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Greg Bruce is a multimedia journalist with the New Zealand Herald OPINION A few days ago, I read a fascinating study in which University of Auckland psychology researcher Chelsea Pickens interviewed 31 single New Zealand men on the subject of masculinity. Her subjects were full of interesting and sometimes disturbing insights but the one that really stuck with me was this: “I presume you have some questions or points to keep the discussion on track? It’s quite easy to get side-tracked on this sort of thing, so you’ll have to make sure you capture information that you can actually use.” It took my breath away.

It was the apogee of mansplaining; absolutely unbeatable – mansplaining to someone who is literally studying (among other things) mansplaining. It was far from the only example. Another classic of the genre was the man who told her – a doctoral candidate in psychology – that, “Men present, women choose, that is actually that’s it, like you can find any number of psychological studies to back that one up”.



Of course you can’t find any number of studies to back it up, although you can find many that refute it, but the truth or falsity of the incorrect claim is beside the point. The point is that the situation was so ludicrous as to be comic: A man who had presumably once read a comment on Reddit felt qualified to explain psychology to a woman who was literally an expert in the field. I tried to imagine the inverse situation: an uninformed woman explai.

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