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Illustration by Max Fleishman

How to catch a mansplainer

Woman ensnares the patronizing creature with the perfect joke.

 

Jaya Saxena

IRL

Posted on Apr 15, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 10:46 pm CDT

Mansplainers are an elusive creature, popping into your mentions and disappearing as soon as you know what’s happening. Luckily, one woman set up a perfect trap, and we can learn from her innovation.

1. Set the bait.

Twitter user @voldemortsbicep began her expedition with a basic truth: When it seems like a woman doesn’t understand something, she’s probably just fucking with you.

2. Lure him in.

Soon, she had her prey, Twitter user @grhughes82, whom she attracted by doing the exact thing she said she’d do in her first tweet.

3. If it works, more will follow.

In the most generous reading of this tweet thread, our prey was attempting to be in on the joke as well. And yet other men continued to fall into the trap, no matter how much the joke was explained to them.

4. Now, what do you do with your catch?

If there was a way to mine mansplainers for something more useful than a joke, the raw material is there in spades. There are entire Tumblrs dedicated to men explaining things to women, women who were not wrong, never asked, or who may actually be experts in the fields that men are explaining to them. There are even men explaining why the portmanteau is actually sexist.

On second thought, it may not be worth catching a mansplainer at all. 

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*First Published: Apr 15, 2016, 11:49 am CDT