"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 pushback a public agency gets when it dares to address issues around gender...
Women are no stranger to having our behavior policed. Sometimes it can seem like “sorry” is built into the beginning of any comment we have, as if we have to feel regret for thinking anything at all. In public space, that apology is translated into shrunken bodies, with legs crossed and hands folded in our laps. We constantly feel the pressure to make ourselves smaller (whatever that means). Men are encouraged to take up more space, physically and conversationally. So when even the most innocuous PSA asks them to address their spatial privilege, the response is to excuse their behavior by trying to erase gender from their offense and by pointing out ways that women have made similar offenses...
He actually raises another question about the politics of manspreading: Where do we figure the ethics of public shaming in all this? The inclusion of manspreading in the MTA’s campaign was very likely due to a cultural climate surrounding a blog that takes and posts pictures of strangers without their consent. What do we do with that?"
http://bitchmagazine.org/emails-from-mta-manspreading-campaign-sexist
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