LogFAQs > #967445077

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The irony here being that you accuse me of extremely narrow personal experience, while simulatenously saying you've never offended anybody by questioning their experience.

I think you're using "questioning their experience" to mean "doubting their experience," which is not at all what I'm suggesting. Your failure to understand the difference between that and looking to establish a baseline for how much jargon is appropriate might be why you think this isn't a you problem.

Think about it for even a second and you should realize how ridiculous your position is: You're literally suggesting that it's less common for people to be annoyed by somebody assuming they understand nothing than by somebody asking how much they understand. Nothing about that sounds even remotely plausible at any level.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Does the majority of the world call people mansplainers? No? Then maybe you're confused because you're looking at irrelevant information. This is about the few people who use the term, not the general public. It's not especially difficult to spend your life without coming across these 70 and below IQ people.

Protip: If you're going to tell everyone that you hold the attitude of "anyone who doesn't like me assuming they're stupid is just stupid," you're going to have a very difficult time convincing anyone that you don't assume people are stupid far more often than is appropriate.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The important thing to remember is that if you constantly go through life with people questioning what you know, it's much more likely to be you not demonstrating competence than tHe SyStEm oppressing you.

Most actual mansplaining happens in contexts where there hasn't yet been an opportunity to demonstrate competence.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

When people who make these claims actually back how they're being treated differently and how it isn't fair in these circumstances, we can have a conversation about avoiding it.

There was a picture that circulated a year or so back of a woman shooting a pistol, and a very significant number of comments on it were men saying things like "she should be holding it with both hands" or otherwise providing completely unsolicited advice, obviously labouring under the assumption that the woman in question had no idea what she was doing. The woman in question was an olympic gold medalist, pictured at the olympics, competing in an event where her displayed technique was perfectly in line with the rules of the event.

A friend of mine was once discussing makeup with a colleague, and when she mentioned highliighter, one of her male colleagues who happened to overhear interjected with "no, you're thinking of eyeliner, highlighters are markers." She was, in fact, talking about neither eyeliner nor markers.

No, unsolicited bad advice is not exclusively a sexist thing, but it is something that women experience very often due to the prevailing attitude of "if I think a woman is making a mistake, she must be making a mistake." It's often not a deliberate act of sexism, but it is behaviour that's generally more tolerated in that form than vice versa, which is why there's a push to explicitly call it out.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Until then, I'm going to treat it exactly as it is presented, presumptuous and ill-intended.

Alternatively, you can try to resist the urge to offer unsolicited advice and/or make sure you understand the situation completely before thinking that you know what advice might be appropriate. Those are, after all, fairly simple adjustments to make that will improve pretty much everyone's experience whether they explicitly have a problem with your behaviour or not.

I will never understand people who wilfully resist making trivial changes to themselves and their behaviour that will make them a better person and help improve the world around them.