Got aggressively mansplained r.e. my field

[Tygarolf]

Just been aggressively mansplained to about my field by a member of the public and he really fucked me off tbh. 😂

I don’t often deal with the public, my field is not customer service, I work in a STEM field, but I got brought in to help with a customer complaint and provide some expertise.

I can’t give many details as don’t want to be too outing but the customer aggressively ranted whilst listening to nothing I said, spouting conspiracy theories and things they’d read on Google and concluded that I was useless in my field or a liar, most likely a liar. Ok sir. 😂😂😂

He kept tell me that “you KNOW (insert conspiracy theory here” and after 20 mins of this I said “with all due respect don’t tell me what I know.” He didn’t like that! I ended the call shortly after as he wanted to Google conspiracy theories together to prove he was right. I don’t have the time in my day for this nonsense. 😂

He was so aggressive I feel he just wanted to be aggressive to someone? And felt he could because it’s work i am obviously not going to kick off back at him? I am so glad I don’t encounter people like this often.

Tell me your mansplaining stories.

I can't remember any mansplaining ones but men repeating what I've just said and passing it off as their own idea is quite common.

I had a male colleague tell me something fundamentally wrong about what I do and would not accept I was right.
It was irritating.
I sent him some information via email 😁

Last week I was talking about genealogy to my SIL and BIL. My BIL told me I was wrong about which of my uncles was the eldest. Not his family and he's never met either of them!

One of my clients tried to tell me about girl guides. I'm in my 37th year of girl guiding. I met dh at a girl guide center. Just fuck off!

This happens all the bloody time. Drives me insane. I can think of 2 incidences from one meeting earlier today, let alone going back any further.

Olympic-grade eyeroll, Tygarolf, that must have been infuriating🙄

I was going through some old family papers and found a cartoon from the 1960s? 70s? that somebody had obviously liked a lot as they cut it out of the magazine it was in. If I could find it I'd post a photo of it but you'll have to make do with a description:

Boardroom scene. Ten men and one furious-looking woman sat around it. Chairman speaks:
"That's an excellent point Miss Brown! Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it?"

Sorry this doesn't sounds like mansolaining at all and someone who was a hit crazy. If the person would have said the same thing to a man (which it sounds like he would as it was all conspiracy theories) then it’s not mansplaining, but perhaps this is the part you can’t explain due to outing?

At a party of one of my staff for their birthday at a golf club. A lot of staff are ex police. Drunk retired old man detective runs into one of my staff who he knew from old times.

Starts talking to her asking if she still works in our field. She says yes. He turns to me... he's 59, ruddy cheeked quite round. I'm 37 and had done my hair for once so probably looking my actual age.

He says "do you work for X too". I said "i am X"..

He said "no love you're not. X is the boss. X makes the decisions and does a,b,c tasks. If you work with Alice here you work FOR X, you're not X..."

Never before been told that I didn't have my own job...

Had a trans woman explain period pains to me.

My ex explained to me that I was breastfeeding DD2 all wrong despite the fact that I had 2 years experience breastfeeding DD1.
To be fair, he had bigger boobs than me, so may have felt that qualified him to give advice

It's from Punch I believe. Late 1980s.

I don’t know why you kept it going. Surely working in STEM means we get away with having bad social skills. I’d have put the phone down and until he was able to explain in perfect detail how the phone worked I’d have left him to it.

Please tell us how you put him back in his box?!

FFS 😒

I have had lots and lots of occasions over my career where I have a student or junior member of staff shadowing me and if they are male they are always assumed to be the senior person. 100% every time. Mostly people are slightly embarrassed on being corrected but one older gentleman looked very suspicious and puzzled for some time and then said 'well I suppose these days you could be'

I had a trans identifying male tell me all about endometriosis once - it was his special interest but am not quite sure why. 🤔 These days I just assume it was part of his fetish.

He wasn’t called Steph was he?

It's been one of the joys of getting older for me that the mansplaining at work has lessened.

I work in a very specialist administrative area supporting mostly male very "dominant"🙄 professionals (think surgeons). In my earlier years I found meetings pretty stressful as they would talk louder over me and assume they always knew better.

Now I've got a long track record, am extremely firm & assertive about my area of expertise, I've got older, most of them are younger and the very senior bods warn off the very young ones if they speak out of turn. Bliss.

Had an 18 year old oik explain to me how universities work. Reader, I have worked and studied in seven universities over the last 30 years and now have a fairly senior job in an RG. He hadn’t even started yet 🙄

Well initially I said "I know what x does, I am x"

He replied again that I was not. I was going to reply when another of my staff, a few drinks in at this point (female) loudly shouted "Look mate, that's my boss and I call her (insert formal job title), if you want to carry on pretending your right you're going to have to stop me telling you to fuck off which is what I'm about to do"

He then said, "oh my God you're really X"

Followed by... "can I ask you out on a date". With no sense of irony.

I declined. And he was then asked to leave because in fact he wasn't invited to the party and had just happened to be at golf club and shouldn't have been in the private section!

Manager in a previous job tried to mansplain office politics to me. I started my first office job when he was 5 years old.

I've been a train spotter since my Dad took me to look at locos when I was a child. My DH knows nothing about them, but comes with me when I want to photo them. Waiting on a railway bridge one day, a chap asks me what I'm waiting for. So, I tell him which locomotive is due. He walks down to DH, and asks him what he's waiting for. DH looked at him and said "what she's just tod you, mate - I have no idea." Happens all the time

In a discussion about the possible causes of a loud bang that caused several houses to shake, I put forward that a sonic boom could be behind it as we live close to an airport that often deploys RAF Typhoons.

Cue two knuckledraggers ambling over to state the following:

ABSOLUTE NONSENSE missy

DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN HEAR PLANES TAKING OFF from 20 miles away?!

I decided not to bother explaining that sonic booms happen in the air not the ground

I've had this many times. I worked with vehicles and transport so encountered many know it all men.

I had one man I had to call a lot about doing vehicle diagnostics who took a dislike to me. He repeatedly spoke to me like I was an absolute simpleton. There was a problem with the account which I won't bore you with, but he treated me like he was trying to explain astrophysics to a toddler.

I refused to let him get to me and went the route of killing him with passive aggressive politeness. But eventually someone else (a man) reported him for how he was speaking to me and he did improve a little after that.

Do we call this “transplaining”, then?

Our department has a very small customer facing element. We have a customer service department but he was so batshit they pulled me in as they thought I’d be able to calm him down with some facts etc 😂