🙂

I’m pretty sure mansplaining men aren’t allowed to refer to the idea that being male gives them deeper understanding of what, say, happened to Rebecca. They just have to assume it.

… here we go ..

Stephanie hold on a sec, that’s not the best response to Taft.

Taft, what Stephanie means to say is that my hat-hair is a lot better now that I’ve had a hair cut, therefore your argument is invalid. Sometimes it takes a certain amount of experience as a man to really understand what a word with the word “man” in it really means. So let me just tell you … hold on a sec, Steph, you can chime in when I’m done … that what she means is a word about explaining things by men. See?

There we go. ‘splained?

The curious thing is the claim that one ought to be immune from some idiot on the internet calling one names.

There are two ways this is getting it wrong:

1) Many of the people using misogynistic epithets in this case are not idiots. Many of them are our peers or betters and highly intelligent people who have typically had (and still have) great ideas. If it were only idiot trolls doing it, then there would be no problem at all! We’d all be denouncing it.

2) No one is saying that a particular person should be immune from being called names. We are telling the people using misogynistic names to stop it, and we are calling them out on it, and we are discussing why they are wrong to do that and why we oppose it. In fact, the closest someone has come to saying that we should have immunity to being called names was when John C. Welch wrote that we should all be able to brush off any derogatory term cast our way–bar none.