Didn’t notice it was a woman at first, but isn’t it an appeal to authority? The fact that someone is an astronaut doesn’t mean they can’t also be a dumb fuck. Just look at Russians - Oleg Artemyev, Tereshkova, Rogozin. I’m not familiar with NASA astronauts but surely some of them were also complete idiots as well?
The guy is clearly “mansplaining” though.
Is there a gender neutral version of mansplaining?
Themsplaining?
This post made me realize mansplaining can happen to anyone.
But is he wrong?
Spontaneous boiling is the scientifically correct term, so, yes, he is wrong for correcting her.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q="spontaneous+boiling"
He’s obnoxious and uncalled for 🤷🏼♀️
But is he wrong? Isn’t mansplaining unless he’s wrong.
Do you think the girl is more or less of an asshole for calling someone a mansplainer when they aren’t?
He is, because spontaneous is, in fact, the correct term here.
But also, mansplaining just means that someone explains something to another person when it’s painfully obvious that the other person knows everything they’re explaining, often way better than the person who’s doing the explaining. Usually requires the over confidence that comes with unreflected privilege, such as being a man who subconsciously assumes that their gender gives them intellectual authority. Being wrong isn’t a requirement for mansplaining. This would be a textbook example even if he had left out the first sentence (the part where he’s wrong).
He is, because spontaneous is, in fact, the correct term here.
Aha. I didn’t know that
He’s obnoxious and uncalled for 🤷🏼♀️
Not an answer to my question. But ok.
People say the same thing to other men. Is it mansplaining then too?
Yeah, it is. The act of mansplaining isn’t gender specific. It is about the attempt to raise someone’s status above someone else by nitpicking what they said, with often obvious facts.
The men doing it to women just seem more popular, but men and women do it to anyone.
The fact that the boiling is not spontaneous is not obvious especially on account of how it’s not true. So that definition is going to need some tweaking. And anyway I think it’s much more likely that the person just didn’t notice they were replying to an astronaut than that they thought they could elevate their status. They were trying to share their (incorrect) knowledge.
I guess the question is who they were even talking to. Where they talking to the astronaut, or anyone reading their message. That would make a difference.
If I say: “When the sun rises…” and someone comes along to enlighten me about astronomy and how the sun doesn’t rise, that would be mansplaining and not correcting. If they talk to someone else because my words inspirerd them to think about this, then it wouldn’t.
Yeah, Men do it to each other all the time too. The sociological context when that happens makes it much less difficult to manage though, as there isn’t the cultural tendency to dismiss other men when they imply they have an understanding of a field that is perceived as typically male-exclusive (hard sciences, mechanics, etc.). It’s a term to describe a complicated and fairly important topic, that has unfortunately become a meme for people to rail against because it’s been characterized as a criticism of an entire group (men) and not as it’s intended (as a comment on a specific person’s behavior).
It also has an anti-intellectual aspect to it. People like to explain things, that’s sort of the whole idea behind science, is to be able to do that. Sometimes people try to explain things and they’re wrong. And that’s okay, it’s part of the process of science. Further, the notes of patronization are subjective and not everyone would agree they’re present here.
So to automatically label things like this as “mansplaining” makes a few unfair assumptions.
And there’s the issue with it being treated as a criticism of an entire group, and not as a comment on a single person’s behavior. There are obviously exceptions to behavioral norms, and as a result any interaction between humans is going to be uniquely contextual. But presenting the concept as a whole as anti-intellectual (or as is commonly done, as some kind of attack on the ability for an enthusiastic person to explain something they are passionate about) fundamentally mischaracterizes the concept. It is not an automatic label that is applied, it’s a description of a common and very complex negative behavior.
To explain something needlessly, pedantically or condescendingly and to someone (usually female) that is already versed or even an authority on the topic are the traits of ‘mansplaining’. What is happening in the OP, where someone is condescendingly and needlessly correcting a woman (who can be assumed to be aware of 3rd-grade level science like phase transitions given she is qualified to be an astronaut) on her use of a term (that was already a correct explanation) is the issue that makes it mansplaining.
You can be enthusiastic about a topic and share that knowledge all you want, nobody is saying “no don’t explain things to girls” (or whatever, I don’t think that’s what you’re claiming to be clear it’s just an example). They’re saying “don’t be rude to other people while explaining things, and this was a rude way to do that”.
