Proving Nothing

BuzzFeed had three women spend a week deliberately manspreading on the subway—taking up seats, being thoughtlessly inconsiderate—to demonstrate that men do this all the time. You watch waiting for the actual investigation, the thinking, and it never comes. It’s just three women being assholes on transit while someone films it.

The thing worth considering—how entitlement shapes movement through shared space, who takes up room without asking—gets buried under the performance. But you can’t investigate that by staging the behavior. That’s theater. That’s three people being deliberately rude to strangers to generate clicks.

What got to me was how the conclusion jumped from specific to universal. Three people being thoughtless, and suddenly that’s men. Prefix man- to any behavior you dislike and you’ve implicated a whole gender. But inconsiderate people are just inconsiderate. Gender doesn’t determine whether someone spreads across two seats. I’m not saying crowding isn’t real—I’m saying this video doesn’t actually address it. It just documents rudeness and calls it activism.

There’s real friction on transit. Real moments where someone else’s comfort costs you space. But that’s human behavior. And turning it into a week of filmed inconsideration doesn’t illuminate anything. We get outrage. We don’t get understanding.