True Stories #429 - The Mansplainer

Rebecca and a friend went to a party. Their male host decided to "teach" them about "very important" things.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-stories-with-seth-andrews--5621867/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Rebecca was a woman around forty years
old who had been invited to a party of mostly
younger adults. This was a mixed crowd, and yet it

(00:23):
was so dull and stuffy and distinguished that Rebecca and
her friend somehow seemed like two of the younger guests.
This was in the summer of two thousand and three.
The location was a pretty luxurious cabin, the kind of
place decorated with elk antlers and a big wooden stove.
The party host was a wealthy guy with apparently a

(00:47):
whole lot of male wisdom to offer. Rebecca and her
friends kind of felt the party was playing out, so
they got ready to leave, but the host said, no, no,
don't leave yet. I want you to stay. I want
to talk to you about something. It was an odd request,
but the two women said okay, fine, and they kept

(01:08):
waiting while everybody else grabbed all their stuff and went
out to head home. And the two women were the
only people who remained. And the host sat him down
and he said, hey, Rebecca, I hear you are into literature.
You are a reader and a writer, and Rebecca noted, well,
I love to talk about literature. I read many books.

(01:29):
I am well versed in this type of thing. I mean.
Rebecca could tell by the man's tone that she was
going to be in for some condescension. The counsel and
perspective of a man delivered down the nose to a
woman like he was advising a naive child. So internally
she sighed, but she was game, and so she began

(01:52):
talking about several of her recent interests, including a specific book.
It was a deep dive into the annihalation of time
and space and the industrialization of everyday life, a book
called River of Shadows, Edward my Bridge and the Technological
wild West. But before she could even get the title

(02:14):
of the book totally out of her mouth, the man
cut her off. He said, oh, oh, Edward my Bridge,
have you heard about this very important my Bridge book?
It just came out this year. Rebecca blinked. Apparently the
my Bridge work that she had been referring to had
not yet warranted the descriptor very important. But fine, she

(02:37):
thought to herself, maybe there's another book on the same
subject that she had missed, and so she kept her
ears open politely as the man held court in love
with the sound of his masculine voice, smugly telling and
teaching his female guests about the work that had so
impressed him. The book reviewed glowingly in The New York

(02:59):
Times Book Review just a few months previously, that very
important book, and I know you are ahead of me.
Here the real book, the well researched and better book,
the one that had to be superior to the book
Rebecca had been referring to. Well. This man had obviously

(03:22):
never noticed the author's name under the title of that book,
Rebecca sul Nitz, the very woman who was sitting before
him at that moment. And yet he continued, cluelesslie spinning
his opinions into the room. This man attempting to mansplain

(03:44):
that deep dive into the annihilation of time and space
and the industrialization of everyday life. He was explaining it
to the very person who had authored it and presented
the ideas in book form. She had written seven books
by that time. The woman had received a master's in
journalism from Berkeley decades before. She would go on to

(04:08):
receive fellowships for literature by the National Endowment for the Arts,
a national book Critics Award, the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize
in Nonfiction, other honors, and whose writings would appear in
news and culture hubs like The Guardian and Harper's Magazine.
And here this guy was trying to describe and explain

(04:30):
Rebecca's own book to her. Finally, Rebecca's friend couldn't take
it anymore, and she interjected, Uh, that's her book. But
the man did not register. He kept yammering. On Another
moment passed, the friend spoke up again, that's her book,
but he was not processing. The man kept explaining. The

(04:52):
friend said it a third time, and then a fourth,
that's her book, And then finally the low light bulb
went off. That man went speechless, stunned, silent, And yet
even after that he again started holding forth on the
very book that his interlocutor had written. The book, he

(05:16):
admitted he had not actually even read, He had only
browsed that New York Times review. But Rebecca did not
need his understanding, permission or endorsement. She would go on
to write no fewer than twenty books on subjects ranging
from feminism, the environment, politics, arts, and more. And interestingly,

(05:37):
one of those books was inspired by the man who
had talked down to her years before. Her twenty fourteen
release was titled Men Explain Things to Me, A Collection
of short Essays on Feminism. And it was in that
book that Rebecca Solnitz herself introduced a term to the

(05:57):
culture that you and I have heard so often. The
word mansplaining was her creation. So a word of advice
to anybody anywhere who wants to start a discussion by
infantilizing and diminishing somebody else based on gender, color, nationality,
or any other unnecessary dividers, try to know what you're

(06:21):
talking about before you talk about it. Understand right off
the bat there's a good likelihood you are not the smartest,
most talented, most educated person in the room. And really
make sure you aren't attempting to teach subject matter to
a person who literally wrote the book. And that is

(06:45):
a true story. True Stories podcast dot Com