By David Futrelle
So I recently ran across this perplexing little cartoon — apparently the English version of a Spanish-language original by cartoonist Mimundo Alex — on a MGTOW Facebook page.
I have a couple of questions:
- Why on earth is she demanding he give her his seat when it’s clear that most of the seats on the bus are empty?
- When the hell does this actually happen in real life?
I mean, I’m not a daily commuter, but I’ve been using public transportation fairly regularly for decades and I have never once seen a woman demand a seat on a bus or train “because I’m a woman.”
Here are some things I have seen:
- Men and women offering elderly people their seats.
- People pretending they don’t see the elderly person standing next to them so they won’t have to give up their seats.
- People offering seats to parents with small children.
- People pretending they don’t see the parents and their children.
- People offering seats to the disabled (or not offering them).
- People offering seats to very pregnant women (or not offering them).
- A creepy dude pressuring a much younger woman who was obviously having an extremely shitty day to move over so he could sit next to her, despite the fact that most of the seats on the train were empty.
- Kids on the tracks throwing rocks at the train I was on
- A store on fire
- A building being demolished imploding just as we passed by
- A guy with his hand stuck in the door of a T train in Boston getting briefly pulled along by the train until other commuters got the attention of the train operator.
- Former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis
- Street hustlers doing the old cups-and-ball routine (numerous times).
- A guy with his face mostly burned off by acid asking riders for money.
- A woman singing loudly and very badly along to music on her headphones while doing dance moves in her seat and refusing to stop after being confronted by other train passengers.
- Large groups of suburban Cubs fans acting like assholes.
These are just off the top of my head.
But I swear I’ve never seen women demand men give them their seats just because they’re women. Because this is simply not a thing, at least in the places where I have lived.
Why are so many men worked up about this thing that doesn’t happen?
It’s like their perpetual outrage about “women and children first” on ships from MRAs and other misogynists. Yes, it happened on the Titanic (though numerous upper class men got seats in lifeboats and many lower class women didn’t). But it’s never been a widespread policy; it would drastically slow down passengers trying to get to safety at a time when every second counts. I realize most people are regular passengers on ocean liners (and neither am I) but think for a minute about the emergency instructions you get every time you fly in a plane. Is there any mention of gender? No.
Why do these guys spend so much of their time railing against things that don’t actually happen? Possibly because the only way to make the case that men are more oppressed than women is to just plain make shit up?
I’ve spent many decades regularly using public transport (I still don’t have a car to this day) and, like everyone else above, I have never once seen a woman demand that a seat be given up to her just because she’s a woman and for no other reason.
And I suspect that if such a thing had ever happened, I’d have remembered it vividly, not least because it would be so unusual.
(Obviously, this doesn’t include visibly pregnant women, or women struggling with small children and associated paraphernalia, politely asking if someone might give up their seat, but I don’t think that’s what’s being talked about here.)
The most disturbing thing I ever saw on public transport happened to be on the New York City subway. A man ‘s eyeball was precariously hanging out of its eye socket. His eyeball was attached to its eye socket by the thinnest little bit of tissue.
I’d forgotten about that until now.
I’ve had men offer their seats. Usually Chicano or older Eastern European men, people who were raised to be courtly toward women.
And since I’m often on public transit these days with small children, more people will offer to let us sit, which is kind, and also practical.
When I was pregnant, it was a little awkward–I’m a big woman, and didn’t show much until very late in the pregnancy. I once took one of the ‘please yield’ seats that was free, and an older (non-teetery) man came on later, and said with a nasty smile, “Boy, I guess you’re sitting down! Must feel good!” I didn’t feel like showing my ultrasounds, and he didn’t say, you know, “May I have that seat if you don’t need it,” so I just smiled, and agreed.
But all the women I know would agree that expecting some dude give you his seat simply because you’re a woman and he’s a dude would be a truly dickish move.
