Manspreaders, Get Lost!

It is the bane of many female subway riders. It is a scourge tracked on blogs and on Twitter. And it has a name almost as distasteful as the practice itself. It is manspreading,

the lay-it-all-out sitting style that more than a few men see as their inalienable underground right.

Now, passengers who consider such inelegant male posture as infringing on their sensibilities -not to mention their share of subway space -have a new ally: the metropolitan transportation authority .

Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men to share a little less of themselves in the city's ever-crowded subways cars. The targets of the campaign, those men who spread their legs wide into a sort of Vshaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats are not hard to find.Whether they will heed the new ads is another question.

Riding the F train from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a recent afternoon, Fabio Panceiro, 20, was unapologetic about sitting with his legs spread apart. “I'm not going to cross my legs like ladies do,“ he said.“I'm going to sit how I want to sit.“

And what if Panceiro, an administrative assistant from Los Angeles, saw posters on the train asking him to close his legs? “I'd just laugh at the ad and hope that someone graffitis over it,“ he said.

For Kelley Rae O'Donnell, an actress who confronts manspreaders and tweets their photos, her solitary shaming campaign now has the high-powered help of the transportation authority, whose ads will be plastered inside subway cars. “It drives me crazy ,“ she said of men who spread their legs. “I find myself glaring at them because it just seems so inconsiderate in this really crowded city .“

When O'Donnell, who lives in Brooklyn and is in her 30s, asks men to move, she said, they rarely seem chastened. “I usually get grumbling or a complete refusal.“ The new ads -aimed at curbing rude behavior like manspreading and wearing large backpacks on crowded trains -are set to go up in subways next month. They will all carry the slogan, `Courtesy Counts: Manners Make a Better Ride'.

One of the posters is likely to be especially welcome to women -as well as to men who frown on manspreading: `Dude... Stop the Spread, Please' reads the caption next to an image of riders forced to stand as a man nearby sits so that he takes up two seats.

The campaign is the latest in a long line of courtesythemed crusades by the authority going back to at least the 1940s. One such ad urged women annoyed by impolite male riders to `Hit Him Again Lady , We Don't Like Door-Blockers Either'. The new ads come as more riders are crowding onto subways than at any time in recent history . In 2014, the system logged as many as 6.1 million riders on a single day 

Source: NYT NEWS SERVICE