Mansplaining Is Appropriation
And why I think you should buy a Funko Pop.
TW: Brief description of stalking and an inference of sexual assault.
I said we’d cover American mahjong this week, but I’m simply not up to being yelled at by a horde of white apologists who don’t understand appropriation — an inevitable outcome. Instead, we’re going to explore why posting that essay will be exhausting, celebrate women who are less easily exhausted than I am, and I’ll share some things I’ve learned about being a female expert in public. (Mostly, you need a Funko Pop, and I’ll tell you why.)
More than 120,000 people saw last week’s essay (“Artists Don’t Need Fewer Lawyers. They Need Better-Trained Ones”) on LinkedIn. One of those people explained my thesis back to me in a comment, restating my central claim as “his” contribution to the conversation. Just information I might find useful.
This person was, predictably, a man.
Kate Manne calls this phenomenon “epistemic entitlement.” Some men assume that they are “best positioned to authoritatively offer opinions on any topic under discussion, even if they know nothing about it.” These men assign themselves the role of “knower” or “teacher” with authority to issue explanations to women, even if the woman in front of them wrote the article, teaches the subject, or engages in the practice under discussion.1
When Rebecca Solnit met a man at a party who explained her own book to her (with great confidence, even though he hadn’t read it), she inspired women to coin a term we’d needed for centuries: mansplaining.2 Mansplaining is a condescending or patronizing explanation, typically by a man to a woman, given in a manner that assumes she knows less than he does.
I prefer a term from my deepest expertise: appropriation. Structurally, that’s all mansplaining is. A man takes a woman’s argument, strips it of its origin, and re-presents it as a general observation. The work remains, but the original author disappears. Credit attaches to whoever speaks most confidently.
Appropriators rarely take weak material. They take the best bit — the thesis, the killer hook, the compositional frame. The appropriator recognizes value; they just refused to acknowledge who created that value.
And they get really angry when you call them out.
My heart races when a man goes after me online. Not because I’m thin-skinned — I don’t care about LinkedIn Guy’s opinion. Intellectually, I know comments are just words on the screen, with no power to cause me real harm. Intellectually, I can name the mechanism, but my body doesn’t care about mechanisms.3 When LinkedIn Guy began ranting in ALL CAPS that I’m a know-it-all who lacks professional decorum, my body reacted: heart pounding, face flushing, jaw clenching, loss of feeling in my limbs.
Why am I so sensitive? Many years ago, I was stalked and assaulted. Afterward, my assailant explained that he chose me because I resembled women who had rejected him. He didn’t see me as a unique human being, but as a type. The qualities he noticed in me — which he shared in lavish and precise detail — added up to an embodiment he wanted to master and dominate. I embodied a type, so he felt entitled to hurt my body.
When a stranger trains hostile attention on me — whether in-person or online — my nervous system still runs its old calculations. The human brain’s threat detection doesn’t distinguish between parasocial threat and physical threat. For trauma survivors, the threshold is conditioned lower: our responses come faster, and our recovery takes longer. This is ordinary neuroscience, but this reaction is probably more common among women writing in public than we say out loud. Amnesty International found that among women who experienced online harassment, 55% suffered stress, anxiety, or panic attacks, and 61% had trouble sleeping. Thirty percent of women journalists self-censor on social media because of online abuse. Researchers call this the chilling effect.4 I call it the reason the mahjong piece can wait.
LinkedIn Guy wasn’t a rapist tracking my morning walks, but he didn’t seem to see me as anything but a type, either. When he engaged with my post, he wasn’t attacking me, but Women Who Know Things. I was just a representative of this phenomenon, which he apparently quite dislikes and sees fit to correct.5 Identical mechanism, different intensity: make her into an embodiment, then engage with the embodiment. The specific woman is never really part of the conversation.6
Specific Women
The mechanism I’ve been describing — target a specific woman, strip her of her specificity, engage with the constructed embodiment instead — is what I’m trying to resist every time I show up online. My role models for resistance are women who have learned to stay specific under pressure, to insist on being a particular person with a particular record, regardless of what someone else needs them to represent. They do this at very different scales. The scale matters for context, but doesn’t change the principle.