Things I’ve seen on transit:
Men giving tired drivers endless shit for missing a stop, when the next stop is a block away
Men spreading into other people’s space
Men being loudly creepy to women
Men being quietly creepy to women
Men looking at me with lust, murder, or both in their eyes
Men being loudly racist
Men being loudly drunk
Men being so drunk they shat themselves and I had to get off the bus before I puked
Men threatening violence
Men threatening rape
Men smoking when it was clearly prohibited, and arguing with the driver when called out
Men cursing at each other
Men cursing at me
Men opening switchblades in front of my girlfriend and me, casually and without care, close enough to flood my body with adrenaline
Men yelling at “their girl”, and gripping her in ways I knew would leave bruises
Men complaining about not enough sex
Men complaining about “girl logic”
Men complaining about how they left a woman right as she was about to fuck them, because she turned to be a fan of the wrong baseball team
I’ve seen a woman make trouble on a bus just once. And she was clearly mentally ill, and kept it verbal and not particularly threatening. Every single other time it’s been men. And in a lot of ways I’ve been very privileged as far as exposure to male violence.
And these guys have the sheer nerve to complain about women being rude in buses.
Patriarchy… It’s a hell of a drug. 🙁
OT, but: the concern that the US is going full Nazi seems to be spreading beyond just WHTM and other sites that would probably be characterized as “far left”:
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/06/child-detention-camps-show-the-us-is-quite-far-down-the-line-of-fascism-amnesty.html
I think even NBC has now made a Nazi Germany comparison. So, reputable news and charity organizations are waking up.
I occasionally asked for a seat early enough in pregnancy that I wasn’t showing, because pregnancy drops my blood pressure to the 80/50 range and that makes me dizzy and faint. I always mentioned the pregnancy, but I guess if someone was obsessively watching from a distance it could look like I was asking for a seat for no reason. I didn’t exclusively ask men though; I asked whoever was nearby when I got dizzy.
In my experience, women were about twice as likely to offer me their seat when I was visibly pregnant. The exception was teenagers. All the teens who noticed me offered a seat.
Men seem to prefer offering me their seat when I’m not visibly pregnant and wearing a dress and heels.
@Surplus
Yeah, I saw a tweet of Michael Godwin of Godwin’s Law fame being shared around saying “Yeah, these dudes are pretty much Nazis.” It might have been in the context of Charlottesville though.
Either way, this has definitely caught people’s attention in a way that I don’t think the Trumpers expected.
OT, but I felt like sounding off, The Toronto Star continues to troll me by publishing codswallop like this: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2018/06/25/why-lindsay-shepherd-is-suing-wilfrid-laurier-university.html
The choice quote:
This is possibly the whitest thing I’ve seen anybody write since The Buttercream Gang.
Whoever this guy is, I’ve got three freakin’ words for you, man: Idle No More. Seriously, the aboriginal people in Canada go through the worst systemic prejudice Canada has internalized, routinely incarcerated, children placed in foster care, substance abuse issues ignored etc. Then when they grab the media spotlight the same way Lindsay Shepherd did, they were met with overwhelming racism and derision from even members of the mainstream press.
I guess this guy just wants them to keep languishing, but not complain about it. That’s reserved for blonde-haired white women who get in trouble for sucking at their job.
This reminds me of the bit from Watchmen where Rorschach is fantasizing about all the ‘corrupt’ people begging him to save them, because he longs to tell them, ‘no.’ The MGTOW are desperate for situations where women are demanding something of them, to make GTOW a real thing. It isn’t good enough to say they don’t need women, they must also pretend that their stand is an act of defiance. Women must be portrayed as demanding in order for the MGTOWs to feel satisfied.
@ pitshade
Yup; as has cropped up here before.
ETA: in fairness he’s looking good for 50 years later; that’s why you should always moisturise I guess.
Public Transport is pretty chill here, it seems.
Obviously never seen the MGTOW-non-scenario, though I was once almost assaulted by a very angry man (maybe in his late fifties?) who was shouting “Can’t you see I’m disabled?!?!?” which really wasn’t apparent, plus I had my back to him when he walked up. Anger issues aside, there was no telling!
