10 Words Every Girl Should Learn

[intaglio]

From Alternet- 10 Words Every Girl Should Learn by Soraya Chemaly

"Stop interrupting me."

"I just said that."

"No explanation needed."

In fifth grade, I won the school courtesy prize. In other words, I won an award for being polite. My brother, on the other hand, was considered the class comedian. We were very typically socialized as a "young lady" and a "boy being a boy." Globally, childhood politeness lessons are gender asymmetrical. We socialize girls to take turns, listen more carefully, not curse and resist interrupting in ways we do not expect boys to. Put another way, we generally teach girls subservient habits and boys to exercise dominance.

/snip

These two ways of establishing dominance in conversation, frequently based on gender, go hand-in-hand with this last one: A woman, speaking clearly and out loud, can say something that no one appears to hear, only to have a man repeat it minutes, maybe seconds later, to accolades and group discussion.

/snip

These behaviors, the interrupting and the over-talking, also happen as the result of difference in status, but gender rules. For example, male doctors invariably interrupt patients when they speak, especially female patients, but patients rarely interrupt doctors in return. Unless the doctor is a woman. When that is the case, she interrupts far less and is herself interrupted more. This is also true of senior managers in the workplace. Male bosses are not frequently talked over or stopped by those working for them, especially if they are women; however, female bosses are routinely interrupted by their male subordinates.

Later on there is one of the finest examples of mansplaining I have ever seen - posted in the thread I like the term Mansplain

[hlthe2b]

1. Excellent article. I especially like this part (below)

In the wake of Larry Summers' "women can't do math" controversy several years ago, scientist Ben Barres wrote publicly about his experiences, first as a woman and later in life, as a male. As a female student at MIT, Barbara Barres was told by a professor after solving a particularly difficult math problem, "Your boyfriend must have solved it for you." Several years after, as Ben Barres, he gave a well-received scientific speech and he overhead a member of the audience say, "His work is much better than his sister's."

Most notably, he concluded that one of the major benefits of being male was that he could now "even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

[intaglio]

2. Thanks, there was a lot of good material in that article

Shame (for me) about the copyright limitations.

[yuiyoshida]

3. I wonder who it was who came up with the term

"Mansplaining" ? Anyone know? I guess I could google it...


Edited: The word is thought to have been first used in 2008 or 2009,[4] shortly after San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit published an April 2008 blog post titled "Men Explain Things to Me." In it, she did not use the word mansplaining, but defined the phenomenon as "something every woman knows," telling the story of a man at a party lengthily describing to her a recent "very important" book, and needing to be told three or four times before taking in that Solnit was in fact its author. Solnit characterizes mansplaining as "the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness",[5] rooted in a "presumption, that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; 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."[6][7][8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansplaining

[ismnotwasm]

5. Nice!

It's better than what I learned -- "fuck you"-- didn't really get me anywhere life

[freshwest]

6. Does using one word in a variety of ways count?

Such as:

# 1: No, we won't.

# 2: No, you must be thinking of someone else.

# 3: No, I don't need a date.

# 4: No, I don't need a ride.

# 5: No, I don't need a meal.

# 6: No, you may not come into my house.

# 7: No, I do not want to hear what that woman you broke up with did.

# 8: No, no way in hell.

# 9: No, we don't even live on the same planet.

#10: No, you do not tell how I should feel.*

*The one used most often. After all, most of us are a work in progress and our feelings change over time. We don't need anyone interfering with that process. People who insist on telling others how they ought to feel, act and talk, are really talking about themselves and using the wrong pronouns. They should work on their own delusions. IMO.

[redqueen]

7. Excellent article.

Thanks for sharing it