And, most importantly, they know they are Not That Guy, so, there are what?

From the gay male perspective (I won't claim to speak for others), it doesn't take many That Guys to ruin things. Although I tend to find mansplaining (straightsplaining?) more in the media than in person. But even in the media, it only takes one willfully clueless person to ruin my day.

I wish I could even figure out how to read the comments on Jezebel now. I saw 3. Literally, 3 comments.

I have actually figured it out, but it is so annoying to me that I can hardly do it.

It takes all the frustrations I have with threaded message boards and compounds them with speed of posting. (I am not talking about threaded like here, I am talking about when each poster starts a thread every time they have a comment.)

I know those guys are still out there...but you don't have to be one to have bias or discriminate. Sometimes a straight-up sexist or ableist almost seems...well, not easier, obviously. They suck. But you don't have to spend as much time trying to get your allies on your side as when they're trying to be "helpful" or "realistic"

Consuela - that article is a thing of beauty.

my fried food is good, but like everything else I have eaten in the last four days, is upsetting my stomach.

I get what you're saying, erika. But like you said, you started out believing you could make a difference, that you could make it better. As I told a coworker the other day, I didn't bring a bad attitude to the party; I started out with a helpful hopeful happy attitude. My attitude went bad when I realized nothing was going to get better, and despite the rhetoric of "empowerment", nothing I did or said made any difference. Not to equate our experiences, of course. But your attitude isn't the *essential* problem, even if it might contribute to a specific problem.

What annoys me so much about people saying things like "but your bad attitude is what makes this so bad!" is that you cannot expect a person to always be cheerful and upbeat when things are hard. My bad attitude is a response, not a first-cause.

I am talking about when each poster starts a thread every time they have a comment.)

That drives me batshit.

My bad attitude is a response, not a first-cause.

Yes.

Cancer has not made me a cheery, stop-and-smell-the-roses person. Studies have shown that cheery and grumpy patients have the same survival rate.

Not exactly mansplaining, I don't think, but annoying as hell: at my old apartment in DC, you could watch the July 4th fireworks on the Mall from the roof. Usually, there were a few people in the building who had parties in their apartments, and then everyone from the party went up to the roof when it was time for the fireworks. One year, there was a guy clearly trying to hit on a girl. And his means of doing this was to try to impress her with his "knowledge" of fireworks. Each time a firework went off, he'd start saying, "Oh, that's a flash-spin type firework, usually green but this is one of the rare red ones, they use argon and potassium to create the color..." and so on, and it was glaringly obvious to everybody there that he was making all of this up as he went along, but he just kept right on going as if he were the world's expert in pyrotechnics.

I also remember once, I met a guy at some Jewish social thing, and he asked me what I did, and I told him that I was a grad student in math. He worked for some lobbying firm. (I don't remember what exactly he didn't, but it was nothing even vaguely science-related.) So, he told me about an article he'd seen in the NY Times recently about a new math discovery. I responded with something like, "Yeah, I read that article. It's actually a pretty interesting discovery, but the article summarized it really badly and had a bunch of errors. The actual cool thing about the discovery was ...." and then he kept interrupting me, to "correct" my information on mathematics, based on this one article that I'd already told him was wrong. Like, he just couldn't accept that I might know more about it than he did, even though this was my field and he probably hadn't taken any math courses past calculus.

(There are two NY Times reporters who I trust with math: Natalie Angier, and Gina Kolata. Articles about math stuff by just about any other reporter there tend to totally miss the point.)

just order more computer stuff from amazon for my office. $3.50 to the board! whoot!

Yeah, it's funny how me being bitchy or grumpy about institutional sexism is considered by some to be part of the problem. There are plenty of straight, white males who are plenty bitchy and/or grumpy, but I don't see them having their reproductive options legislatively curtailed or their income for doing the same work as women reduced (relative to women's) because of it.

If having a bad attitude led to oppression, there's plenty of online commenters who would be naked and starving in a sewer. Yet they never seem to lose internet access.