Major pet peeve, people not moving to the back of the bus when it’s getting crowded. Like, come on people, we’re all in this together, let’s utilize the space we’ve got so that as many of us can get where we need to go, why is that so hard?
@Surplus to Requirements
I’ve certainly been doing my share of reading up on pre-Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler to power, and it all seems similar if not identical to the surge the Alt Right is experiencing.
Even the narrative they are using is exactly the same. I hadn’t read actual Nazi propaganda before, and I didn’t know that whole concept of “Cultural Marxism” is nothing more than the re-purposed version of “Cultural Bolshevism”. Or that those vapid accusations of “globalists” were the same in essence as Hitler’s accusations of the “International Jewry”.
As I was saying before, they need to be impeached straight away. At this point it’s only going to get worse from here on out.
I remember reading about a cat somewhere in the UK – Plymouth, I think – who liked to ride the public bus. In fact, I think the cat’s owner was annoyed by this odd habit. The cat would get on the bus, ride for awhile, then get off, miles away from its home.
Dormousing It:
I’ve heard a couple of stories like that, but usually the owners’ reaction was to have no idea their cat was doing this until they saw him/her on the news…..
Stories like that always shock me because Dracarys is such a little wimp. She gets nervous if someone comes over or walks across the driveway when she’s in the window. I can not imagine her getting on a bus.
Once I lost my car to an accident and was going without while I saved up, and I used the bus a bit – but I never made a dude move so I could sit down. The buses I took were mostly empty anyhow, but even if they’d been full up, I wouldn’t make anybody move. It’s called manners.
That’s why people giving up their seats to help others doesn’t bother me, either. But when men specifically give up their seats for women because they are women, it’s weirdly old-fashioned at best — and at worst, a harassment tactic, judging from the stories here about being some creeper’s target after he gives up his seat.
I’m glad I have a car. I can sing as obnoxiously loud and badly as I want, and no one gets upset. 🙂
The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on public transit was one time in Tokyo when a man rode a skateboard down the center aisle of a train. Other than that (and once getting robbed on an AC Transit bus in Oakland) my public transit experiences have been relatively boring.
Of course, the best thing to ever happen on a bus was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnLjRi_g9o
I’ve used public transport for decades. R and I do own a car now, but I don’t drive, plus we both work and it’s only one car, so I spend a fair bit of time on trains and buses.
I remember a guy repeatedly whacking himself on the top of his head on one bus, yelling (approximately) “Wah-bow!” over and over. To this day we use “wah-bow!” when someone is behaving oddly. And coming back on the train at night-time there are plenty of strange and disturbing things. I am sometimes grateful for the security detail, as a woman travelling alone (and a very tired woman at that).
There are all kinds of people who behave like assholes on public transport, and although I’ve never seen a woman demand a seat purely on the basis of her gender, I guess it’s not beyond the realms of possibility (and some people here have witnessed it).
I do love that this is all it takes for the kid in the cartoon to start thinking mgtow 🙂
I used to drive a bus and can confirm that this literally never happens. Ever.
I have (politely) threatened to kick a guy off unless he moved to the other side of the bus from the girl he wouldn’t leave alone when she’d told him to multiple times. I asked the Gideons to either stop handing out Bibles or get off once because I considered my passengers to be a captive audience. I (not-so-politely) threatened to call the cops on a dude who was hitting on me when I was working late around the fifth time he leaned in my bus without getting on at the same stop to talk to me. But a woman demanding a man’s seat for being a woman? Nope. Not a thing.
Add me to the list of people who haven’t seen women demanding bus seats because they’re women.
I’ve seen a woman yelling at a man who left a window open when she wanted it closed. He got mad in return, and the argument was bothering people, so I asked her if she wanted to change seats – my idea was to intervene in a non-escalating but “look, people are noticing you” way – and it worked in this case. She gave him a few angry looks, but stopped arguing.
