A series of GIFs featuring Hillary Clinton at Wednesday's Benghazi hearings have gone viral this week, after political columnist Zerlina Maxwell posted them as part of a humorous "how-to" guide to dealing with "mansplainers."
For the uninitiated, a mansplainer is a person -- typically a man -- who explains something condescendingly or patronizingly to a listener -- usually a woman -- who, in fact, does not require an explanation.
"Sometimes you don’t realize how #bawse somebody is, until you make it into a gif," explained Maxwell in a post on the blog Feministing. "So after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton smacked down the Senate and the House yesterday it occurred to me that what made it magical is that it is an instructional video on how to deal with a mansplainer. And of course, any good tutorial needs to be broken down into gifs for emphasis."
The 9-step GIF tutorial includes the following gems:
"Step 4: Raise your hands up like, 'What’s your point?' and clown the mansplainer for not having an actual relevant point"
"Step 5: When Senator John McCain calls you combative and proceeds to rant endlessly, nod with a sly smile."
"Step 8: When the rant continues on and on look at the mansplainer with a *blank stare* and put your hand on your chin like, 'Are you still talking?'"
For the full tutorial, check out the Feministing blog post here.
Since Maxwell published her mansplainer tutorial, droves of netizens have taken to Twitter to praise the funny list:
As might be expected, overall reactions to Clinton's appearance at the Libya hearing on Wednesday have been mixed.
While many, like Maxwell, lauded the Secretary of State for how she handled the day's proceedings, others -- particularly conservative commentators and others on the right -- criticized Clinton for being too "emotional" during her testimony.
“It was theatrics,” Tea Party Senator Ron Johnson said, according to MSNBC. “She didn’t want to answer questions so she makes a big show of it.”
Radio host Sean Hannity concurred.
“What you saw in this answer, this anger, this outrage, I can tell you was not spontaneous. I’m telling you it was staged, probably at the direction of the raging Cajun James Carville or somebody else,” Hannity said on his show.