Good afternoon Sean Lennon, progeny of John and Yoko. Do you have any opinions you’d like to share with us today? It can be anything!
Word? Go on, Sean. Tell us what you mean.
It’s not..fun…for…hmm okay you know what, we’ll just set that aside for right now.
The Twitter screed was apparently ignited by a spat with Elizabeth Le Fey, aka @Globelamp, a former member of the band Foxygen who says she was abused by the group’s frontman, Sam France. According to the Daily Dot:
The two have become publicly embattled after Le Fey called for a boycott of Desert Daze, a Joshua Tree festival she is legally barred from enjoying due to Foxygen’s participation. This was Lennon’s response:
There’s a lot going on here, but back to the issue at hand:
Lennon is not mansplaining’s first critic, of course. The word is believed to have spawned from a 2008 essay by Rebecca Solnit called “Men Explain Things to Me.” Solnit later clarified that “mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.” By then, though, it was too late. “Mansplaining” had been released to the masses; its destiny was out of Solnit’s hands.
Some of the word’s detractors seem to misunderstand what it actually means. Others raise thoughtful points, like this Guardian essay that argues that to reduce “specific physical, social and cultural traits are native to a particular gender” is harmfully essentializing.
In any case, it’s well after 3 p.m. and Lennon is still at it. At least we’ve learned one important lesson from all this.