Pet peeve
(This always comes up when discussing this topic: being autistic is not an excuse for being rude. It’s an explanation for non-typical behavior, and does merit and nearly always garner forgiveness for infractions of social norms, but you can still be a rude jerk even if you are autistic. You can also be a great, kind and understanding person if you are autistic. Autistic people are, fundamentally, people. People are a diverse group not defined by a singular aspect of their personality.)
Edit: Clarity
My biggest pet peeve with terms like “mansplaining” is that it does contain a real issue with some actual definition, but then it uses such a blunt and crude word that’s just plain besides the point of what it actually means.
If this was a term against women, feminists would be up in arms because the stupid terminology almost guarantees that it will be understood and used wrong.
Because fundamentally, the word itself is man+explaining, and it’s used just like that: Whenever a man explains something a woman doesn’t want to hear, it’s mansplaining. No matter who is the expert in the field.
In a prior job I was head of software development. I built the team, I built all the software, I worked on all the hardware we sold.
We hired a new marketing person. She had no prior experience, it was her first job in the field after returning from a long maternity break and before that she worked in an unrelated field. She put stuff into marketing material that was plain wrong. She listed features that we not only didn’t have, but that didn’t actually apply to the whole product category. When I pointed that out, she tried to shut it down with “Don’t mansplain”.
The concept behind “mansplaining” is real and it is a problem in some circumstances. But the term is toxic and needs to go.
(Similar story with the term “toxic masculinity”, which is often understood as “all masculinity is toxic”, not as “machismo”. This one really annoys me, since we already had a really good term, “machismo”.)
I agree - the term has reached a point where at this point it’s become little more than an alt-right dogwhistle. The phenomenon is real, and really extremely common, and a new term should absolutely be introduced so that discussion of the concept isn’t derailed by people constantly going “ugh it’s such an oppressive thing”. I doubt that new term would avoid the same thing happening, the alt-right does love to destroy the language of their enemies, but hey that brief time where it’s useful would be convenient as hell.
Side note:
(I wouldn’t normally point this out, but it’s beside the point. That you’re making a (literal, not dismissing you) semantic argument and the first sentence has a semantic error was too amusing not to point out.)
You are right that any term can be destroyed by the alt-right, that’s totally true (I mean they got the term “walkable city” to mean something like “apocalyptic ghetto” in their sphere), but I think that “mansplaining” (and to a slightly lesser degree “toxic masculinity”) were already dead on arrival.
Mansplaining is such a bad term, that it already doesn’t work without the alt-right touching it.
At least in German speaking counties (can’t speak for the rest of the world), feminism is known for being really particular with words used for/against women, because they know that words shape understanding. For the last 20 or so years we have had (and still have) a quite heated discussion about gender-correct language¹. But instead of applying the same scrutiny to terms used for men, these terms are just adopted without question.
I just want the same scrutiny to be applied for all terms. “Hysteria” is rightfully a word that dropped out of use, and so should “mansplaining” be.
Why not just use a gender-neutral word like “overexplaining” or just describe what’s the problem instead of using a fighting term that only causes pushback instead of actually helping people understand problematic behaviour?
¹ German is a gendered language, meaning almost every term has distinct male and female versions, and gender-correct language means that you use constructs that mention both genders. The reasoning is that using the generic masculinum (aka, use the male version if you don’t care about the gender) leads to people not considering women, so e.g. when you hear “Arzt” ( (male) doctor) it makes women working in that job invisible and shapes who wants to become a doctor. Similar with female-first terms like “Schwester” (which means “nurse” or “sister”).
Why not just use a gender-neutral word
Because it’s not a gender-neutral problem. In a non-gendered language, an explicitly gendered term is generally used for strong emphasis. I’m sorry, I just don’t know why insights about semantics in a gendered language are relevant in a discussion of a non-gendered language. It’s not that it’s not interesting, it is, I just don’t know how to address it within this context. (Does german have the word “mansplaining” too? Or like, a term to describe a similar concept? Maybe we can ‘borrow’ that one off you guys too, compound words are so dang handy sometimes…)
It wasn’t rude at all, it was one of the most neutral ways of “correcting” someone (in quotes because yes the correction was wrong) but it was basically “I think it’s actually X” which is about as non-aggressive as it can get.
