Dear Ms. Torre:
Thank you for making an excellent point. At the bottom of it all, most people want to be listened to, treated with respect, and given honest responses. It’s great to have opinions — like you, I share many of them — and I don’t need to have everyone who hears or reads them genuflect before me and express how sage a thinker they feel I am. But if someone disagrees, I would hope that they would have the integrity to say (A) “I disagree,” and (B) “here’s why.”
That kind of conversation, based on respect, is something I like to practice with my wife, and she with me. Sometimes I disagree with her, and vice versa, but the cardinal rule is “we can disagree without being disagreeable.” Sometimes she forgets, and tells me in a very pedantic way why she thinks I’m a moron (or something worse). Not that I’m perfect, but I very, very seldom make the mistake of giving her a bottom-line opinion without explaining the factual basis for that opinion, and I consistently invite her to prove me wrong if she has other facts about which I don’t know. A number of times she does. I thank her and tell her that I appreciate the learning experience, which made me a better person, all because of her.
As I understand the term, “mansplaining” is a form of condescending, patronizing communication used by a male to dominate a female by explaining why she’s wrong, doesn’t have the facts straight, is “too emotional,” or is otherwise incapable of mustering an intelligent argument or point of view. Any form of communication or action between adults when used as a tool of domination is, to my mind, a shameful indicator of the dominator’s inherent weakness.
Again, you made an excellent point, and being a humanist I feel that treating people with dignity, respect, and civility are much better ways of interacting than using vulgarities to “keep it a hunnerd” (completely ‘real’). Part of the vulgarities, in my lexicon of values, is to treat people as inferiors because of some perceived differential that, in the end, means little or nothing at all.
