by Olivia Sullivent

The first time I said “mansplaining,” it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

He was explaining something I already knew. Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just with a confidence so assured it assumed I needed even the simplest things spelled out for me. As he spoke, I felt myself do the familiar thing: nod, wait, let him finish a thought I’d already finished in my head.

And then the word appeared.

“You’re mansplaining,” I said.

He paused, recalibrated, and hesitantly apologized. The conversation ended abruptly, not because we reached understanding, but because the control had shifted quickly and cleanly into my hands. That was the moment I realized the power wasn’t in the argument; it was in the word.

After that, I stopped saying it carelessly and started noticing how casually the word gets used. I have a friend who loves it. Every man, every moment, same verdict.

He shares his political views: he’s mansplaining. He explains their date to her: mansplaining. He mentions a fact she might not even know yet: definitely mansplaining.

At a certain point, it stops describing a behavior and starts describing a person: man, therefore guilty.

It’s strange to watch, and a little uncomfortable. It’s not that the men are always right. They aren’t. It’s that nothing they do is allowed to be neutral; everything is suspect. Every sentence is a potential offense.

It feels rude, it feels kind of unfair, and it also makes complete sense.

When you zoom out far enough, of course women are jumpy. Men have dominated conversation, policy, and history itself for centuries. As women, we’ve been corrected, dismissed, overwritten, and “educated” into silence. The word mansplaining didn’t appear out of nowhere; it crawled out of a very real, very earned frustration.

The pleasure of calling out mansplaining isn’t really about correcting the man in front of you. It’s about finally interrupting a pattern women have been trained to tolerate.

It’s about being ten years old and having a boy explain your own joke back to you, louder and with more confidence. It’s about sitting in meetings, classrooms, and at dinner tables, absorbing the quiet lesson that knowledge sounds more legitimate when it comes from a lower voice.

Still, I flinch at how easy it’s become to flatten intention.

When every explanation is treated like an attack, conversation turns rigid. Men either over-apologize or stop speaking altogether, and women stop listening before a sentence finishes. 

Telling someone they’re mansplaining can be an act of resistance, but it can also become an instinct that punishes effort and even care. When “mansplaining” is used as a weapon to end a conversation rather than as a tool to start one, it risks repeating the very pattern it was meant to break. 

I watch how quickly we reach for it now, how easily a man explaining a plan, a thought, or a joke becomes evidence instead of conversation.

We can hold two things at once. That men have dominated conversation for centuries, and that not every sentence is a reenactment of the past. 

Honestly, 

Liv