army1987 comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong

27 [deleted] 10 April 2013 07:54PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 11 April 2013 06:02:20PM 9 points [-]

You know, I'm pretty sure it's sometimes used that way, but I'm also pretty sure that there's an actual category of discourse that involves men explaining things in a tone of certitude but from a position of ignorance.

This is part of humanity. It's not unique to men.

I've experienced first-hand the equivalent phenomena where straight people try to comment on what they think my situation is like as if they know what's going on, and end up being completely wrong.

Being bisexual, I know exactly what you're referring to. However, again, the typical mind fallacy is not unique to straight people, or men.

Now I'd agree that the term has become inflated sometimes to mean any negative male reaction to a female narrative, but that's just an argument for deflating it, not an argument that the inflation is universal, and that legitimate examples of illegitimate negative male reactions don't exist.

The issue with this argument is that "male" doesn't belong in your last sentence. Illegitimate arguments exist. Point out why they're illegitimate. If you can't, you have no business responding to the argument.

"Mansplaining" is sexist. It's kind of like the term "hysterical." Cognitive dissonance is encountering somebody who regularly uses the term "mansplaining" complaining about the sexist origins of the word "hysterical."

Comment author: [deleted] 12 April 2013 10:19:53PM 4 points [-]

"Mansplaining" is sexist. It's kind of like the term "hysterical."

Well... I'd guess that many of the people who use the word "hysterical" aren't aware of its etymology, or at least aren't thinking about it. (Is the word "bad" *ist because it originally meant "hermaphrodite"?)

Cognitive dissonance is encountering somebody who regularly uses the term "mansplaining" complaining about the sexist origins of the word "hysterical."

Yes.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 12 April 2013 11:11:58PM 5 points [-]

The root of the word refers to the Greek word hystera, which refers to the uterus. Hysteria -originally- referred to female sexual dysfunction, but medical quackery resulted in becoming a catch-all diagnosis in women experiencing unidentified symptoms.

Given that the treatment was using vibrators or other mechanisms of inducing orgasm, and given that the culture of the era was that men weren't supposed to desire sex/sex was demeaning to them, and women were supposed to be sex-crazy (the reverse is actually a fairly recent phenomenon - watch older movies and you'll still see traces of these attitudes), I suspect that women were frequently more than a little complicit in that particular bit of quackery.

Freud and other contemporary psychologists started using one of the quack versions of the word to describe emotional issues, and it stuck.