Everyone is wrong about mansplaining and it's very annoying.
Mansplaining is a failure to negotiate a common conversation protocol, resulting in an annoying mismatch. This can be due to sexism but it isn't necessarily so.
People talk about how mansplaining is just "how men talk to eachother" and this isn't true - mansplaining is what happens when you talk to someone in a particular male coded way that they are not prepared to engage with.
Mansplaining is like talking to someone in French when you know they don't speak French - it's probably a dick move, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's reasonable for them to expect you to speak to them in English.
When men talk to eachother in this way it's a conversation in a way that it's not when you end up doing it to someone who is not prepared to engage with it. It's not some deep sin, it's just being a bad conversationalist, but that can be for any number of reasons.
As I apparently didn't make it clear enough: When mansplaining happens, that is always bad. My claim is not that mansplaining is good. It's that:
1. There are multiple possible underlying causes. 2. There are multiple possible appropriate solutions that vary by cause
Additionally, without understanding the underlying dynamic, just trying to solve the problem by attempting to shame men into not mansplaining will mostly not work and will make things worse more often than it makes things better.
But this is why my claim is that *everyone* (OK, almost everyone) is wrong about mansplaining, because I think the two camps are basically "mansplaining is because you hate women" and "mansplaining is good, actually" and they're both bad takes.
Reasons why you might explain something to someone that aren't that you think they don't understand them.
This incidentally is the thing that most regularly trips me up. I'm very into most feminine communication patterns but those are *good reasons* to explain things, and it's actually very frustrating to constantly litter these explanations with check ins and questions.
I accept that in many circumstances I have to do it anyway, but the conversation would go so much better if I could just assume that both parties respect the other's expertise and are prepared to assert their own where relevant. It's a very effective communication protocol.
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People always lie about appropriate social norms because they omit the step where you're supposed to read their mind and based on the information revealed to you there do the thing that they wanted.
This isn't even exaggeration. The social norm really is that you're supposed to read people's minds, because neurotypicals are under the mistaken impression that they can do that, and as a result are under the mistaken impression that what they want is obvious.
Ought doesn't imply can, it just implies that other people believe you can.
For reasons I might be less likely to want to tweet controversial things right now and so might stick to sensible safe topics for a while.
...
No, fuck that, lets do a thread about sexuality hacking.
By "sexuality hacking" I mean anything you do to yourself to try and change your sexual interests. I'm almost exclusively interested in *broadening* sexual interests - I don't think narrowing them is desirable, and I suspect if it's possible then it's intrinsically traumatic.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Nobody under any circumstances has any obligation to change their sexuality. I do not believe you can coerce people into doing this, and you shouldn't try because it's horribly unethical. This is for self-directed consensual use.
91. Which fictional characters would you love to be if ethics permitted you? What needs are you failing to express as a result of holding on to those ethical constraints?
92. What do people tell you about yourself that you refuse to believe? What does not believing that protect you from?
93. What things in your life do you not feel allowed to complain about?
In the context I saw this, it was being painted as a gendered difference. I think it is, but not for the reasons people are treating it as.
The actual reason is that we've put the boundaries of "thinking" in the wrong place.
We tend to only consider it "thinking" if you're doing it on your own off in your own head, but almost everything you do involves thinking, and many other modes of thinking succeed even by the standards you'd want to judge "real thinking" by, they just seem less legitimate.
Idle thought: We were talking about how Less Wrong had a lot (though a minority) of people from less savoury parts of the internet, but that's... actually very good? Less Wrong is actually a great community of last resort because it does genuinely make its members better.
The core LW worldview is not one I would particularly endorse, but honestly most people don't end up staying there. A lot of people seem to have become much healthier and more complete human beings as a result of joining LW, taking on board its worldview, and building on it.
And actually that is exactly the sort of site we want more of on the internet.