Why learn things the boring way when we can make them sound like gossip to keep them interesting?
One of my friends in high school once asked me to help him understand the Federalist and Democratic-Republican conflict for AP U.S. History. I explained it to him with stan Twitter wars as an example. He got an A.
The idea behind the trend “girlsplaining” has been present in women’s lives for a long time, but most recently, the internet has made the act viral.Â
Contrary to “mansplaining,” which is inherently sexist and condescending, “girlsplaining” focuses on keeping our tiny attention span and getting to the point in a quick and entertaining way. Urban Dictionary defines it as “when girls explain something to you with examples from your everyday life in order for you to understand.” Unknowingly, I’ve been girlsplaining all my life, turning anything slightly complicated, like stocks, into some celebrity analogy or scenes from TV shows.Â
TikTok jumped on the girlsplaining train earlier this year when multiple people made videos explaining difficult political or economic topics by relating them to high school drama analogies. Users @cryptidfaery and @girlsplain.inc were among the group of women that took to the social media platform to help people understand historical events such as the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. Beth (@girlsplain.inc) shared in one of her videos her text messages with her brother, who she said goes to Harvard University. In the messages, they simplified the conflict by calling Russia a toxic ex-boyfriend who had an abusive relationship with Ukraine and now is stalking them and won’t let them go.Â
Although this form of defining and simplifying topics can water down issues, as Russia and Ukraine’s current conflict is far more nuanced than a toxic relationship, it does help understand the basis of complicated ideas.
From personal experience, the act of “girlsplaining” is a fun one, and it can help you greatly. I use it to study. When a textbook gets too dense or a concept too convoluted, I channel an inner version of Kim Kardashian (don’t worry, we all have it inside us) and start turning my economics class into a reality TV drama. I understand my classes better and remember that demand falls for inferior goods when income increases the same way my friend dropped her bigoted ex-boyfriend when she realized how insulting his comments were – her intellectual income increased when she had that realization, and he is an inferior man.Â
The concept of “girlsplaining” is also a funny twist on its evil twin – “mansplaining.” Rebecca Solnit first explained the term in a column for the Los Angeles Times: “Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.” It is the action of a person, typically a man, who explains a subject to someone who already has some level of knowledge or expertise in and who clearly does not need any explanation. “Girlsplaining” challenges that toxic practice. We aim to turn the problem around and make it a solution.
Simple explanation is a solution to the bigger problem behind “mansplaining”: lack of knowledge. The reason so many women get upset when a man decides to explain something they already understand is that, a lot of the time, they don’t even explain it right. Like the guy at the football game who tried to tell me and my friends the purpose of the game was throwing the ball around, which is a simplification that takes away from the actual purpose of scoring touchdowns and field goals.
Kat Stoeffel wrote an article for The Cut about the difference of the “I don’t know gap” between women and men. “In studies, women are shown to hold themselves to a higher standard of expertise than men before providing an opinion on a subject, even though they do not, on average, know less about those subjects than men,” Stoeffel wrote.
We tend to turn to the shield of the “maybe” and the “I’m not sure” before making assumptions, and we try to get actual knowledge and expertise in a topic before trying to teach it. That is the magic of “girsplaining.” By simplifying complex ideas, we are not dumbing them down but rather learning enough about them before going forward with an explanation.
The best example I give myself and others about this art of knowing so much about a topic that you can summarize it in a few words is of my mom. When I was in seventh grade, I had to give a presentation for my health class explaining how human lungs worked. My mom, a chemical engineer and professor, told me about it in the simplest way she could. She called the diaphragm a balloon being inflated and deflated, and she acted as if the oxygen going into our blood was a man on his way to work. If I have any doubts about this method of explanation, they dissipate when I remember that, just like my friend after our discussion on the stan Twitter version of Alexander Hamilton, I got an A on my presentation.