Mansplaining vs. Shelaborating

Yes, I have to explain this nuance

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic risks the accusation of mansplaining to explain the nuance behind how humanity has evolved both mansplaining and shelaborating to communicate important information for our survival. By understanding the value and the difference, we can learn how to interact and communicate better.

Note: I apologize! This got sent accidentally on September 3 in an email while I intended to schedule it. I hastily pulled it back, but it was too late. So, you get it again today and, hopefully, it’s just as good. Don’t forget to leave a comment!

A term that needed to die a long time ago and has never managed to go away is Mansplaining. It’s a portmanteau of Man Explaining. It’s quite self-definitional and used to dismiss information or insights that a man presents. Now, the original idea, as captured by Wikipedia, is “describing the act of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, without regard to her own expertise.”

And yes, there really is a recognizable behavior in which someone assumes a woman lacks knowledge despite evidence of her expertise. Research has found that condescending explanations do communicate competence questioning and that it affects women differently than men. At the same time, research found that the label can also be used strategically to discredit disagreement rather than identifying actual condescension.

I’ve seen this happen both ways, and yes, it’s sexist, spiteful, and unacceptable when it’s the former. The problem I have is that the true incarnation of mansplaining is also not the vast majority of the accusations. A great example came up recently as my wife recalled a woman who was describing a particularly grueling climb in a mountain biking race and said:

“I was super tired, but riders kept mansplaining to me that I should shift my gears.”

It just so happens she went on to confirm that yes, in fact, shifting gears solved her struggle. But the tone she used when she uttered the word? It was as if it were the most insulting thing that ever happened, and how dare they…

But the men were helping, and when they saw someone struggling, likely knowing that when you start sucking wind on a ride, you sometimes forget the basics, and they reminded her. Since this really is Biking 101, it’s a ‘No duh’ moment and probably a little embarrassing. So instead of coping with the face-palm moment, she attempted to redirect her shame onto someone else.

Mansplaining is also a deflection from a perennial female tendency, as was so perfectly captured in the incredibly funny short video It’s Not About The Nail, where women want you to understand her feelings without explaining. They want validation, not solutions, and they likely know the answer, but are not willing to do that yet. Because it’s not about the nail…

Where it gets messy is men do care to explain. We do it to each other all the time. Just listen to a conversation and, instead of getting offended, you see that we typically build on it just a little to show we know it, and the conversation can continue forward.

Also, if it’s an important topic, even if you’ve heard it before, sometimes hearing it again adds nuance. There are also people out there I call ‘multiple exposure’ because I do have to state the same thing multiple times before they understand it. What’s frustrating is that the ones who get offended at hearing it twice (or more) often can’t even summarize the nuance of the topic to begin with.

I’ll pause here a second because we’re teasing back a few layers. Yes, men like to explain. Yes, men can misread the audience. And yes, there can be true condescension and gender bias.

Want to know the funny thing? It happens to me all the time, a point Wikipedia goes on to describe. Want to know a funnier thing? Women tend to do this form of explaining as much, or more. Especially when it’s condescending. It doesn’t take long on any social media platform before I’m chided by women for even having an opinion on a topic, regardless of how well-informed, especially when it comes to discussing things about the feminine.

Heck, even the accusation of mansplaining is rarely levied in an uncondecending manner. Think about whenever you’ve heard the word, because it’s normally used to shift the focus from a conversational flaw like over-explaining or misreading a room to a reductive gender stereotype. But even more, by levying the accusation, they presume the speaker’s intent as malicious instead of enthusiasm or a simple misunderstanding. And I can tell you, working with highly technical engineers, it’s normally the latter.

Worse, it’s patronizing in two ways. First, it treats the listener as too fragile to handle an explanation and, second, it strips the speaker of nuance. In the end, the accusation just replaces one form of potential intellectual arrogance with actual intellectual arrogance, with the added dash of moral superiority.

Here’s where it gets even weirder, because there is such a thing as Girlsplaining, which is defined as “offering a female perspective on relationships, society, or everyday topics.” Note that it’s a positive term. In common use, it’s glowingly described as offering support, assistance, and clarity. Also note the diminutive term “girl” vs. man, as that quickly evokes innocence while trying to avoid naivety.

