The Experiment That Proved Nothing

BuzzFeed—the site that convinced itself it was reinventing journalism by hiding three geopolitical news items inside a hundred listicles about which Friends character matches your dog’s personality—ran a manspreading experiment. Three women spent a week sitting as wide as possible on public transit to expose the allegedly universal male habit of spatial entitlement. They filmed it. They were proud of it.

The problem with the stunt is obvious the moment you think about it for longer than thirty seconds, which BuzzFeed reliably does not. Manspreading—to whatever extent it’s a real phenomenon and not a moral panic engineered to generate clicks—has an anatomical dimension. Men and women are built differently. This is not a controversial observation. It’s biology. Three women performing a caricature of male behavior to satirize male behavior is less an experiment than it is three people being deliberately obnoxious in public and calling it activism.

What bothers me most isn’t the stupidity of the premise. It’s the framing. Prefixing "man" onto a behavior—mansplaining, manspreading, whatever comes next—implies the behavior is definitional to the gender rather than the individual. It flattens a billion people into a monolithic social crime. If you did the same to any other group, the same outlets would correctly call it prejudice. Assholes exist at every point on the gender spectrum. The seat-hogging jerk on the subway is an asshole, not an ambassador for his chromosomes.

Feminism worth anything acknowledges this. The version BuzzFeed peddles doesn’t—because complexity doesn’t generate clicks, and nuance makes for terrible thumbnails. So we get performance art dressed up as journalism, contempt dressed up as critique, and everyone who calls it out gets labeled the problem. It’s a neat trick. It’s also corrosive to the actual cause.