Mansplaining in Song

Yesterday when I went shopping very early in the morning, a man in his early thirties was speedily walking through the shopping centre. As he glided past, I heard him singing in a beautiful high falsetto: 'Mansplain! Manspilaiiinnnn! MANSPLAAAIIIINNN!'

It was beautiful to hear, but also made me smile as I remembered the scene in the recent BBC series The Tourist. The rejected Australian fiancé, who has reformed his misogynistic ways and done a course in feminism, mansplains mansplaining to a hapless female victim.

It's one of those expressions that was just waiting to be invented, like coercive control. Suddenly, you see a clear vision of a behaviour that has been troubling you for many years. Where you thought there was a fault in your perception, the entire weight of anxiety and blame shifts from you to the perpetrator.

Funnily enough, some men still mansplain and obviously have never heard the term. I wonder if his partner had accused him of being a mansplainer, or if perhaps he'd been writing a song with a female artist and was trying out melodies before their session began. We will never know.