Jessica Valenti once woke up to a rape and death threat directed at her five-year-old daughter. “I should not have to fear for my kid’s safety because I write about feminism,” she wrote publicly — and then she went back to work. Valenti has written seven books, and her newsletter, Abortion, Every Day, is some of the most urgent journalism in production right now.
Tia Levings’ memoir of escape from Christian fundamentalism and church-sanctioned abuse is a New York Times bestseller. She names publicly what she survived, which means the people most threatened by her voice are the same people who hurt her. I’m lucky to know Tia offline, and she is one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Her second book, I Belong to Me, is out this spring.7
That’s the far end of the spectrum. My internet troll lives on the other end. Understanding the distance — between a death threat against a child and a mansplainer — keeps the thing proportional. It also clarifies that what Valenti and Levings are doing isn’t just courageous. It’s the evidence of a trained capacity: how to show up in the face of genuine danger and remain yourself, the specific person who wrote the specific book, survived the specific thing, and will keep doing the specific work.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a lauded sociologist, MacArthur fellow and, if you ask me, the smartest person alive. She has described her project as wanting “to show up and raise the hell at the precise right moment that might tip the scales in a way that will make something a little more clear, or a little bit more just, for people I care about.”8 Her work spans race, class, culture, and political economy — across academic journals, the New York Times, podcasts, whatever public space the moment requires — without being defined by any of them. She is, in her own terms, in something and not of it: both inside and outside at the same time, present in institutions that have always written about certain people without ever writing for them, fluent enough to be in the room but apart enough to see what others in the institution cannot. “Nobody likes that person,” she said recently. “Nobody inside likes that person, but everybody needs that person.”9
She has also said:
“I’ve been getting angry mail for many years now. It doesn’t quite bother me. I will say that the scale has changed. And postal mail actually does bother me just a little, because I just think of the effort that took.”10
A precise accounting of her own response to sustained hostility: a little bothered, but not stopped. This requires long-term vision and discipline: staying specific across years, through accumulated pressure, without hardening into defensiveness or softening into accommodation.
Eileen Gu is the most decorated female freestyle skier in history, with six Olympic medals. She’s studying quantum physics at Stanford. She’s also a professional model and one of the highest-paid female athletes in the world. At a press conference during the 2026 Milan Games, a reporter asked whether Gu viewed her results as “two silvers gained or two golds lost.”
She laughed into the microphone.
“I’m the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that’s an answer in and of itself. How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder, because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right? The two medals lost situation, to be quite frank with you, I think is kind of a ridiculous perspective to take. I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before, and so I think that is more than good enough.”
“But thank you.”
Gu rejected the premise, stated the facts, called the framing ridiculous, and closed the door. Polite, but final. The laugh is the part I keep returning to. Gu wasn’t threatened by the question; she found the gap between the premise and her actual record briefly, genuinely funny. That gap — the space between whatever someone is trying to make you into and who you actually are — I find true sovereignty in that space.
Meg Conley’s version of this is quiet, lovely, and persistent. Conley writes Pocket Observatory — an attention reclamation project about capitalism, care, and the home. She was a member of the LDS church for 35 years; the tradition explicitly assigned domestic labor to women as religious obligation and told her that she would be “a mother and a wife who should stay home with the kids.” She left the church in 2020, and has subsequently spent her career proving that domestic labor has economic value capitalism systematically denies. Meg writes with a rigorous precision and emotional clarity I find genuinely intimidating, but also admire with a force I can only call love. (Honestly, Meg is the reader I keep in my mind as I write here every week.)
When powerful forces try to silence her, Conley handles their hostility with grace and power. But what I love about her is yet more fundamental: she keeps writing from inside difficult things, not above them. Her insistence on remaining the specific person doing this specific work, even while battling breast cancer, is a staunch refusal to become anything smaller than the force she is. Meg makes me want to take up space.
When I want to close the laptop and disappear, I run a test: Would Meg do this? Would Meg be brave enough to say this out loud?
Always yes. And on chemo.