But the more apropos term to compare to mansplaining is “shelaborating,” which is the stereotypical tendency for women to provide a well-meaning but overwhelming dump of information, context, and side stories. Ask a “shelaborator” how their day was, and you’ll receive a 20-minute timeline starting from their morning coffee down to the backstory of a coworker’s cousin’s dog.

A visual of Mansplaining vs. Shelaborating

At their root, mansplaining, girlsplaining, and shelaborating are all methods of sharing information and transferring knowledge. Want to know the fun part? It’s all rooted in evolutionary biology.

That’s because, across history, men focused on creating resources and, as such, benefited from using a more descriptive and direct explanation because they needed to ensure a clear and common understanding of things. This often meant mansplaining the basics to make sure.

The Two Rules of Life

Women, on the other hand, focused on creating and nurturing offspring, which means their shelaboration builds the relational component, communicates a ton of supplemental mental state information, and weaves together the community. It’s so important that women typically sit quietly and listen.

• Men mansplain to men, and they don’t think anything of it.

• Women shelaborate to women, and they don’t think anything of it.

• Women shelaborate to men, and they roll their eyes and laugh about the drama.

• Men mansplain to women, and that’s misogyny.

That last line is the part of the equation we need to fix because it has serious consequences where accusations of mansplaining result in men largely forgoing the mentorship of women. Nothing quite ruins getting into something that’s normally a back-and-forth, push-and-pull of descriptions, and then being accused of mansplaining. It just shuts down genuine, peer-to-peer, egalitarian dialogue.

It also doesn’t even have to be directed at me. That woman and mountain biking? I’m now much less inclined to help her with biking or anything else. Her casual accusation about helpful advice that she actually needed created a reputational landmine I don’t want to risk. The consequences for her are obvious as her reputation becomes known.

That doesn’t stop me from mentoring women, but it is definitely something I’ve seen in those sessions where I have to communicate differently than my natural inclination, and the way I normally engage with men, to get an equal response. A key point to weave back is that women typically sit quietly and listen to shelaboration and are also inclined to sit and listen to mansplaining, whereas men will often interrupt both if they already understand.

So, let’s break out some practical advice for both sides of the equation.

First, you have power: If someone is legit mansplaining in a condescending, lecturing, or pontificating manner, just interject a “Hey, I’m aware of that.” and then build that into something else. “And have you considered XXX YYY implications?”

Second, explain what you’re doing: This was advice given to me when my actions were interpreted as lecturing when my intent was exploring and explaining. I learned to caveat a few different ways:

1. Do you mind if I draw on the whiteboard really quick?

2. I’m thinking out loud right now.

3. Let me know if you already know this.

4. Jump in at any time; it’s not interrupting.

These set the stage about your intent, and invite engagement while also disarming the perception of rudeness if they do step in.

Third, pause and offer the opportunity for others to enter the conversation: This goes for both mansplaining and shelaborating. Remember that women, in particular, will suffer through mansplaining much longer than a man will, but it’s also just general social graces to pause and offer the opportunity for others. This gives them the chance to redirect without interrupting.

Fourth and last, understand your own motivations: If the situation is that you’re just embarrassed that you forgot to do something like shifting your gears, accept that, learn from it, and own that lesson. If it’s just not about the nail, then say something like “I get that, and I’m not ready to do anything; let me work through my feelings.” That’s OK too, but it means you need to introspect. It’s important to remember that good intent doesn’t guarantee good communication, but your negative reaction doesn’t prove sexist intent.

Really, what we are doing here is appreciating that mansplaining and shelaborating are just part of normal human dialogue, conducted, typically, with no malintent, and specialized between the sexes because that’s what’s worked best for a very long time. The consequences of not understanding the nuance create a very real reduction in the amount of information or help you’ll have access to.

So, next time you’re annoyed with the communication style of another person, you now have some tips to deal with it. Even better, you also have a few techniques to bridge the communication gap yourself and avoid condescension. In the end, I hope you better understand the value and the differences between mansplaining and shelaborating so we can learn how to interact and communicate better.

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What examples do you have of true mansplaining or shelaborating and what did you do about it? Leave a comment below.

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