The issue I take with it is not at all about group dynamics. Even if it’s one guy saying this to another, if someone is going to call that “mansplaining” I have an issue with it because it’s just explaining. Incorrectly, and maybe very slightly patronizingly (but only because the person being spoken to is a scientist and not because of the way it’s said), but still at its core simply explaining something they think is true. That is the core of scientific discourse and I don’t care what the genders are, giving it a stupid name and using that as an insult is antithetical to the open and curious exchange of information.
You seem to have a preconceived idea of what ‘mansplaining’ is and, in an effort to examine that, could you tell me why you think the term has achieved such widespread cultural use?
Why widespread? Well because it’s “punching up” and catchy and plays in to the traditional feminist narrative that women are oppressed in $WESTERN_COUNTRY particular in science even though women regularly outperform their male counterparts in terms of college grading and admissions. You’re basically asking why feminism is popular.
Wouldn’t it be natural that having existed as an idea for over 10 years I would have a preconceived notion of it?
Aaaaaand… there it is. Careful, your incel is showing.
I’m circumspectly asking what you believe are the driving forces behind feminism’s popularity, absolutely. To carry your allusion, the first step in understanding any software is to check it’s dependencies; as natural languages are just really messy formal languages, and by the transitive property of “I just made this up but it sounds good”, it holds that the first step to understanding someone’s statements is to examine the fundamental concepts they used to construct that statement.
To that end then, lets look at you holding some contempt for the idea of “punching up”. I doubt you intended that to be the takeaway, but it’s presented as the justification for an idea you have expressed strong disagreement to. If you held it was totally valid, there wouldn’t be much a conflict. So: why is it wrong to do in this case?
- Water in space boils, freezes or evaporates?
- Yes
Again, who’s recreating Twitter screenshots really badly, and why? There’s a person on Reddit with like five alts who’s been spamming these posts, and I’m so confused by it.
yeah this looks fake as fuck with the purpose of being inflammatory and divisive.
I’m pretty sure its crafted rage bait to get women angry at men and men angry at women. Its constant on reddit. The conversion is probably a decade old at this point if its even real in the first place.
This post literally has the watermark of the account that creates/posts these. Other people or bots are reposting them, sure, but they’re coming from some kind of aggregation account that has this particular style of recreating Twitter threads in a space that fits into the Instagram preference for square images.
He’s right tho, so…?
It says in textbooks that in a vacuum water will spontaneously boil so arguing that it’s not spontaneous is wrong.
It happens as pressure decreases but unlike conventional boiling where you can see nucleate boiling it can instead happen all at once without you adding heat to the system
Most importantly he’s trying to argue semantics with a person who is much smarter than him and then ends it with a condescending “simple thermo”.
You should look up the definition of boiling.
It isn’t that he’s wrong, it’s that his input was both unnecessary and irrelevant.
Also, spontaneity is fairly vague. At best he’s just arguing semantics
Large airplane flies overhead.
Wouldn’t say it flies. It just glides because a giant threw it
developing or occurring without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment
Pretty much the definition of spontaneous if you ask me.
Eh, it definitely has a cause. A known one. The fact water will boil isn’t spontaneous. “Spontaneous” still works for the sole reason which specific molecules is nigh impossible to predict.
So, who is correct depends entirely on the mental framing of what someone thinks of when they read “water”. Water as an abstract idea of a specific type of fluid? Not spontaneous. Water as in what will literally happen to the bottle of water in the picture? Spontaneous.
This post isn’t showcasing mansplaining. It’s showcasing pedantry. Nearly valid pedantry at that.
“Spontaneous” is actually the correct word to use here, using its definition in statistical mechanics.
Here’s an example: https://principlesofchemistryopencourse.pressbooks.tru.ca/chapter/5-6/
This should have been the correct answer to Kev, and not that thing about mansplaining.
I think would’ve even worked in a reference to “it is Kev’s turn to study statistical mechanics.”
Yes, I already said it is correct when viewing it as specific water boiling.
This post isn’t showcasing mansplaining. It’s showcasing pedantry.
Just like this comment!
Yes, that’s the point. I’m explaining a very pedantic point, ofc that requires ample amounts of pedantry.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Eh, it definitely has a cause. A known one.
