Women reveal their worst experiences of mansplaining

Oh, thank you so much for enlightening us as to how we should breastfeed

Rachel Hosie
Thursday 18 May 2017 16:51 BST
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(Getty Images/iStockphoto
(Getty Images/iStockphoto (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

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When 25-year-old Lucinda was off to her first smear test, her boyfriend turned to her and said: “Make sure you wear something with easy access.”

“I was like, ‘Dude, you take your underwear off, what are you talking about? Are you mansplaining my smear test to me?’” Lucinda told The Independent.

“He was trying to help (why I have no idea) and was really embarrassed.”

Lucinda, like many women, has to put up with mansplaining on a daily basis.

It’s been something men have done since the beginning of time (probably), but it’s only in recent years been identified and given the name ‘mansplaining’ - if you didn’t know, mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman in a patronising or condescending manner.

It's usually something the woman clearly knows more about too.

And it happens a lot.

“I was once building some flat-pack furniture with a man and he kept trying to tell me how to work a screwdriver even though I was already doing it,” 24-year-old Clara told The Independent.

It’s frustrating.

And women have now been taking to Twitter to share their worst experiences of mansplaining.

It’s enough to make you roll your eyes so far back into your head you fear they may never face forward again.

Whether men guilty of mansplaining mean to be patronising or actually helpful is not clear, but men simply do not receive the same treatment from women (or not to such an extent anyway).

Thank goodness we have men to explain things we already know.

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