Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining

Posted: November 20, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, psychology, self, self-determination |2 Comments

How Compensatory Verbosity Protects the Narrative Self

Write a skit where three expert men explain mansplaining as a form of left-brain self-protection.

ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)

Skit

Characters

• Daniel Dennett
• Paul Ricoeur
• Shaun Gallagher

Setting

A café that exists simultaneously in Paris and inside a cognitive neuroscience conference in Boston.

Scene 1: The Opening

Dennett: Gentlemen, I submit that mansplaining is a bug in the
narrative self’s operating system. Emotional ambiguity launches
ExplainEverything.exe.

Ricoeur: Or perhaps the bug appears when narrative becomes narcissistic. Monologue replaces dialogue; coherence replaces what I
call hermeneutical hospitality.

Gallagher: It starts in the body. Stress rises, breath tightens, and the left hemisphere grabs the mic. Fight, flight, or explain.

Scene 2: The Debate

Dennett: So it’s autonomic? Intellectual fight-or-flight?

Gallagher: Exactly.

Ricoeur: But also teleological. The speaker seeks redemption through
discourse, rescuing identity from insignificance.

Dennett: Redemption is too theological; the brain just patches
models.

Ricoeur: Even models long for meaning.

Gallagher: And you’re both doing it now.

Scene 3: The Meta-Moment

Dennett: Three men explaining mansplaining. Recursive philosophy at
its finest.

Ricoeur: A confession enacted.

Gallagher: Maybe we can feel it instead of describing it.

Dennett: Less “I think, therefore I am,” more “I listen, therefore
we are”?

Ricoeur: Beautiful. And yet—you did just mansplain empathy.

Scene 4: The Resolution

Dennett: If we could model that—

Gallagher: Daniel.

Ricoeur: Let the narrative rest.

The chalkboard reads: Integration begins when the story learns to stop talking.

Continued in Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy

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Appendix: Core Dynamics of Compensatory Verbosity and the Narrative Self

Explain the core dynamics in an appendix, with citations.

ChatGPT Prompt

A.1 Left-Brain Identity and the Narrative Self

The narrative self becomes
pathological when coherence and explanation turn into identity
requirements. See: Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.

A.2 Compensatory Verbosity as Self-Regulation

Linguistic overproduction becomes a self-soothing mechanism, aligning with Gazzaniga’s left-brain interpreterand McGilchrist’s hemispheric framework in The Master and His Emissary.

A.3 Mansplaining as Narrative Self Fragility

A compensatory performance triggered when narrative identity feels
threatened.
Related reading: Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind.
Also see: Kate Manne, Down Girl.

A.4 Neurophenomenology Under Threat

Emotional ambiguity creates interoceptive dysregulation, prompting
explanatory overreach.
Foundational sources:

• Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
• Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring

A.5 Dialogical Breakdown

Speech collapses inward, fracturing dialogue. Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative provides the background for narrative
ethics.

A.6 Toward Integration

Practices that reorient the self toward embodiment—stillness, attention, relational presence—restore balance.
Parallels:

• theological: kenosis
• philosophical: embodied cognition

Continued in Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy

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