‘The View’: Whoopi Says ‘Gran-splaining’ Is ‘Propaganda’ to Enforce Idea ‘Women Are Not as Smart as They Think’

“Let me ‘splain something to you,” she said

Whoopi The View
The View

Whoopi Goldberg tends to be exasperated by many of the less political topics of discussion on “The View,” but on Tuesday, she called one of them outright “propaganda” when giving her thoughts on the matter.

The moment came at the end of the day’s episode, on the final Hot Topic, talking about how studies have shown that younger men overestimate their intelligence. But, according to a new study, Whoopi said, it was found that older women are also guilty of thinking they’re smarter than they are, and have a habit of “gran-splaining” things.

The word is, obviously, a play on “mansplain.” Except instead of a man explaining a topic to a woman (usually something she’s already very familiar with), it refers to — according to Urban Dictionary — “someone of an older generation (typically a Baby Boomer) condescendingly [explaining] why you are doing something wrong, even though they lack the shared experience necessary to equate theirs with yours.”

And, before she opened the discussion to the table, the moderator was quick to voice her dismay on the topic.

“Let me ‘splain something to you,” Whoopi said. “You know, I think this is propaganda that goes along with this idea that women are not as smart as they think they are, that we don’t know stuff. Listen, when you get to be Joy’s age, right, when you get to be my age, you know stuff!”

She added that, in her view, these two studies shouldn’t be correlated at any point, because they are polling two very different groups of people.

“Whether or not young men think they know everything, it’s of no consequence to us,” she said. “We know what we know! ‘Cause we lived it!”

Host Joy Behar agreed, citing Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of experience with something to become an expert at it. So, Behar joked, at an older age, you have “thousands and thousands of hours” of experience.

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