Protective Figures
When my nervous system kicks up, I think about these women — their bravery, their methods, the precise way they handle pushback. Turns out this is a totally normal and healthy thing to do if you’re recovering from trauma. EMDR therapists refer to models for action as “Protective Figures”: real or fictional individuals you install as internal resources, to inhabit when your threat signals fire.11 A Protective Figure can be anyone; they just need to represent qualities you can access and imitate. It feels wrong to pretend I’m Tressie, Tia, or Meg. They’re real people, after all, and I don’t want to engage in my own appropriation of their singular voices.
So that’s why I keep a Galadriel Funko Pop on my desk.
Galadriel isn’t as serene, ethereal, and passive as you might think. A vocal segment of the Lord of the Rings fanbase is notoriously anti-feminist, and their preferred version of Galadriel is the Jungian Anima wearing Cate Blanchett’s face. When Amazon’s The Rings of Power gave Galadriel back her author-granted personality — stubborn, sometimes wrong, full of ambition and prone to vengeance — this sector revolted.12 A woman confident in her convictions was “more otherworldly than a Balrog” to this crowd.
But Book Galadriel was born Nerwen: her birth name means man-maiden in Quenya, because she was “tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth.”13 Nerwen/Galadriel was the only woman to stand among the princes in the rebellion against a godlike authority, because she wanted “to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will.”14 She defied the god. She was exiled. She was offered a pardon and refused it (twice!) because “pride still moved her” and she wasn’t finished.15 By the Third Age (the era you’re familiar with if you’ve only seen the films), Galadriel is the most powerful being in every room she enters — rooms otherwise filled with men.
Starhawk, another author I deeply admire, distinguishes between forms of power. There is power-over — hierarchical, requiring subjects, working by domination. There is also power-from-within — inherent, self-generating, needing no one beneath it.16 When Galadriel refuses the One Ring, she’s not displaying submission; she’s demonstrating power-from-within.
The Ring offers Galadriel a trade: her power-from-within for power-over all of Middle-earth. She is compelled by the promise, but she knows what she would do with power-over: use it brilliantly and ruinously. Given the choice, Galadriel chooses specific power-from-within. “I pass the test,” she says. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”17 She asserts her inherent power as Galadriel, then takes a deep breath and returns to herself.
That’s what I’m going for when someone fucks with me.
What makes a Protective Figure work is specificity. This is not “someone brave”; that’s too generic. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s response to the angry mail — bothered, a little, but not stopped — is precise enough to retrieve under stress. Eileen Gu’s laugh before she’d finished processing the question is precise enough to retrieve under stress. Galadriel’s assertion of power-from-within is precise enough to retrieve under stress. You need someone whose specific method you can picture clearly enough to inhabit when hostility hits and your body is already bathed in stress chemicals.
My little Funko reminds me to embody Third Age Galadriel: eight thousand years old, measured, precise, and complete in myself.18 My composure is real because it was earned.
Once you’ve chosen your figure, follow the guide below.
A Little Guide for Being a Female Expert in Public
Before you respond, triage: Not every comment deserves engagement. The question isn’t whether you were wronged — you probably were. The question is: who is watching, and what do you want them to see? The answer determines how you will respond.
Know your type:
The mansplainer restates your thesis as information you might find useful. He gets one correction, precise and brief. Then you move on.
The bad-faith debater escalates with each round rather than engaging. He can be acknowledged once — give him an opportunity to participate in a real conversation. If he doesn’t play fair, move on.
The troll goes all caps and ad hominem. Block; don’t respond. You’re not just protecting yourself, but everyone else in your comments. Think of yourself as a good hostess who asks a mean drunk to leave her dinner party.
The legitimate dissenter engages with your actual argument. These are wonderful debate partners who will test your resolve — and strengthen it. Treat them with curiosity, respect, and kindness.
When you respond: State credentials once, factually, with no softening. “I hold a JD and a PhD in this area and wrote the piece you’re commenting on.” Make your substantive point. Stop. Name the dynamic once if warranted — “it seems like you’re trying to teach me something” is sufficient and complete. You don’t need to argue the case. Anger in response to being named is confirmation, not rebuttal. Do not recommend reading — a book recommendation implies a continuing relationship and invites another round. You are not being paid for this. Respond to one round. Round two is just unpaid labor.
