Mansplaining can be done by females. It’s just that men do it more often that it gets that title. Sometimes they even do it to other men. On rare occasion women even mansplain to men — but in general they are not as deeply bought into the dominance hierarchy as men are. Congratulations on being one of the outliers who feels utterly compelled to joust for position of power, rather than have an actual conversation and exchange of ideas! As you may recall, I indicated just a few comments back that mansplaining was “Interrupting or talking over someone to tell them all about their own thoughts, experiences and area of expertise.” Mansplaining has a very specific definition. When you meet those criteria, you get reminded that you are fulfilling the definition of that term.
I’m not going to waste my time attempting to educate you about anthropology — or anything else for that matter, beyond leaving you these two links. It would take too long and be entirely pointless. I am well versed in the academic and scholarly underpinnings of everything that I’ve said. A great deal of it comes from Eisler (who you seem to simultaneously respect and yet know nothing about), although the others I’ve named have influenced my understanding as well. If you think that Brene’ Brown’s work on empathy and vulnerability does not translate into any larger societal context, once again, you don’t really know too much about her. I recommend checking out her recent Netflix special entitled The Call to Courage. Perhaps it will make more sense to you then.
Some of my understanding also comes from these well researched pieces posted below written by my friend, Elle Beau, whom you’ve just met — but it also comes from a wide variety of other places as well. Since I’m a student of human nature, I read up on it quite a bit.
The definition I’ve given of patriarchy is pretty much the standard academic one. If you don’t accept that or don’t know that — I don’t particularly care. It’s really not my problem.
“Patriarchy is a social system that came into being approximately 10–12 thousand years ago. It is largely recognized to have coincided with the advent or agriculture. It’s far from being the only system we’ve ever had or an inevitable one. In fact, for most of human history, we’ve lived very differently.
Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support. Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichtomy between the public and the private sphere.
For most of human history, people lived together in small bands, subsisting as hunter-gatherers, sharing nearly everything as part of their survival strategy. “Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
When Darwin observed that females of many species were naturally coy and choosy and reticent, sexually speaking, and males were naturally competitive and randy, he set us on a course by distorting the lens through which we view behavior. What we know today thanks to mostly female primatologists, anthropologists, and sex researchers is that when the context is right, female sexuality is assertive, adventurous, and what we call “promiscuous.”
The great anthropologist and comparativist Sarah Hrdy tells us that, across species, including among humans, the best mother for many eons was the one who was, under particular and far-from-rare ecological circumstances, promiscuous. By being so, she could hedge against male infertility, up her odds of a healthy pregnancy and robust offspring, and create a wider network of support by lining up two or three males who figured the offspring might be theirs. (5)
As a student of human nature, I am naturally curious about what the fuck the bee in your bonnet is truly about— but as a busy person with other things to do, I am resigned to the fact that I’ll never know.
