Helen Smith:
As if NYC doesn’t have enough to worry about, a campaign is underway to curb manspreading:
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — If you take the subway, bus or train, you’ve probably seen men who take up more than just their seat.
As CBS2’s Vladimir Duthiers reported, the issues is now the focus of a new MTA campaign.
Sitting on a crowded subway can be a lesson in sharing. Each person is allotted 17.5 inches — the width of an average seat.
But for some, that’s simply not enough.
So what is “manspreading?”
“Manspreading is when men take up too much room on the subway by spreading their legs in a wide V. Like geese traveling,” explained actress Kelley Rae O’Donnell.
O’Donnell has become an anti-manspreading activist, making stopping the spread a personal mission.
“I guess you would call it subway shaming? It’s what my friends accuse me doing,” she said.
So, if it’s okay to subway shame men, is it okay to slut-shame women? Slut-shaming is “defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct.” So now men are attacked. Why is one form of sexism okay and the other not? And don’t give me the crap about the patriarchy. If you shame men in this way, you are a nasty sexist who deserves contempt.
The commenters to the manspread article seem to get this:
going commando would be even better. It is worse in Chicago and LA. In the early am on the buses in Chi., these persons spread out and sleep or spread their arms and read a paper of play with their I pad.
On the Dart trains in Dallas, people with their back packs or bums with that trash bags of goodies (I suspect they ride the trains around just to be out of the weather; whether or not they have a fare, I have no idea, but some suspicions) take up more than their fair share of room. There is an ethnicity that likes to get on the train and take up lots of space with a bag or just spreading out over multiple seats… and it is not specific to gender. I pick these places to sit, however and they never offer any resistance.