Bear in mind: The response is for the audience watching, not the attacker. See yourself on a stage, engaging a debate opponent you’ll never convince, and focus on winning over the people watching the debate. Write what you want them to learn about how you operate. Set a civil example for participants in public discourse.
After: Leave his tantrum standing in the comments. Blocking is sovereignty, not retreat. Find a private channel for the aftermath. Your anger is valid and needs a place to go that’s not a public platform. If you do want to vent publicly (I sometimes do), know the difference between deliberate community processing and reactive rage.
What this is not: advice to be nicer, softer, or more strategic in ways that mean absorbing hostility. The goal is not harmony with the attacker — far from it. The goal is to be legible to your audience as someone unshakeable, precise, and in control of her own space.
Who are yours?
Who are the women you think of when you need to remember how this is supposed to go? Tell me about them below, and tell me what you’re learning from them. Let’s build a list.
Next week:
We really are going to talk about mahjongg/mahjong. If you’re a player and have time to chat, I’d love to talk! I don’t know this world intimately, and want to be as generous as I can. But my take is going to be far from generous at the rate my research is going.
Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (New York: Crown, 2020), chap. 8.
Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me,” TomDispatch, April 13, 2008. Solnit did not use the word mansplaining; her readers coined it from the essay.
Amnesty International, Toxic Twitter: A Toxic Place for Women (London: Amnesty International, 2018); Julie Posetti et al., The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists (Paris: UNESCO, 2021). Online hostility toward women functions as a structural mechanism to remove women from public discourse. The body already knows this.
The irony of making LinkedIn guy into a type is not lost on me. On the other hand, I am a type. I’m a card-carrying member of Women Who Know Things. And everything my assailant said about me was true — in fact, those qualities were what I liked most about myself.
Erik Santoro and Hazel Rose Markus, “Is Mansplaining Gendered? The Effects of Unsolicited, Generic, and Prescriptive Advice on U.S. Women,” Psychological Science 35, no. 12 (2024).
Find her at Tia Levings, Writer or TiaLevings.com
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Raising Really Good Hell for People Who Cannot,” Guernica, March 20, 2019.
“A Masterclass on Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom,” The Money with Katie Show, June 25, 2025. The ‘in something and not of it’ formulation emerges here in conversation with host Katie Gatti Tassin. I have listened to this episode at least 20 times. It’s formative.
Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Episode 105: A Conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom
Laurel Parnell, Attachment-Focused EMDR: Healing Relational Trauma (New York: Norton, 2013). The technique is “Nurturing and Protective Figures.” Fictional characters explicitly encouraged!
Elon Musk, Twitter, September 2022: “Tolkien is turning in his grave.” The review-bombing of Rings of Power on Rotten Tomatoes in its opening weekend was widely documented. See also Diep Tran, “In Rings of Power, Galadriel Is Finally Adding Some Feminism to The Lord of the Rings,” Primetimer, September 12, 2022. Finally, for the serious LOTR folk: I do not give a single fuck about that single letter from Tolkien to Lord Halsbury. Authors say all sorts of weird stuff to their friends. Furthermore, I see no conflict between female ambition and moral purity.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980). I have always liked this, ever since I was called a “fearsome Valkyrie” in middle school. By my school principal.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “Of the Flight of the Noldor,” in The Silmarillion.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,”
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), chap. 1. The distinction between power-over and power-from-within is foundational to her feminist theology and explicitly frames the book’s political analysis.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Book 2, Chapter 7, p. 358 in many editions.
See what I did there? Embody? That’s called re-appropriation.
epistemic entitlement, it's for real! I have colleagues who have tried to explain things about inheritance and investment law to me, like people I work with every day. I usually just respond by saying, "that's something I cover in class."
“strips it of its origin, and re-presents it as a general observation. The work remains, but the original author disappears. Credit attaches to whoever speaks most confidently. “ I appreciated this internal view of appropriation. Quite concise.
This is a great exercise. I’m going to make my list.