Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
New York’s MTA is about to mount a campaign against it. They’re debating the issue in Chicago. Even in polite Toronto, the issue—and the term—have, uh, spread widely. Manspreading first appeared, as far as I can tell, just three short months ago, on October 6, 2014, but it already garners 665,000 results on Google.
It’s a word that was begging to be coined. Manspreading refers, of course, to certain men’s habit of spreading their thighs in a wide V from the pelvis outward, often taking up two or even three seats on the bus or subway and crowding other passengers. For reasons that need no belaboring, women don’t tend to sit this way, so the identification by sex is evidence-based, but it also refers to the manly part of the anatomy to which the posture tends to call attention.
The complaint against manspreading, then, operates at two levels. One is simply the spread. As the blogger of One Bro, Two Seats notes in one caption, “He wasn’t even doing this before I tried to sit next to him.” Before it had a name, the manspreading phenomenon got its first wave of publicity in a long-running blog titled Men Taking up Too Much Space on the Train, a series of photographs with commentary by readers and the blogger, MTUTMSotT—who is clearly something of a language maven, judging by his “edit” of a comment:
Not only do you upload pictures of men without their permission (which [a not-only-but-also construction unfolding a parenthetical subordinate clause—looks like we have a pro on our hands], while legal [this is an interesting bid for credibility], is more disrespectful than spreading your legs a bit [an understatement that’s more convincing because it’s enfolded] on a train could ever be) but you also prove that third-wave [almost no one can correctly hyphenate a compound modifier—props for this] feminism [this is a bit elliptical, no? are you saying I should pursue a fourth wave or, like, refocus on universal suffrage?] is undoubtably [spelling] a joke with it [man, almost, but a prepositional phrase that repeats the subject at the end of the sentence definitely makes it looks like the structure you chose was a little much for you]. Out of all the problems in the world that this blog could have been about [“a blog” would have been a bit stronger here, since if it were focused on a different problem it wouldn’t be “this” blog], it became [in what sense did it “become”? I think you’re writing from an idea that bloggers start by opening the Tumblr template page then asking themselves what the main problem in the world is] a catalog of dudes spreading their legs while sitting [your prose is fine but its edge is a little dull, and in combination with your bitterness leaves me with a portrait of a person with intelligence who is unable to create—am I right?].
MTUTMSotT has also crafted from his readers’ comments a continuing “superpoem,” titled “Men Defending Their Balls,” that almost distracted me completely from writing this post.
But back to language, the second level of discussion. Manspreading follows in a tradition of various man- neologisms (manogisms?) that seem to have arisen in the wake of second-wave feminism and amid the demise of vexed customs like men’s rising to give the so-called weaker sex a seat. I’m thinking of man cave, man-pack, man-bag, man bun, man time, and ManZone, just for starters. The man spread, in this family of slang, awaits dude ownership. Which is undoubtedly why the MTA decided to take a bro approach to the problem with its “Dude … Stop the Spread, Please” signs.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The conservative website Breitbart, on the other hand, takes the Latinate high road to addressing the manspreading issue, which he sees not as a problem of men taking up too much space, but as “pathetic feminist pipsqueakery, the last dying gasp of a movement with nothing to win and nothing to say, determined to abuse and antagonise the male sex at all costs and for whatever perceived or outright imaginary infraction it can conjure from the vicissitudes of everyday life.”
The contributors to MTUTMSotT’s superpoem might have trouble finding common cause with the fey quality of Breitbart’s prose, which runs to pronouncements like “this otiose playground jihad against men” and complaints of “capacious handbags clogging the gangways.” In fact, Breitbart takes pains to remind us that he does not “frequent public transport,” so his position in the debate is purely ideological. But it seems he is trying to rescue The Spread, not just for louche dudes who brag about their private parts, but also for the nobler heroes of our species, whose secret sitting habits ought not be a matter for public talk—after all, “even in the dark bars of the London suburbs I trawled as a late teen looking for companionship, filled with desperate masculinity, I never saw such a comically absurd picture.”
Personally, I’m glad to hear that spreading your legs can now be deemed socially questionable for both sexes. I grant you, it may always mean something slightly different for men than it does for women. But an empty seat is an empty seat, neither male nor female. It awaits a nether region, not the side of a thigh.