I'm white/mostly hetero/male etc, and in real life I tend to piss off friends by insisting that "mansplaining" is a rotten concept (as but one example). They tend to continue inviting me, so i don't quite belief their intolerance to be quite as extreme as people make it out to be.

I find term to be so broad as to be useless. And, like the linked article, and like the litany of generic complaints about free speech on HN in the last few years, I tend to see it as convenient stand-in for people who know their opinions cannot be uttered in polite company.

Nobody gets cancelled for proving p!=np, or finding a new antibiotic, or coming up with a melody that is impossible not to sing along. So the shtick about conflating the (sometimes apocryphal) hardships of innovators in the Middle Ages with the bland low-level hate today's young adults come up with to compensate for their mediocracy is getting tiring.

You didn't really reply to my comment as much as to something I never said. I didn't claim that my friends were cancelling me (I don't tend to be friends with jerks), and I also don't think that we are at "you may not criticise the church"[0] levels of heresy being cried right now. It's the tendency I find worry ing.

[0]: obligatory disclaimer that the Galileo incident was at least as much about him deliberately pissing off the Church as about his scientific beliefs, which if I understand correctly you were allowed to express if you tried to be at least a bit subtle about them.

Mansplaining is not what people make it out to be. It is in extreme cases a bad thing but anytime a dude explains any type of concept to a woman they're pointed at and ridiculed as doing some mansplaining. And it is toxic in the sense that it makes some man, who would otherwise not have a patronizing attitude to women, not want to interact or convey any information to women. All this fingers pointing and exaggerating is a freaky thing.

But we as humans tend to see things from the prism of a late concept we just learned about and gauge it against various models in order to test its validity. The problem is that in this case it is not about being valid but about some sort of subjectivity.