Is it ‘mansplaining’ or just how men communicate?

Comedian David Mitchell has called the term unfair, saying guys do it to each other as well. But Helen Coffey says it’s time they learned how to dialogue, rather than monologue

- Helen Coffey

I’m going to start with that much-maligned phrase of the 2010s before I take aim at male conversational skills: #notallmen. Not all men don’t know how to hold a proper conversation. Not all men spend the time when someone else is talking thinking about what they are going to say next. Not all men treat any time they're not talking as a mild annoyance before they are allowed to speak again. Not all men are ignorant of the fact that a dialogue should be just that – a two-way street, something that is constructed together, brick by brick, by dint of asking questions and actively listening to the other person instead of simply monologuing.

But if #notallmen, then #enoughmen have so little awareness of the above that it's prompted David Mitchell to take aim at another term popularised more than a decade ago: “mansplaining”. The comedian and Ludwig actor said that the portmanteau, historically used to describe a man patronisingly explaining something to a woman that she already knows, is “unfair”, as it’s simply how most men converse.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, he posited that men “do it to each other”, not just members of the opposite sex. “I feel there’s an unfairness to the term ‘mansplaining’, which is taken to be men explaining things in a boring way to women,” said Mitchell, “because they do it to each other and they take turns - that’s what men call a conversation.”

The word “mansplaining” was first coined in 2008, inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s essay and subsequent book,