How A Man's Attempt To Mock Mansplainers Epically Backfired

Greg Hughes meant to make fun of mansplainers, not become their poster child.

On Thursday, Toronto writer Katie Cunningham , 24, tweeted about “mansplaining ” -- the phenomenon of men presuming that women basically don’t understand anything, and that it is their job to explain things.

Hughes , a 34-year-old Brit who lives and owns a publishing house in Bahrain , thought her tweet was funny, and decided to play along by sarcastically responding as if he were the ultimate clueless mansplainer.

Hughes told The Huffington Post that he assumed Cunningham realized he was kidding around. That’s why he was flattered when she tweeted a screenshot of their conversation with the caption, “I’m so sorry but this was truly perfect.”

“I initially thought she was saying it was perfect satire,” Hughes told HuffPost. “But then reading the comments below and her reaction to them I was dumbfounded.”

As it turns out, Cunningham didn’t know he was kidding, because his comments were nearly identical to completely sincere remarks she gets all the time.

“I get a lot of comments like that every day and I don't assume everyone is sarcastic, because many aren’t,” she told HuffPost.

Hughes contacted Cunningham to clear things up, but her tweet was already gaining momentum.

Her screenshot picked up thousands of retweets and coverage from multiple news sites. Mashable said Cunningham caught “a mansplainer in action,” and though some other sites acknowledged that Hughes says he was joking, they still characterized the exchange as Cunningham “trolling” Hughes or said that Hughes “fell” for her “trap.” And he said he’s still getting bombarded with messages from people “who genuinely think I was trying to explain the concept of deception to a woman.”

What Hughes figured was over-the-top satire was actually depressingly close to what many women experience on a daily basis. He told HuffPost he thought that using phrases like “my dear” or “that’s quite sophisticated stuff, well done!” would make it glaringly obvious he wasn’t being serious.

Nope.

“I get stuff like that sincerely all the time,” Cunningham said. “The whole tweet was about how often men condescend to me. I'm called ‘sweetheart,’ ‘young lady,’ ‘missy,’ in person all the time, even as a grown woman.”

Hughes said that since seeing some of the sexist remarks from people trying to “defend” him, he’s begun to understand why people would think he meant his comments seriously. Seeing that misogyny in action helped him realize why someone might not find his sarcastic comment so obviously outlandish after all. 

But both of them seem pretty OK with how things turned out. Cunningham has a fan in Hughes, who describes her as “quite funny.” And she’s just glad that her commentary on how many men treat women has got so much traction.

“If I’ve given women a tool to feel better about being constantly condescended to, then that’s a fun bonus,” she said. “If men check themselves before talking down to a woman, that’s cool, too.”