Mansplaining

I can't remember having done this very often. Does this mean I'm a great guy, or that I have a lousy memory? The Rand Paul "Shh, shh!"-level of mansplaining condescension made me cringe, all the more so because Paul has been a couple of horrible mistakes away from the Republican nomination for President. I'm almost entirely sure I've never or almost never been that much of a pig.

(And why do we call it "being a pig" anyway? We eat pigs, and if that weren't enough, we constantly insult them, too. I have never had a close relationship with a pig like I have with dogs and cats, but I've read moving descriptions of human-pig friendships.)

(According to Stephen Berard's novel Capti, written mostly in Latin, the 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon developed such a friendship when he was old, and died of grief when he found out that his fellow monks, who disapproved of the friendship, had killed, butchered and cooked his friend and were eating him. I'm not sure whether that's an historical anecdote or something Berard made up.)

Women, girls: please speak up and speak out! I probably have mansplained now and then, and I apologize for that. Since it has been explained to me that mansplaining is a thing, I have tried to be more aware of it and to do it less.

It may well be that sometimes I have mansplained, but that I would have shut up if the woman or women or girl or girls to whom I was speaking had been a little more insistent, and fought a bit harder for the floor, as it were. Shouting matches aren't pretty, but they may be a temporary step up in human evolution over a man mansplaining while a women just goes quiet and wide-eyed.

And, of course, there's a possibility that I don't understand this issue at all, because I'm autistic, which means that I experience social interaction differently than do most people. If this entire post has been a complete waste of time for 99% of you, I certainly apologize.