Just don’t ever meet Atwood. She’s insufferable and rude.
Atwood refused to accept the science fiction label for a very long time. Le Guin is much kinder to her friend than Atwood was in person to many folks about this (this is harder to cite because older convention and genre drama doesn’t really show up online, unlike modern). In recent years, Atwood has accepted speculative fiction (the umbrella term for lots of stuff including SF) because it’s convenient for her and helps sales. She was and imo still is a huge genre snob. Don’t get me wrong, Atwood writes great stuff. She just hates a lot of her audience.
Why do I care? Compare and contrast her to Vonnegut, whose agent wouldn’t let him use the science fiction label but actively attended conventions, telling fans he wanted to be SF but the money folks wouldn’t let him. Octavia Butler is equally fantastic as is Atwood’s dear friend Le Guin. Both love SF and are happy with the label.
All three were also subtler and more skillful writers than Atwood – Butler in particular is criminally underappreciated. Her stories were far ahead of their time, exploring ideas about race and gender in a way that really makes you think rather than bludgeoning you with it. She should be a household name.
Okay, when did mansplaining change from overexplaining something simple because the listener isn’t a man to just explaining things in a horrendously incorrect manner?
This isn’t mansplaining, this is just being a massive christian dumbass.
Mansplaining has always been a stupid term that served no purpose other than to just whine and moan and blame men for any problem they could think of.
At best its a guy actually being an asshole, at worst it’s just a guy who doesn’t know that the girl is knowledgeable on the topic.
Especially in this meme, the dude probably just didn’t know the name of the person who wrote the book and was given misleading information. He’s an idiot, yes, but anything beyond that is just looking for an excuse to shit on him because men bad.
I would say that mansplaining is an actual real phenomenon, sometimes directly so (guys that do believe they know better than women) and other times indirectly, in cultures were men behave in a more assertive and aggressive way than women in conversations in groups and take over the conversation, in practice creating situations were they’ve taken over explaining something which a woman in the same group is vastly more qualified to explain.
However the word “mansplaining” has been so massivelly abused by mysandrists cosplaying as Feminists (to the point that in the last couple of years the most loud and frequent use of that word was by said mysandrists making prejudiced statements), that now there’s a natural “bullshit!” reaction to anybody using it.
Dawg, someone find this man and throw eggs at him.
I’ll just leave this here because I didn’t know, but guessed from context and then googled to verify:
The Handmaid’s Tale, acclaimed dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. The book, set in New England in the near future, posits a Christian fundamentalist theocratic regime in the former United States that arose as a response to a fertility crisis.
Incredible
