Mansplaining Manspreading

The Earth is getting warmer, people’s heads are getting cut off in the desert, women are still paid 75% as much as men for the same work, the police are murdering people, the NSA is collecting all of our communications, Republicans are pushing for yet another ill-advised war in the middle east, and another trade deal to send American jobs overseas is being fast-tracked through Congress, but none of that is getting half as much play in my Facebook feed as manspreading.

If you live outside the New York City area, you probably don’t know what manspreading is. Those of us in NYC didn’t know what it was until a few months ago, but it’s suddenly the hottest local topic since the Ebola doctor went bowling.

“Manspreading” is where someone takes up too much space on the subway by spreading their knees apart, and it’s created one of the dumbest online food fights I’ve ever seen.

The first problem here is with the term itself, which I object to on a purely linguistic level. It seems to be a variation on the term “mansplaining,” which is another social media meme that popped up not long before “manspreading.” “Mansplaining,” I have gathered, is where a man pedantically explains something. I’m not sure how condescension got to be the sole province of men, but on the other hand one could argue that this whole piece (indeed, all 200 entries on this blog) are examples of mansplaining, I won’t fight that part too hard. Being a man myself I’ve never been on the receiving end of a mansplanation, so maybe it’s more widespread and annoying than I realize. In any case, as an English major and Professional Writer I find the term distasteful just because it’s a clunky, made-up word. (I hate made-up words.)

“Manspreading” is even clunkier, and is not a variation on any other term — it’s just adding “man-” as a prefix to a verb. We don’t say “manfarting” or “manreading” or “mandrinking” (yet). The way things are going “man-” is going to end up like “-gate”: overused, annoying, and ultimately meaningless.

As for the act of manspreading itself, I certainly can’t fault anyone who’s finds themselves unable to sit on the train because someone is being inconsiderate and taking up too much space, and tries to draw attention to it. But I don’t quite understand why this is something that had to be genderized. There are all kinds of people who take up too much space on the train, for all kinds of reasons: people with baby strollers, people with bikes, people with luggage, people with upright basses, people who are just too big to fit in one seat no matter what they do with their legs. Dickheads who treat the bench seats on public transportation like their own personal La-Z-Boy are certainly part of this category, but they’re not the whole category.

4915brod
Et tu, Ferris?

I am not myself a manspreader, and I am not defending myself or anyone else who does it. I tend to cross my legs on the subway. (I have always been a leg-crosser. One of my clearest, earliest memories of humiliation was when the girl I liked in kindergarten, Gretchen, called me a girl for sitting with my legs crossed in music class.) If my choices are squeezing in between two people or standing, I’m more likely to just remain standing. I acknowledge that like most men I tend to take up more space than the average woman, because I am fifty pounds heavier and eight inches taller, and there’s nothing I can do with my legs to change that, but I do my best not to make it worse. I’m a goddamn hero, is what I’m saying.

Gothamist has taken a particular interest in this topic, with a series of hard-hitting articles and exposés. What the Washington Post was to Watergate, what Glenn Greenwald is to the surveillance state, Gothamist is to manspreading, publishing photos of men sitting with their legs spread wider than their shoulders and branding them with the scarlet M.

This is something I never noticed until everybody started posting Gothamist articles about it on Facebook, and since I’ve been made aware of it and have been looking for it… I still don’t really notice it, honestly. I mean, I see dudes sitting with their knees apart all the time; but they are almost always sitting with no one around them. The photos that supposedly prove the pervasiveness of this practice even show the same thing. I have never seen a photo of a manspreader manspreading on a crowded train — and I have been looking for one to use with this piece — because as anyone who’s ever been on a crowded NYC subway knows, you can’t even get your phone out of your pocket when the train is really crowded. Even if you could, your photo of that guy manspreading across the aisle would be blocked by all the people standing in the aisle.

Just like a goldfish grows to the size of his bowl, a person tends to take up as much subway space as they can. When you’re on an empty train, you’re going to spread out, put your bag on the seat, maybe even put your feet up on the other seat. Everyone does it, male and female. Our natural impulse is to make ourselves comfortable, and then (reluctantly) cede that comfort, little by little, as the train fills up. As long as you give up the extra space as soon as space gets dear, I don’t see the problem.

Anyway, don’t ever let anyone tell you that social media can’t effect change, because after a few months of relentless, Benghaziesque scrutiny the MTA actually posted a new series of notices on the trains reminding us of proper subway etiquette. To their credit they did not use the term “manspreading,” but they did begin with “Dude.” One step forward, two steps back, I guess.

Here’s where things really get ridiculous: the signs have now been up for a couple of months, and the whole stupid debate was refreshed when Bitch magazine posted (and everyone else linked to) a set of angry letters to the MTA from men who resent the supposed sexism in the new etiquette campaign, and if you are someone who likes to read comments sections for the over-the-top arguments about trivial matters, these are pretty tough to beat. There are men out there actually defending their right to keep their legs apart because there’s no other way to accommodate their huge nutsacks, which to me suggests a problem maybe best addressed by a physician.

I don’t see how turning this into an arms race to see who can exaggerate their side of the argument the most is going to help anyone, but like every other issue in 2015 America, that’s the way this is being litigated.  I can’t recall ever seeing anyone egregiously take up too much space and (this part is important) refuse to cede it when the train gets crowded, and turning this into a matter of feminism or male privilege, when it is just garden variety unisex selfishness, does little to affect positive change; it just makes both sides dig in their heels that much more. But at the same time, anyone who’s taking the time to write to the MTA to protest these perfectly innocuous signs and calling it “an attack on men” needs to seriously recalibrate their outrage meter and point it at something important, like exactly how Tom Brady likes his balls.

POP QUIZ:

Someone is taking up more space on the subway than they need, refusing to accommodate other passengers. This person is most likely a:

a) man
b) woman
c) asshole

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