Now, I’m sure I’m biased due to being an Evil Femoid: my thoughts about this were, “Well, she seems grumpy for whatever reason,” and not, “Aha! Part of an epidemic of women demanding things from men!”
Oh, and one thing that’s nice about buses here is that people line up at the stop instead of just bunching together. My former counselor told me this wasn’t usual in other cities, but I don’t know whether she meant within Canada or in the U.S. I’m skeptical of the myth that Canadians are politer than Americans, but something like this might be part of the origin story for that particular stereotype. Do people usually line up for buses in American cities? What about other continents?*
*If you’re in the UK, you might make a “queue,” not a line. 🙂
Oh, shoot, that reminds me of one of the worst times on the train.
Normally, when traveling with small children, if the layout of free seats is such that everybody can sit but you’ll be separated from one or more small children, people will jump up and offer to switch. You don’t need to ask, they offer. Except this one time, the only two free seats were separated by a man, let’s call him Mr. Douchey Entitled. I seat the four year old in one, Mr. D. Entitled doesn’t move over as I expect and, somewhat surprised in a low-key way, I ask if he minds moving over exactly one seat so I can sit next to my kid. “No, I’m sitting here.”
Um, wow, okay. So I sat down next to him. Immediately, my niece asked for an orange. I took one out of my bag, peeled it slightly, handed it over. She handed it back and asked for me to peel it a little more. I did, handed it over. She handed back the peel, bit by bit as she took it off. The guy in the middle never said a word. I never said a word, but inside I’m thinking “You know, this would never have happened if you’d just moved over a little like literally everybody else.” (And I do mean literally everybody else. I never, ever had this problem at any other time, even when the girls were as old as ten and eleven. People always offer to let you sit next to your kids if they can do this just by switching seats. Sometimes they’ll do it even if they have to stand, if the child is small enough.)
I know it seems relatively minor, and it probably is, but even now I look back and think: what a freaking asshole. Somehow, he tops the list, even before the guy who dumped his leftover chinese food outside the door, upside down and the guy I saw masturbating in another car of the train.
On manspreading: In the interest of scrupulous fairness, I feel I should point out that while women virtually never sit with their legs wide open, it is VERY common for two women sitting together to angle themselves so they sort of face each other, with the end result being that two women occupy three seats. Which is one thing when the bus/train is mostly empty (likewise with putting your bag on the seat, which people of all sexes/genders do) but when it crowds up – move! And lots of people oh-so-cleverly situate themselves on a four-person bench in such a way that they have a small buffer zone on either side, and then won’t move over when the bus/train gets crowded, meaning that only three people can sit down on that bench. Those people can drop dead.
How could you possibly forget that? I’m going to sit here and assume you’re making that up.
Like many here I’ve been a daily public transporter for years. The only time that bears any resemblance to the mgtow delusion was when a woman who had stood for a journey after I’d got on before and got a seat said to me in a sarcastic tone as we were getting off ‘well done on showing such good manners offering your seat’.
It was my first day at a new job and hilariously we walked to the same building. The rest of the day I was second guessing myself as to whether there was some obvious pointer that I should have offered my seat that I’d missed. I never saw that woman again though.
The entirety of my top 5 worst bus rides ever including drunk pukers, aggressive speed highs and annoying rude teens involved other men
The weirdest thing I ever saw on public transport was a guy who got on the train in Lyon, France, brandishing a pennywhistle. He yelled “JE SUIS FOU!” and proceeded to screech on the pennywhistle at top volume. Passengers scrambled for the next car, covering their ears. It was awesome to behold. I was almost disappointed when my stop came up.
OT
Ack! I still can’t edit my posts. The preceding post has a link that I hoped would be an actual photo. No such luck. But click through to see how Michelle Obama trolled Melania Trump’s stupid jacket.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michelle-obamas-stylist-pulls-a-pete-souza-and-brilliantly-trolls-melania-trump_us_5b30fa15e4b00295f15f23e1