bitch-media: While manspreading is a well-known issue on public transit, there are very few public transit agencies talking about it. In December, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority took the plunge and included manspreading in their “Courtesy Counts” campaign. Among a dozen messages targeting public transit do’s and don’ts installed on subway cars, one placard read, “Dude… Stop the Spread, Please.”All the media coverage on MTA’s efforts got me interested in what subway riders themselves were saying about manspreading. So few weeks after the MTA’s efforts made headlines, I filed a public records request through MuckRock.com for MTA emails containing the word “manspreading.” The transit agency sent me a file of 18 email comments about the campaign from over the course of one month.Of the 18 emails, nine of them called out the campaign for being sexist against men, anti-male, or contained gripes about how they ways women take up space are a far worse problem. The complaints range from the predictable to the offensive to the downright perplexing. A couple of them contained weird racial microaggressions (“Would the MTA also have a campaign ‘hey black folks, stop using the poles to do your dance routines?’ That would be racist by most counts, correct?” You’re correct. It would.) But from the worst of the worst we get a glimpse into the push-back a public agency gets when it dares to address issues around gender.

bitch-media:

While manspreading is a well-known issue on public transit, there are very few public transit agencies talking about it. In December, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority took the plunge and included manspreading in their “Courtesy Counts” campaign. Among a dozen messages targeting public transit do’s and don’ts installed on subway cars, one placard read, “Dude… Stop the Spread, Please.”

All the media coverage on MTA’s efforts got me interested in what subway riders themselves were saying about manspreading. So few weeks after the MTA’s efforts made headlines, I filed a public records request through MuckRock.com for MTA emails containing the word “manspreading.” The transit agency sent me a file of 18 email comments about the campaign from over the course of one month.

Of the 18 emails, nine of them called out the campaign for being sexist against men, anti-male, or contained gripes about how they ways women take up space are a far worse problem. The complaints range from the predictable to the offensive to the downright perplexing. A couple of them contained weird racial microaggressions (“Would the MTA also have a campaign ‘hey black folks, stop using the poles to do your dance routines?’ That would be racist by most counts, correct?” You’re correct. It would.) But from the worst of the worst we get a glimpse into the push-back a public agency gets when it dares to address issues around gender.