They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but I find that nothing else is better suited to address white man's fear of being silenced than base derision. Because men - especially cisgender, heterosexual men from the middle class - still overwhelmingly dominated the public conversation all over the world.

Look at who gets to drive opinion just in Australia. Our commercial talkback stations are wall-to-wall white men, representing around 80 per cent of those people given the privilege of being paid enormous salaries to sit behind a microphone. Our federal, state and territory based governments are also mainly made up of white men, and this isn't only because the general populace has been conditioned to treat these male voices as naturally more authoritative, but also because pre-selection favours those privileged by white skin and male identities.

White men are less likely to be dismissed as stupid, ill-informed or operating 'with a politically correct agenda', which means they're more likely to consider their voices valuable and therefore to speak up without fear of ridicule or having their positions dismissed through the use of particularly gendered or racialised insults.

This is frustrating enough when considered as part of a general social construct, but it becomes especially galling when spaces and conversations that directly deal with oppression are whitewashed or dominated by 'mansplaining'. I've experienced this myself when delivering feminist lectures. Although the audiences to these things are predominantly made up of women, question time is always begun with the four or so men in the room popping their hands up before the microphones have even appeared. I once gave a lecture for the Wheeler Centre's lunchtime soapbox series, only to have an old white man stand up and interrupt me mid-sentence to disagree with my assertion that Julia Gillard had experienced sexism during her time as Prime Minister. Funnily enough, the topic of the lecture was how women's voices and contributions to society are seen as secondary to those of men. You just can't make that stuff up.

For a time, I indulged the men who came to hear me speak. I participated in that cringeworthy practice of thanking them for their attendance, as if the act of a man turning up to listen to a woman speak about her life was so monumental in its generosity that they required acknowledgement and applause. I was fair when it came to calling on people during question time, selecting the first person to raise their hand because I thought it was necessary to respect whatever order had presented itself. The fact that this person was almost always a man struck me as ironic, but I lacked the confidence and the sense of permission to be able to bypass them and give the microphone to a woman.