Dream Log: Nervous Speechwriter in NYC

I dreamed that I was living in New York City --

-- and that I had joined a firm which wrote speeches and essays for non-commercial institutions. Sort of like ad-copy writing, but with less bad karma. I was given the assignment to write a speech on the history of an entity called The Lower East Side Women's Help Foundation. I was also assigned, in this case, to deliver the speech. I went into my boss' office and said that I had recently gotten into trouble for mansplaining, and that I was worried it might happen again on this project.

"Are you planning to explain their current day-to-day operations to them?" my boss asked.

"No, I'm planning to write about the history of the organization, as they've asked."

"Then I don't see a great risk of accidental mansplaining here," my boss said. "Look," she added, "I know these people. They're good people. You'll like them. They'll like you. Get out of my office."

Despite my boss' kind reassurance, and despite my research into the organization having shown me that I probably would like these people, the day of the speech came, and I was very nervous.

I was at the lectern of an auditorium on the ground floor of The Lower East Side Women's Help foundation. The auditorium was full of cheerful, well-dressed women. One of them knew me, and ran up to say hello. "I'm very nervous," I told her. "I've recently gotten into trouble because of mansplaining."

"Let me see what you got," she said, grabbed the pile of paper on which my speech was typed and paged through it. "Looks fine, she said. "Don't be afraid of these people. They're on your side. I truly think the worst that could happen is they'll notice you're nervous and they'll think it's cute. Believe me, they've sat through speeches much worse than that." And she gave me a reassuring punch to the shoulder and returned to her seat.

After a mercifully short introduction, I began my speech: "The Lower East Side Women's Help Foundation was formed in 1862, and was originally called New York City Ladies for Action." This fact caused a ripple of laughter among the audience, while some others looked around, seemingly wondering what was funny. I relaxed a bit, and continued: "Some women in New York had noticed that hospitals were being hard-pressed to treat all of the wounded Union soldiers in their care..." and then I woke up.

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.