Men to avoid: The mansplainer, the sexpert, the patroniser

This story begins, as so many do these days, on Twitter. In May 2019, Nicole Tersigni, a US-based writer, logged on to the social-media platform at the end of a long day. She was tired and frazzled from looking after her eight-year-old daughter, who was at home sick at the time. "So I go online just to kind of scroll through Twitter and zone out for a little bit," she says, "and I see a dude explaining to a woman her own joke back to her – something that has happened to me many times."

Tersigni had let those kinds of irritating conversations go in the past, but this one sparked something in her. She Googled "woman surrounded by men" – "because that is what that moment feels like when you're online," she says – and stumbled upon a 17th-century oil painting by Jobst Harrich of a woman baring one breast in the middle of a scrum of bald men. She combined that image with the caption "Maybe if I take my tit out they will stop explaining my own joke back to me."

In another post Tersigni placed an 18th-century painting titled Conversation in a Park by Thomas Gainsborough next to the caption "You would be so much prettier if you smiled," turning what seems like a vignette of a man flirting with a woman into a laugh-out-loud scene.

She kept tweeting, and her posts went viral, garnering tens of thousands of likes and retweets, an indication that Tersigni had playfully captured everyday instances of misogyny that many women found uncomfortably familiar.

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“It just snowballed from there, because it was just so easy to consume and relate to and laugh about,” Tersigni says. Several men chimed in to explain her joke to her or point out that not all men do these things.

Within days an agent got in touch, suggesting she turn her tweets into a book. Two weeks later they were meeting with editors, Tersigni says, and struck a deal with Chronicle Books. "I remember I got it, looked at it and just cracked up," says Rebecca Hunt, the publisher's editorial director, who works on pop culture and humour books. "When it was time for me to share it with our editorial team I printed out a lot of the pages and spread them on the table. We all didn't even need to say anything: we were all just reading and laughing," she says. "That's how you know right away that something will resonate."

Just over a year after that first tweet, Tersigni's vision has leaped from social media to print, with Men to Avoid in Art and Life, which has just been published in the United States and appears on August 24th in Ireland. Each chapter of the coffee-table book, which brings together works of art and razor-sharp captions, explores the different types of men that Tersigni and many women encounter regularly. She describes five of them, with some examples from pop culture, here.

The mansplainer

“The mansplainer explains things in a condescending way,” Tersigni says. “Their thoughts are always unsolicited. Nobody is asking for them. One of my favourite jokes that I used in the thread and also in the book for the mansplainer is ‘Let me explain your lived experience.’”

The concern troll

Concern trolls approach women with a sense of worry about something they are saying or doing, but it isn’t sincere, Tersigni says. “They use their faux worry to undermine or criticise you.” Think Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, who feigns concern for Belle’s wellbeing when he sees her with a book (“It’s not right for a woman to read. Soon she starts getting ideas – and thinking!”). In the real world, Tersigni says, “They’ll say things like, ‘I agree with your point, but you shouldn’t use that tone or you’ll alienate your audience.’”

The comedian

The comedian is not just someone who tells jokes. He is the unfunny person who is convinced of his funniness, “but if you don’t laugh at his jokes, which are really tired, sexist, racist jokes, it’s because you just don’t understand comedy or you need to get a sense of humour,” Tersigni says.

"Todd Packer from The Office is a great example of this guy," she adds. (Packer's character, in the US version of the comedy, is based on Finchy from Ricky Gervais's original series, on the BBC.) "He tells the worst jokes and gets so mad when people don't like him that he gives them laxative cupcakes."

The sexpert

This is what you call the heterosexual man who believes he has all the answers when it comes to women and sex. “The sexpert thinks he knows your body better than you do,” Tersigni says. “They think they know what’s going on with you internally.

"Harry, from When Harry Met Sally, is a total sexpert," she adds, something that Meg Ryan's character, Sally, finds so annoying that it leads to her memorable performance at Katz's Deli in New York City.

The patroniser

A close relative of the concern troll, patronisers minimise women by harping on their (imagined) feelings. “The patroniser uses your emotions as weapons against you and makes you feel small, so that he can feel big,” Tersigni says. “That guy will say things like, ‘I can’t talk to you if you’re going to be hysterical,’ which is like nails-on-the-chalkboard annoying.” – New York Times