Nothing to do with the physical definition of spontaneity. Spontaneity of a process just means that the ∆G is negative or total energy of the system is lower after the process, and additional energy isn’t required for the process to be thermodynamically allowed. This is, and I can’t stress this enough, the simplest of simple thermo.
for the sole reason which specific molecules is nigh impossible to predict
Also unrelated, but it is fully impossible to predict, since in trying to predict it well enough you reach quantum scales where everything is probabilistic. That doesn’t at all mean everything is spontaneous.
So, who is correct depends entirely on the mental framing of what someone thinks of when they read “water”.
Nope, the first person is strictly correct and the second is strictly incorrect, as described above.
Water as an abstract idea of a specific type of fluid? Not spontaneous.
Nope, exactly spontaneous. You could even forget about water entirely and model this just as a bunch of nuclei and electrons in a box and derive that the lowest energy state has them being in a gas of atoms, and the initial state doesn’t, which is enough to demonstrate by our earlier statements that boiling is spontaneous.
Water as in what will literally happen to the bottle of water in the picture?
This is “not even wrong” territory.
This post isn’t showcasing mansplaining.
It absolutely is. We will define mansplaining here as the confidently incorrect dismissal of statements of women by men where we suspect that the genders of the participants may play a role.
The first part has been demonstrated above. It is also reasonable to assume the second given that we observe this happening to women at a far greater frequency than to men. Although, like with atoms, we cannot prove that this individual instance is a direct result, it is consistent with the probabilistic data and we would need additional evidence to conclude that this particular guy just goes around wrongly correcting everyone equally.
Nearly valid pedantry at that.
Once again, not remotely.
Nah you just don’t understand language or pedantry.
I said it takes an autistic reading to come to the non-standard conclusion. I’m also not agreeing with the pedantry, hence “almost valid”.
I’m sorry you do not understand how autistic people misread things or jump to funky conclusions, but I am wholly correct and you just want to be an asshole.
You’re probably one of those people that perpetuates the mistreatment of autistic people for shit like this. Pathetic of you.
Lol
Spontaneous doesn’t mean “happens suddenly without explanation” what are you on about?
Everything has a cause.
Even your face
While you are technically correct, you also misunderstand who the target audience is and what language is required to actually make people understand.
When speaking to a normal person you don’t want to slap random jargon and care too much about precise definitions. So in that context spontaneous is a great word to describe what is happening. People without deep backgrounds in the field will not understand technical jargon and it will only make them not pay attention.
Spontaneous is actually the thermodynamic jargon in this case though :)
No, I’m explaining the pedantry, not agreeing with it. I said almost valid pedantry.
I’d still say it’s spontaneous because when you reduce pressure you’re removing a factor rather than adding one. It’s like saying “when you compress a spring and then remove the compression force, it will spontaneously return to its previous length.” Water vapor can be seen as water’s “natural” state when thero no pressure forcing it to be a liquid. Also saying “simple thermo” to an astronaut is definitely mansplaining, because it implies the other person doesn’t know that simple thermo. Maybe it’s just pedantry, but in that case damn that’s some terrible phrasing.
Hahaha, under that definition not spontaneous can ever occur
No, many things in chemistry are functionally spontaneous. That’s why her usage of the word is totally fine.
He’s just taking an autistic reading of the text as I’ve described already. He’s being a bit of a pedantic ass, sure, but mansplaining is not simply being an ass.
no
Yes. Pedantry doesn’t make the guy more correct. He’s still being an ass. I’m not agreeing with him. So the fact you still don’t understand is a bit… sad for you. Do you treat autistic people like shit because they don’t operate on social norms and the most common understandings of statements? If you say, “no”, then I’d suggest you introspect a LOT more, because the answer is clearly yes.
words have meanings. thats not what spontaneous means in this context. the definition of spontaneous in this context is independent of the nature of water. and i frankly don’t give a shit if you struggle with social norms. i care that the word has a meaning and you are abusing it.
It’s not an external cause. It boils on its own, because the molecules don’t want to be close together.
Pressure almost by definition is external influence…
There’s no pressure in space
You should be an astronaut
In addition to what MotoAsh said, it also has a definite external influence and a well defined force acting upon it. It boiled because it underwent a change in pressure.
Without apparent external influence. Relative pressure is something humans have a hard time judging. As well as it just exists everyone in that zone vice something easy to perceive, like a fire under a pot boiling water.
Idk man, my ears are pretty good at estimating quick relative pressure changes.
