Mansplaining is a portmanteau of the words man and the informal form splaining of the verb explaining and means "to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing." Lily Rothman of The Atlantic defines it as "explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman", and feminist author and essayist Rebecca Solnit ascribes the phenomenon to a combination of "overconfidence and cluelessness".
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Due to its gender-specific reference to "man", this term has been referred to by some critics as sexist, and as a way for women to trivialize men's opinions.
Definition
Solnit's original essay went further, discussing the consequences of this gendered behavior and drawing attention to its effect in creating a conspiracy of silence and disempowerment. Solnit later published Men Explain Things To Me, a collection of seven essays on similar themes. Women, including professionals and experts, are routinely seen or treated as less credible than men, she wrote in the title essay, and their insights or even legal testimony are dismissed unless validated by a man. She argued that this was one symptom of a widespread phenomenon that "keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence."
Mansplaining differs somewhat from other forms of condescension in that it is specifically gender-related, rooted in a sexist assumption that a man will normally be more knowledgeable, or more capable of understanding, than a woman.
Origins
Splaining and the verb splain have existed for more than 200 years and were originally simply colloquial pronunciations of the words explaining and explain. Since some time before the first written evidence in 1989 of a shift in meaning, they have increasingly referred to condescending and often extensive or verbose explanations. Since then, the word has been increasingly prefixed by words to refer to who is doing the splaining, of which mansplaining was the first. This remains the best known form of splaining, and it has inspired terms for many more, but in some cases the term is also or mostly used in the original positive sense of "explaining", for example gaysplaining.
The neologism mansplaining showed up simultaneously in multiple places, so its origin is difficult to establish. In an essay titled Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent book at the time, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had "heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year" – not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit's book.
The word is thought to have been first used in 2008 or 2009, shortly after Solnit published her April 2008 blog post. In it, she did not use the word mansplaining, but described the phenomenon as "something every woman knows."
A month later, the word appeared in a comment on the social network LiveJournal, and its use has grown since. It soon became popular among feminist bloggers, and then in mainstream cultural commentary. It was included on The New York Times' 2010 word of the year list, nominated for the American Dialect Society's most creative word of the year honor in 2012, and added to the online Oxford Dictionaries in 2014.
Usage
Since 2010, journalists have used the word to describe people including the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney; Governor of Texas Rick Perry; MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell; various characters on the HBO drama series The Newsroom; music executive Jimmy Iovine; Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull; actor Matt Damon; and consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader.
In 2013, Dictionary.com said it was adding both mansplain and the suffix (libfix) -splain to its dictionary. Its announcement read in part: "In addition to being creative, this term, particularly the -splaining part, has proven to be incredibly robust and useful as a combining form in 2013." Dictionary.com noted that the meaning of mansplain had changed somewhat since 2009, from "intense and serious to casual and jocular," while older -splain words still have "heavy cultural and political connotations and are often added to the names of politicians."
Mansplaining has also engendered parallel constructions such as whitesplaining, rightsplaining, and Damonsplaining.
Controversy
The usefulness of the term is disputed. Given its gender-specific nature and negative connotation, Lesley Kinzel described it as inherently biased, essentialist, dismissive, and a double standard. Author Cathy Young called it "a pejorative term for supposedly obtuse and arrogant male arguments on gender, apparently now also applied to female dissent." As the word became more popular, some commentators complained that misappropriation and overuse had in some instances diluted its original meaning. Liz Cookman writing for The Guardian says that the term "reeks of gender essentialism — the idea that specific physical, social or cultural traits are native to a particular gender" and considers it degrading. Joshua Sealy-Harrington and Tom McLaughlin write in The Globe and Mail that the term has occasionally been used as an ad hominem to silence debate. They suggest that faulty arguments should instead be refuted.
In February 2016, the term sparked an argument between two members of a committee of the Australian Senate.