of a six-year effort to make language in the state’s copious laws gender-neutral.

“It brings us to modern times, to contemporary times, why should we have in statute anything that could be viewed as biased or stereotypical or reflecting any discrimination?”

That was 2013. I’d encourage readers to go over this article again as a frame of reference, but the gist of the idea then was revealing the efforts being made by the Feminine Imperative to remove men (literally and figuratively) not only from the common language but to remove men from defining masculinity altogether. I touched on this as well in Vulnerability. In seizing a monopoly on our very language women are free to redefine not just words but the ideas that those words connote.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” – George Orwell, 1984

It’s an easy jump to associate this word-thought monopolization with political and social justice agendas, and I’m sure there are many examples of it in practice. And while I’ll leave that discussion to other blogs, I do think it’s important in the scope of this blog’s mandate to address how maleness is (and has been) decoupled from masculinity – certainly conventional masculinity – and the redefinition of the concept of masculinity has been surrendered to the feminine in a similar fashion that Hypergamy has been given free reign in society.

In other words, in a feminine-centric social order, men, by and large, have willingly acquiesced the defining power of how they will communicate to the sensibilities of women.

From Remove the Man:

Volumes have been written in the manopshere about how feminine-primary government assumes the masculine providership role in modern relationships, thus freeing an already unhindered hypergamy even more so, but the effort to remove the Man goes far beyond this obvious institution. The fundamental restructuring of gender reference in our very language – as illustrated by the Washington state legislature – attempts to, literally, remove the Man from the equation.

[…]the same social tool has been used by the Feminine Imperative for the past 60 years; inspire self-doubt in male-specific masculinity. By making compliance with the Feminine Imperative a qualification of masculinity, men assign the power to define masculinity to the Feminine Imperative.

[…]For the Feminine Imperative to sustain itself men can never be trusted with masculinity, solution: remove men from being the definers of masculinity and apportion them only enough authority of it that would benefit the Feminine Imperative as necessary.

Control the language and you control the concept. Control the concept, and what is acceptable and what is not about it, and you control the thought before it forms. As I’ve argued in the past, the end state of the Feminine Imperative’s consolidation of social control isn’t the complete elimination of masculinity, but rather that it conveniently conforms to the needs of the imperative as best suits it.

‘Masculinity’ when shame for a lack of performance in desired acts, protection and provisioning are necessary, ‘Misogyny’ when the threat of feminine-primary control is implied in men’s self-esteem, affirmation or reward are attributed to maleness.

From Vulnerability:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

I’m beginning with this today because it’s necessary to underline the latent purposes behind the cutesy jingoisms the Feminine Imperative likes to use when it finds it necessary to reign in the ‘word-thought’ of men. One of these is the term “Mansplaining.”

I led off with the video of Senator Gallagher being called to the carpet for using ‘Mansplaining’ as her go-to rationale because it illustrates how the jingoism of the imperative is expected to work with men already cowed by a Blue Pill conditioning. She literally expects everyone present to understand what Mansplaining is.

Side note: I also find it ironic that the word “Mansplaining” is not flagged with a red underline by autocorrect as I type this. Womansplaining however, is. It’s kind of spooky how readily the language monopoly of the Feminine Imperative is integrated into our popular consciousness via communications technologies and social media. How quick? Have a look at how ‘Mansplaining’ trends on Google.

Even more ironic is the fact that the common definition of what constitutes ‘mansplaining’ is still up for grabs. According to Wikipedia:

Mansplaining covers a heterogeneous mix of mannerisms in which a speaker’s reduced respect for the stance of a listener, or a person being discussed, appears to have little reason behind it other than the speaker’s assumption that the listener or subject, being female, does not have the same capacity to understand as a man. It also covers situations in which it appears a person is using a conversation primarily for the purpose of self-aggrandizement — holding forth to a female listener, presumed to be less capable, in order to appear knowledgeable by comparison.

Solnit’s original essay went further, discussing the consequences of this gendered behavior and drawing attention to its effect in creating a conspiracy of silence and disempowerment. Solnit later published Men Explain Things To Me, a collection of seven essays on similar themes. Women, including professionals and experts, are routinely seen or treated as less credible than men, she wrote in the title essay, and their insights or even legal testimony are dismissed unless validated by a man. She argued that this was one symptom of a widespread phenomenon that “keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

Mansplaining differs somewhat from other forms of condescension in that it is specifically gender-related, rooted in a sexist assumption that a man will normally be more knowledgeable, or more capable of understanding, than a woman.

