Offend In Every Way

There's a word on the net: "mansplain." If a woman is offended by something a man does, mansplaining is the man explaining to her that she shouldn't be offended.

I have mixed emotions about this concept. On the one hand, there have been a lot of egregious examples of guys trying to explain away some really obviously bad behaviour. But I'm not comfortable with blanket use of the term. That is to say, I have no doubt that most - if not all - of the incidents that have been labelled as mansplaining are just guys trying to excuse unacceptable behaviour, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will always be true that the explaining man is in the wrong. This disappoints me when - in the frenzy of condemnations against a man's offensive behaviour - some people take a more sweeping condemnation, thinking of the mansplainer as inherently wrong; this view implies that if a person is offended by something you've done, then you are obviously in the wrong, and you have no right to explain your way out of it.

Again I'm not defending individual mansplainers - all the examples I've seen of them are pretty pathetic - I'm just defending the concept.  But on the other side of the equation, there are a lot of people celebrating the very idea of not caring if you offend people. I saw this image of a Stephen Fry quote being passed around on Twitter

Most of the graphics depicting quotes by famous people that go around the Internet are wrong, so I looked this up at Wikiquote, and found out it is indeed genuine.  It comes from a discussion with Christopher Hitchens in 2005. Fry reiterated at the time that he does oppose laws that ban people from offending others. What's odd is that the article about the event cites the quote only after several paragraphs reporting on Fry's experience of looking for his Great-Grandfather's grave in a Jewish cemetery recently desecrated by anti-Semites. And Fry has worked for the acceptance of homosexuality and atheism, so he's hardly okay with people being offensive.  And that's the problem with this blanket defence of offensiveness: being against banning offensive behaviour doesn't mean that offending others is an admirable pursuit.  Or - to answer Fry's question at the end of his quote - if someone is offended by something you've done, then one or the other of you is acting unreasonably; it might be the offended person, but it might also be you.

The point is that both sides are wrong. Whether you think that offending people is always acceptable, or that it's never acceptable, you're wrong. And it doesn't take too much imagination to come up with counterexamples proving that you're wrong. By all means, continue to fight against extremists at both ends of the scale, but don't kid yourself that you're fighting for some absolute, inalienable right. Really, you're just one of many trying to find a reasonable middle ground.