Excuse Me, Mansplainer

I was going to write a poem to mark the occasion. It would have been titled: Ode to the Mansplainer, and it was going to be epic. I had the whole opus worked out in my head, as I composed it in the shower. However, like all things fleeting, the words washed out of my hair right down the drain so I had forgotten it all by the time I was toweling myself dry. Sigh.

Despite it all, the sentiment remains. I cannot stand the mansplainer. Let me elaborate:

I was helping out a customer. He seemed a little disoriented, perhaps he was high, or tired, or was suffering from mild-heatstroke exacerbated by the raging Texas heat. Regardless, I gave him the brief assistance he required and was about to step away when he called my attention back to share some entirely unrelated and completely unsolicited knowledge with me regarding the wearing of face masks.

Let me preface this by stating that he was not wearing a mask. He belongs to that cache of human beings who believe the shit they read online via the articles shared with them via Facebook. Or the news that is promoted on Fox News. He looked deranged as he wagged his finger on my face, attempting to use his height to intimidate and impress his “knowledge on me”.

Here is what he was hoping to educate me with:

That he felt sorry for me because my work required the wearing of face masks. How I was endangering my life because he heard of some girl who got a bacterial infection from “breathing her own air” over and over again because she was wearing a face mask for a long time.

What the actual fuck?

His concern was a fucking insult. The idea that he thought he was better than me for wandering around subjecting the general populace to his unfiltered air was even more insulting. Ignorance is a hell of a drug, and he was higher than the Mad Hatter.

mansplaining

noun

1. the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

As a woman, I am often subjected to the generous benevolences of the mansplainers in the world. They feel somehow compelled to share their trivialities with me, usually when I least need it, and most especially when I have not asked for it.

This jackass who happen to get in my face regarding my Personal Protective Equipment is the perfect example of what is wrong with this fucking world.

I’ve had men in every single one of my jobs attempt to explain my job to me. My favorite mansplainer was this one Chief W when I was a radar technician on my last ship. This man had not one radar qualification, but due to some administrative technicality (aka the obsolescence of his specialization) he was placed in charge of my division despite having no actual technical knowledge.

I was in charge of my work center. Had been for over a year, and at this point I had been a radar tech for over 6 years. We were in the shipyards and I had just completed the repair of the radar, a major overhaul where I replaced a half a million piece of 400lb radar equipment as the final step. This is a finely tuned machine which required that the tubes through which the generated wavelengths travel be kept at a very specific air pressure.

I had explained to everyone in the division that nothing in my radar space was to be touched. No gauges were to be adjusted. I left work that evening and returned a day later to find that everything had been adjusted and that the radar was not operational. Even better, the 400lb klystron that we had just replaced was broken. Why?

Because Chief W couldn’t keep his busy little fingers off my air pressure gauges. He had been the only one in our division on duty the night before so it couldn’t have been anyone else, especially since the space was locked and he had the combination.

He had the gall to tell me that he thought the pressure should have been higher and that I couldn’t possibly have been right. Because he thought he knew better and that I had set it too low because he was a Chief.

The chart below shows that he was mansplaining:

Long story short, I reported this malfeasance to the EMO and the Captain, considering that they needed to foot the bill for another $500K piece of equipment that was working the night I left work. Considering that I was responsible for the radar working in the first place, my reputation as a skilled technician was solid.

Satisfyingly enough he was banned from my space and put in charge of another department, far far away from my radar and he was not allowed to be in my space without supervision.

The cross of every woman with an ounce of knowledge is that there will always be some man who thinks he knows better.