MTV, PhD, LOL

(Because a mind is a terrible thing.)

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Here’s a solid candidate for Oxymoron of the Year: MTV News.

That’s right – MTV, the ground-breaking video peddlers who’ve done more to destroy music in my lifetime than The Roseanne Barr Christmas Album, is now delivering “news” to any American mush-heads out there who aren’t busy thumb-typing.

And, bristling as they are with decades of rock-solid journalistic credentials, MTV recently unleashed – to whatever eight people actually get their news from MTV – a particularly vulgar little piece they called “2017 Resolutions for White Guys.”

Now, right up front, you might be picturing the national media outrage if a bunch of white guys were to publish “2017 Resolutions for Black Guys.” First of all, you’d never have heard of the piece, because no publication would run it. But your average white dude … especially a single guy … doesn’t feel a need to offer New Year’s resolutions to black guys, or anybody else. We really don’t care to advice or instruct on “how I think you ought to live,” because we don’t want anybody telling us. Besides, we’re too busy standing in the middle of the aisle at the grocery, trying to remember what was that other thing we were supposed to pick up.

According to the internet, the “news” video featured several young, nonwhite actors and a “fellow white guy” (see, now they’re legitimized), who spent the segment painting all white men as racist, clueless, and privileged.

I would have thought that declaring people racist simply due to their race, or gender, or religion, or college football affiliation was racist. But what do I know? I’m racist, clueless, and privileged.

After spending several painful hours trying to translate the MTV transcript into adult English, this appears to be the full list of dude-centric Caucasian-oriented resolutions:

  • Learn what mansplaining is and then stop doing it.

Yeah, that’s it. There was a much longer spattering of narrow-minded observations, but no other real directives or tactics, no resolutions. We’ll get to what mansplaining might be in a minute, here are some of the “observations,” just as delivered in the transcript:

“First off, try to recognize that America was never great for anyone who wasn’t a white guy,” a woman says in the video.

Take that, Oprah. Tiger. Taylor Swift. Condoleezza Rice. Barack Obama.

“Also, Blue Lives Matter isn’t a thing,” the white guy added.

Well, it’s hard to argue with timeless Churchill-like literary constructions like that. Nicely, like, done and stuff, white guy.

“We all love Beyonce and yeah, she’s black, so of course she cares about black issues,” a man says.

That throbbing you feel in your head right now is the effect of being hit with a medieval mace-shaped non sequitur.

And what was the point of the “though” in the very next observation, I’ll never know:

“Feel free to take Kanye West, though. You guys can have him,” a woman adds.
“You know what you did, Kanye,” the man replies.

No, not the vandalism charge. Not the battery or the grand theft beef. Not the beating up a reporter rap. You know what you did, Kanye. You met with Donald Trump and … worse … praised the president-elect.

It’s a good thing MTV doesn’t have the death penalty.

So what is mansplaining? According to Wikipedia, mansplaining is “to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.” In other words, “mansplaining” is behaving like Ralph Kramden every single night on The Honeymooners.

Here are some even tastier (aka, political incorrect) definitions of mansplaining, from the Urban Dictionary:

  • Stating verifiable facts that are inconvenient to the feminazi worldview
  • Telling a woman that she’s wrong, even when she actually is
  • A form of character assassination in circumstances where there is no other response except for a female to concede the loss of an argument

The term’s growing popularity has spawned other new ways to describe con condescension, like whitesplaining, rightsplaining, and Hillarysplaining.

MTV News, I’m afraid I’ve got a little news flash for you – I’m not sure us white guys are holding the sole mortgage on mansplaining. People have been condescendingly ‘splaining at other people since right around the time Eve proposed that infamous Apple Challenge.

But it’s okay. It’s not your fault. Nothing ever is. Here’s your participation trophy.

Happy New Year.

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