With legs wide apart: Why is everyone talking about menspredding
Dmitry Kurkin
Fight menspreding - that is, with the male habit of sitting with legs wide open in public transport - it has reached Russia, albeit in a somewhat dubious form. The action of the student Anna Dovgalyuk, who splashed the bleach on the trousers of the passengers of the St. Petersburg metro, was already called a play. We tell that it is necessary to know about the menspreding and about the fight against it.
Long before the word itself appeared, the menspreding in the cities began to fight: for one time, a passenger who had collapsed widely in a wagon or bus was called, for example, a "seathog" (literally: "town dwelling"). However, the habit turned out to be stronger than visual agitation. The action of the New York transport company (MTA), launched in November 2014, was completely different. The carrier, whose services are used by about eleven million passengers daily, decided to pay attention to the problem and placed posters with the words "Dude ... Stop spreading your legs, please," in subway cars and buses. At this point, menspreding as a concept was born and baptized: as early as next year, the neologism ended up in the Oxford Dictionary.
The example of MTA was followed by transport workers in other cities. Philadelphia slightly paraphrased the slogan on its posters: "Dude, this is rude ... Two places, really?" The Madrid Metro responded to the petition of Spanish feminists, which collected 11,500 signatures, and hung warning signs in the cars, such as those already in it, emphasizing in this way that this is not some special rule. In Barcelona, the campaign against Menspreding was wittily combined with the promotion of the new season of “Jessica Jones”. The whole movement unfolded in Toronto, where activists demanded to ban Menspredding at the legislative level - and met with opposition from anti-anti-spreading supporters.
Finally, in the spring of 2015 in the same New York, the word "Menspreding" was first heard in the courtroom: however, the arresting police officers were immediately accused of abuse of authority - the judge expressed doubt that at the moment of detention (at 1 am) two men of Hispanic descent could interfere with anyone. Most actively reacted social networks, users of which upload photos of passengers caught in menspreding. Under the distribution got even Tom Hanks - the actor explained his arrangement of legs by sitting in a half-empty carriage.
Under the distribution got even Tom Hanks - the actor explained his arrangement of legs by sitting in a half-empty carriage
Male rights activists appeal to the anatomical differences that really exist. The point, however, is not at all that the posture with legs crossed harms the testicles (if so, the lotus posture would hardly be used for meditation), but in the structure of the pelvic bones. In addition, it was worth the campaign against Menspreding to turn around for real, as the she-bagging counter-tag appeared on the Web, describing women who load empty seats with bags after abundant shopping: they say, remove the bags first, then we move our legs.
Some consider menspreding to be a fictitious “first world problem” and a manifestation of ersatz feminism, others criticize the term as sexist (strictly speaking, women can also be “menstruating” - this is not a question of physiology, but only habits and upbringing), others remind that disrespectful sitting in public transport is not limited to spread legs only.
Is it fair that the term acquired a gender coloring from the very beginning? According to Hunter College, men do come across the menspring five times more often than women, but this data hardly explains why people sit that way. There is an opinion that menspreding is a continuation of sexual instincts: spreading their legs, men consider that this pose makes them more attractive. The results of a study conducted by a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley even confirm that the posture really works as a sex bait - although this is unlikely to concern the subway car at rush hour. Defenders of equal rights remind that menspreding is not as harmless as it seems: it is a literal marker of "machismo" and manifestations of power in relations between men and women. A man is supposed to take up a lot of space, because he is in charge.
The rules of traditional etiquette require women to sit cross-legged, thus emphasizing modesty
The rules of traditional etiquette (for example, it still operates in the British royal family) prescribe women to sit with their legs crossed, thus emphasizing modesty - the echoes of these prescriptions have reached our days. Simply put, women are less likely to "menspredyat" also because they are often taught not to do so. And this is a perfect example of a ban (and its consequences), which is imposed only on one of the social groups and bypasses the other.
But, as often happens, public campaigns to fight menspreding quickly turned into a practice of public shaming, and critics are increasingly asking themselves: how ethical is it to post a photo of a stranger, calling for condemnation by the whole community?
The fake action of a Russian student illustrates well the possible costs of the “struggle”: to respond with aggression bordering on petty hooliganism on disrespectful behavior is an effective way to pay attention to the aggression itself rather than to the behavior. As practice shows, the rules of good tone are much better assimilated when they are imposed not by fines and not by splashing coloring substances, but by visual agitation and explanation of why a particular behavior interferes with people around. It seems quite natural that as urban life changes, the rules of behavior in public transport evolve, both official (for example, a ban on the transportation of cumbersome things in the metro, the dimensions of which exceed the established norms), and unofficial (telephone conversations in Tokyo). subway, though not prohibited, but are considered a great rudeness). In this sense, menspreding, by and large, is no different from other examples of disrespectful behavior, like the habit of not taking off a backpack when entering a car or bus.
Cover: Fear of God