1 definition by LemonyElmony
The word “mansplain” can been traced to Rebecca Solnit, a writer whose 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” laid out the mansplaining fundamentals (though the actual term only began croppping up on feminist blogs months later). In its early incarnation, it had a straightforward definition: when a man condescendingly lectures a woman on the basics of a topic about which he knows very little, under the mistaken assumption that she knows even less. In the piece, Solnit describes attending a party at which an oblivious male, “eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority,” patronizingly attempts to tell her all about a new book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, which it turns out Solnit actually wrote. This all-too-typical experience of being unthinkingly talked down to, she writes, “trains women in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
by LemonyElmony August 24, 2017