LogFAQs > #967442500

Kyuubi4269 posted...

I am completely confident it is because we move in different circles. I'm sure there are lots of reasonable people, and good on you on being in professions where you're surrounded by slow people who are high enough up to practice good social etiquette.

I've moved in so many different circles (including the sort of tradespeople among which you count yourself) throughout my life that I'm completely confident that's baseless nonsense you're making up to pretend you didn't just try to generalize your extremely narrow personal experience. If you're giving somebody information that they want (or can at least see a clear benefit to receiving), they aren't going to mind you trying to get a feel for what they already know so you can give them a more useful explanation. If they mind, it's either because they don't care about what you have to say and are frustrated that you insist on talking at them anyway (since that's generally pretty annoying), or because you asked in a way that was insulting or otherwise needlessly disrespectful.

Knowing how you be, I consider both possibilities substantially more likely than that every single person I've encountered has somehow been anomalously more open-minded than the majority of the world.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The issue being with that, is that nobody says that they are mansplaining, a "victim" of it assigns that reasoning on to it, when they have no way of knowing it. It's a term by people who have been offended to retroactively change the narrative to feel justified in anger. It's thrown around a lot, but I don't think I've ever seen it justified or used in a non-heated circumstance.

The takeaway for you is to try to be cognizant of when you're assuming ignorance inappropriately and to avoid being patronizing or condescending when explaining things to people. In the event that somebody does call you out for it in the moment, listen to them. Start from the assumption that they have a valid point, and only conclude that they don't after determining for certain that they're just trying to deflect from being wrong. If you get called out retroactively, do the same thing.

The important thing to remember is that, like most microaggressions, an individual instance of mansplaining generally isn't going to be a big deal. The analogy I see tossed around a lot is that microaggressions are like mosquito bites: One is annoying, but not really a big deal. By the time you get up to a few dozen, though, you're ready to personally rip the proboscis off of any mosquito that even looks at you. When somebody gets mad at you for mansplaining or any other microaggression, they're not mad at you for committing some grievous fault, they're mad at a broader problem that has been bothering them for a while and which you have become a part of. Rather than defending yourself and insisting that their response is unreasonable, try to stop being part of the problem and instead sympathize with their frustration. Insisting that you're only one straw isn't going to fix the camel's back.