Also, were I in a spavesuit, I’d probably have trouble judging temperature changed as well.
I hope she brought enough tampons
For those who don’t get the joke:
Sally Ride, first female NASA astronaut to go to space: "I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?”
“No. That would not be the right number.”
I mean, the 10 ish day long mission that recently took 9 months happened, actually with a woman on board. If you said “100 is too much lol” and opted for 10, you’d be laughing out the other side of your face when you started having to improvise sanitation supplies after month three.
Except that 9 months took place on a space station. There were regular cargo missions to the station. And they could have been brought back at any nearly any point if necessary. Other astronauts literally went up and came back from the Station in that 9 months.
The timeframe being so long was almost entirely about the Starliner itself and what they were going to do with a known defective and potentially unusable spacecraft, where the only trained pilots were those astronauts, not anything with the astronauts themselves.
If the station wasn’t an option for whatever reason (despite it literally being part of the planned mission), then other contingencies would have been available or at least planned already. This wasn’t an Apollo 13 situation where not making it back was a serious concern.
There were regular cargo missions to the station.
I guess you’d run out of food before tampons without cargo shipments? Although if they are using error bars for the food, they might want to use simiar error bars for tampons too? 🤷
Yeah but drag would still rather have 100 tampons than no tampons in that situation.
To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they’d need to come down one way or another or just die in space.
♻️ Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. ♻️
Thanks. A little surprised by the current proportion of people that didn’t understood that reference.
It was almost half a century ago
Thanks, I was really hoping for a gut punch right about now
No problem, old timer.
Get off my lawn
To be fair, I have absolutely no idea how many tampons a woman would need either, although 10 per day seems high.
They last 4-8 hours. Most women bleed for 3-7 days. So on the outer edge, you could need 42. I’ve never gone through more than a box of 24 in a cycle. But the US hadn’t put a menstruating person in space before, who knew if being in space would somehow unleash a geyser of mysterious lady fluids never before seen by man.
To condemn NASA a little bit further: NASA engineering also insisted that Sally Ride absolutely had to have a flight makeup kit. They went to the trouble to design one and make sure everything would work in zero-g. It went up and came back down completely unopened.
I mean what do women do besides menstruate and look pretty??
who knew if being in space would somehow unleash a geyser of mysterious lady fluids never before seen by man.
Fetish unlocked…
“Spontaneous” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
It doesn’t take a lack of understanding of the word to arrive at the guy’s conclusion. It just takes an autistic reading of the word “water”. Water WILL boil in those conditions. Just like we don’t say water “spontaneously” boils when heated up in a kettle even though it’s the exact same thing happening.
So in the abstract, the guy is correct. Though, there is also a bottle of water in the picture, and when discussing which specific water will boil, it’s a guessing game, hence “spontaneous”. “Spontaneous” totally works for discussing the water in the picture.
One of the things that “spontaneous” doesn’t mean is “without cause”. Also, the astronaut doesn’t mention the water in the picture. She mentions water generally.
Like I said, it takes an autistic reading of the text.
“Autistic” doesn’t mean what you think it means. I’d characterize your use of the word as discriminatory and offensive.
No, you just don’t understand it yourself. Many social quirks and awkwardness is because of these sorts of abnormal thought patterns that make people arrive at weird conclusions. They are in fact, an important part of diagnosing autism vs scizophrenia and many other mental disorders, as in some situations, these weird conclusions can make someone seem pretty loony, or make them shut down socially when they realize they’ve misunderstood. So you being offended by this explanation just means you do not understand nor empathise with autistic people.
I’m not saying these are the only things that make someone autistic, or that all autistic people will have such peculiar trains of thought. Just that it is common in the realm of such disorders. Autism is a MASSIVE spectrum, because it describes symptoms, not causes.
So while this type of behavior might eventually get fully separated from autism in to things like social communication disorder, that’s more of a consequence of psychiatrists/etc slowly picking appart that massive umbrella of “autism”, not that it wasn’t or isn’t currently part of it.
This guy seems to think it’s equivalent to “by magic”.
It’s a pedantic take that makes sense and is fun. It relies on spontaneous having multiple meanings.
A spontaneous person randomly does weird things. A spontaneous occurring change happens without the environment promoting it.
There is no man’s planning. This is willful ignorance to enable a joke.
Edit: literally Kev M
I like to imagine replies are more often for future readers than for the OP.