Google cuts to the meat of it for simplicity:

Others argue that any information a man relates in a male way of explaining it (i.e. a longwinded description of informational content). Julia Baird’s offering is particularly egregious, citing the amount of lines women get in proportion to those of men in the movies:

The problem is global and endemic across all media. Female characters speak lessin Disney films today than they used to — even princesses get a minority of the speaking lines in films in which they’re the principal: In the 2013 animated movie “Frozen,” for example, male characters get 59 percent of the lines. A quick search for best monologues in film or movies reveals that they are almost all male. If you took Princess Leia out of “Star Wars,” the total speaking time for female characters is 63 seconds out of the original trilogy’s 386 minutes.

This, of course, is in stark contrast to the studies that show women spend more time on their cell phones and text more often than men. Women also use emoticons more often than men, yet men have more variety in emoticon usage. That may seem trivial, but it’s an important aspect to consider in comparing men and women’s preferred intents of communication. Then there are the studies that show women actually do talk more than men – 13,000 words a day.

It’s also important to consider that women dominate the vast majority of social media, unless that social media happens to be something work related like LinkedIn. This is an important distinction to make when we consider how men and women prefer to communicate.

From The Medium is the Message:

We get frustrated because women communicate differently than we do. Women communicate covertly, men communicate overtly. Men convey information, women convey feeling. Men prioritize content, women prioritize context. One of the great obfuscations fostered by feminization in the last quarter-century is this expectation that women are every bit as rational and inclined to analytical problem solving as men. It’s result of an equalist mentality that misguides men into believing that women communicate no differently than men. That’s not to discount women as problem solvers in their own right, but it flies in the face how women set about a specifically feminine form of communication. Scientific study after study illustrating the natural capacity women have for exceptionally complex forms of communication (to the point of proving their neural pathways are wired differently) are proudly waved in by a feminized media as proof of women’s innate merits, yet as men, we’re expected to accept that she “means what she says, and she says what she means.” While more than a few women like to wear this as a badge of some kind of superiority, it doesn’t necessarily mean that what they communicate is more important, or how they communicate it is more efficient, just that they have a greater capacity to understand nuances of communication better than do men. One of the easiest illustrations of this generational gender switch is to observe the communication methods of the “strong” women the media portray in popular fiction today. How do we know she’s a strong woman? The first cue is she communicates in an overt, information centered, masculine manner.

It should come as no surprise to most men in the manosphere that men and women have different means and different priorities in communications. I published that post almost five years ago, but even then I knew that a social order founded on feminine primacy was going to standardize its own way of communicating as the correct way. The ostensible reasoning is that, from a desire for gender parity in society, men must abandon their blunt, artless and simplistic, yet overbearing and egotistic way of communication and adopt women’s more meaningful, emotive and insightful covert way.

Of course, it’s men who see this ruse for what it is and either refuse to capitulate or simply don’t realize they’re supposed to talk like women who set themselves apart from the throngs of Blue Pill men conditioned to identify with the female experience (as a means to become intimate with them). I forget where I read it, but some one said a PUA is a man who pretends he has what a woman pretends she does not want. I may not agree with that in whole, but it certainly describes the social condition that’s been established by the Feminine Imperative over the course of four generations.

When we’re presented with easily digestible terms like Mansplaining, no matter how loosely defined, and it filters into the popular consciousness and lexicon so rapidly, what we’re witnessing is the ease with which the Feminine Imperative expects men to cede to it.

When a woman attempts to cow a man by saying he’s Mansplaining something to her she’s reached a point at which she prefers that man, any man, speak to her as a woman would. In base terms, she shames him for not opting to communicate as a woman would from the outset. He should know better.

The fem-splaining cover story is that men feel some ego-centric need to over-explain something to a woman. For a Blue Pill conditioned man this may even be accurate in that they hope so doing will endear himself to a “rational reasonable” woman by helping her understand a concept he’s educated on. What we’re really looking at is a struggle to control which gender-communication will take precedence. In a feminine primary social order, men’s means of communicating is offensive to women by default. The presumption is that men are being condescending to women by expecting them to communicate as men do, and especially within the political and working spheres.

As women push their way into male spaces, part of assimilating those spaces is to re-standardize how men will appropriately communicate within them. The conflict comes from the expectation on the part of men that women will respect the nature of station she’s been empowered to and be able to weather criticism and reproach as men have always done in those stations. The fallacy is the equalist belief that women will be equal agents while holding the same roles as men; the reality is what we see in the video above today.

So the solution, as always, is to remove the man, remove the masculine influence, change the language and the definitions, to remake the nature of the engagement if not the actual real-world factors that make the game or the politic or the business what it is – to silence the man by telling him to “just shut the hell up” or be tarred with the epithet of being a ‘typical man’.

The content of the communication is of less importance to women than how that communication makes them feel. We see this in no uncertain terms the more women become part of the socio-political/business spheres. When a man needs to explain the importance of content to a woman who is only qualified for her station by virtue of her being female that exchange necessarily is uncomfortable for women. Solution: complain about the delivery of the content and silence the men who would deliver it.