First you try to associate the behaviour with sexual assault and violence against women.
Then - getting a bit desperate now, perhaps - you put it on a level with racism!
It's similar in the sense that people who deny black people are treated differently because of institutional racism also exist. "They're not racist, they're just twats."
Your argument seems to fall along the same lines, so I can see the similarity. "You're not being subjected to sexism, love, these are what we men call 'rude people.' Don't you worry your silly little head about it, I'm sure they are rude to everyone."
No. They are not. The very definition of "mansplaining" is a man refusing to accept a women has equal or more knowledge than the man doing the explaining. Men don't tend to pull this particularly irritating trick on their fellow men. They might disagree, but they don't do shit like this:
We were preparing to leave, when our host said, “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He was an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, “So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”
I replied, “Several, actually.”
He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book — with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority...
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless — for a moment, before he began holding forth again.
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-solnit-the-archipelago-of-arrogance/I don't know a single man who has gone into a bike shop and been very specific about what they want, only for the shop person to insist he is, in fact, wrong, and what he needs is this completely different thing. I've known men to be told the thing they want isn't available, and this other thing might work instead. I've even known a shop person say he wouldn't recommend that particular thing, because this other thing does the same job only better. I have never, ever seen a man be told, "No, love, you don't want that. You want this."
Sorry, but I'm happy to stick with what I posted. Your ridiculous comparisons leave me unmoved (except for making me smirk, I admit to that.)
So you're just gaslighting now, is that it? Or being a troll, maybe? It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Sam
