Mansplaining muzzles free speech
and limits academic freedom
In August, I went to hear feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker give a talk about academic freedom and freedom of speech. Very soon after she started her speech, a man in the audience interrupted her loudly, telling her what she had gotten wrong and peppering her with questions. I was appalled, and in fact, under my breath I muttered, Where is Rebecca Solnit when you need her?
Note to readers: The recording above includes the original audio, which I recommend you listen to rather than read.
New word for an old, tired phenomenon
Rebecca Solnit famously coined the term mansplaining in her essay and book, Men Explain Things to Me. It was one of those instances where a new word spotlights for a large group of people, in this case, over half of humanity, a phenomenon that they knew to be true but couldn't quite put their finger on. Mansplaining happens to women every day. There is an implicit assumption in our culture that men's knowledge is more important, men's experience is more important, and even more than that, that on any subject a man's opinion is more important.
Bettina did just fine without Rebecca’s help
Bettina has been at the forefront of the fight for freedom of speech and academic freedom for her entire life. So I muttered my little invocation, but I was eager to see how she would handle it. She was polite at first, answering his point and then continuing.
Then the second time she was interrupted, she was a little more firm.
“ I'll take questions later. Okay. Just hold on. This is— Please wait, please wait. So I can finish the points.”
Finally, she had to say what should have been obvious.
“ Excuse me, sir, please don't interrupt. I mention if— please don't interrupt. You can get a turn.”1
Mansplaining curtails women’s speech
In my full episode based on the speech, I cut out all the mansplaining, but I include it here because this is a theme that runs through my conversations with women, not just women of Bettina's generation, the generation before mine that entered the workforce as the only woman in the room, but also young women starting out their careers.
Here is a young scientist, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, who I interviewed when the Babblery first started.
“I do think that there are certain people who create an environment that can make us feel uncomfortable. Also, there are any people listening who sit with like a manspreading position, please understand that manspreading is a real problem and it makes it makes the environment around you much less welcoming for other people so please don't do it.”2
Three young scientists spoke about not only the fact that men take up the intellectual space in the room, but that they literally take up the physical space. As smaller physical beings, women are continually pushed aside and intimidated physically and verbally.
Mansplaining curtails women’s academic freedom
Going back a generation, one of my recent interviews was with the linguist Eve Clark, who was one of the first women in her role as a linguist and was often the only woman in the room at faculty meetings.
“At times in meetings, you would make a suggestion and it would be ignored. Same suggestion would be taken up five minutes later by one of the men on the committee, and it would be applauded. And I just found that infuriating.”3
Eve describes a situation that is also very common for women, that their ideas are co-opted, repackaged as men's ideas, and they suddenly become acceptable.
Mansplaining even affects transgender women
For all that so many on the right seem bent on insisting that transgender women are men, my 2024 interview with Stephanie Jacobs proves that when it comes to bias, men are very willing to apply bias against women who were once considered men.
Stephanie was, as a man, a producer at CBS News. As she said to me, she once told millions of people what to think about events in our country and around the world. In retirement from CBS, she became a venture capitalist—and a transitioned woman. Here’s what she had to say about experiencing conference table politics from the other side.
“ I know the first time I was in a pitch meeting at the accelerator that I mentor at, as a transitioned person, my opinion was not solicited. And when I have discussions, the kind of privilege that I was awarded or gifted as a white male former media executive, the holder of multiple patents, the winner of eight broadcast Emmys for their work—when you're a trans woman, uh, sorry, we're not calling on you.”4
Do ideas become more true when they come from the mouth of a perceived male?
So much of what feminists say is ignored until a prominent man says it in a way that shows that it's just a mainstream idea, not those ‘crazy feminists.’ Bettina's speech was about freedom of speech and academic freedom, and mansplaining is, in fact, a suppressing factor in both of those freedoms.
