This was an awesome book when it was first published so it's cool to see it get attention still.
One of the most interesting things i’ve learned from this book so far is the topic of mansplaining, and how what women perceive as misogyny is actually the man being an egalitarian.
I’ll try to summarize.
From a high level: the feminine trusts the experts, while the masculine verifies them.
This means that among women when it comes to who gets to make the decision or pontificate on the topic, they try to figure out who knows the most about it and then they quietly listen and follow her advice.
While among men, when someone asserts themselves as an expert, the other men see this as a bid for power, and so they challenge them to make sure that they are genuinely an expert and deserving of their subordination to him on this topic.
So what happens is that women expect other people to not challenge them on the things they perceive themselves as the expert on. Say, if she is the project manager, everyone who is not the project manager should defer to her judgement.
But what happens when dealing with a man is that he challenges her, and the more she tries to say “erm sweety i’m the expert” the more he feels the need to challenge her.
What he wants and expects is that if she truly is the expert, she can show him how he is wrong and his idea is stupid and prove that she deserves the title of SME on this so that he can respect and trust her judgement.
However to her this offensive and rude. And furthermore, she doesn’t see him do this to the men so he must be questioning her or pontificating despite not knowing as much because she is a woman. But what’s actually the case is that he did do that to the men too, they just proved to him that they deserved the title and so he stopped. There is this introductory period of s**t testing that the others passed.
But because no one has ever challenged her before, all the girlies just say “oh you’re so smart ms expert” she’s not experienced at fighting back. And so even when she does genuinely know more, she fumbles the s**t test and loses his respect, making him more likely to challenge her in the future.
The most ironic bit here is that what she perceives of as misogyny is actually him being a radical egalitarian. Most men are brought up to treat a woman with kid gloves and not do this type of s**t testing as hard as they do with men. But as we’ve dissolved these practices, more and more men are not seeing gender and do treat women like men and they get decried as sexist.
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