Freedom of speech assumes that every person in this country is able to speak what they think and that they won't be shut down because of who they are. The assumption is that if their speech is worthy of merit, it will be heard and appreciated. But for non-white people and women, that's never been true. Freedom of speech for women has always been accompanied by the fact that the speech is coming out of a female body. Freedom of speech for women has always been accompanied by the fact the sound of a female voice is often described as “shrill,” “grating,” or the much-reviled “strident.”
In most of the history of the United States, women literally and legally didn't have freedom of speech because they weren't included in the Constitution and physically were prevented from exercising freedom of speech when they were excluded from public spaces.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom rest on false premises
Now that women do have the vote, now that we have the right to be in public spaces, we still don't have complete freedom of speech because freedom of speech rests on the idea that the value of speech is in its content. But that is obviously not the case, since the same words coming out of a man’s mouth or under a masculine name are valued more. The same is true for minority groups in this country, of course. Minorities in terms of race, culture and religion all find that their ideas are discounted until a person from the dominant group echoes them.
Academic freedom similarly is an area where women don't have the same rights as men. Bettina's career is case in point: she spent many years building the women's studies department at a university into its current feminist studies department. And women around the country were doing the same. Now, as we see the Trump administration tweaking the levers of power to limit academic freedom in general, we see that women's academic freedom is actually limited more.
Last summer, I interviewed climate scientist Heather Ford. Here's what she pointed out about the Trump administration's cuts to science funding.
For the National Science Foundation, specifically women principal investigators, leads on a grant represent only 34% of all active grants. So, you know, women make up about half of the population, right? But in terms of who's getting competitive grants and who's applying for National Science Foundation, it's about 34%. And of those grants that have been terminated by Trump's agenda, 58% of the grants that have been cut are women leads.5
Just as I was working on this piece, I heard an interview with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of the new book Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. Here’s what she said about her reservations about writing the book:
“As a woman, I felt I’d be pigeonholed to some extent if I were writing on gender and I wanted to be seen as an expert on extremism and not only on gender. So I had my own little hangups.”6
So, in essence, her academic freedom was curtailed by her knowledge that doing groundbreaking work in her field could “pigeonhole” her into the feminist ghetto. I was struck by, first, her description of this pervasive issue as her “own little hangup,” and also how carefully she spoke in the interview, avoiding even the slightest implication that she thought that women had it worse than men in our society.
Theoretically, academic freedom is available to all, regardless of sex. But money is the oil that smooths the gears in a capitalist society, and if the money doesn't go to women, then they don't have the same academic freedom as men. Similarly, if women doing serious research in their field expect to get ghettoized if they pursue a gender-related line of research, that is incentive enough for them to look elsewhere for their research topics.
Who do they come for first?
The MAGA takeover has been so devastating it almost feels like I’m whining when it comes to women’s free speech. What about dying children in Africa?7 What about families losing their healthcare?8 What about women dying in childbirth in red states?9
It’s a cliché now to cite the famous poem, but the erosion of rights always takes a clear path. MAGA is systematically destroying the edges of our rights, using money and gender disinformation as a way to stop what we used to see as a now-unstoppable advancement toward full political equality and participation for women and minorities.
The classic way to envision freedom of speech is the iconic man on a soapbox in the town square. Jimmy Kimmel got his platform back—for now. But how can a woman have freedom of speech if men keep manspreading her off the soapbox?
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“Academic Freedom Under Fire with Scholar Bettina Aptheker”—minus the mansplaining!
In case you haven’t noticed, red states look like developing nations when it comes to maternal mortality.
This is why we must keep speaking and attending rallies and marching. They are coming for us all. The question is only where you are in the line.
Yes, men mansplain and they need to stfu.
That said, it's time to stop jamming dudes in dresses into women's matters. Stephanie is a dude. Y chromosome, end of story.
Why on earth is that pic of a woman with her mouth covered featuring FEMALE hands with grown-out acrylics? Why is it in the woods instead of a board room or lecture hall?
So much partisan, think tank weirdness in this post.