December 24, 2014--Fem-Phobia

It's not as if we don't have enough on our plates in New York City.

You know the list--the racial divide seems to be widening (or at the minimum is more starkly visible); the mayor and the police are barely talking to each other and when they do talk it's angry; the middle class is being squeezed out of the real estate market where every day there's a story about one billionaire or another buying, sight unseen, yet another $50 million condo; there are demonstrations in the streets nearly every night organized by the Occupy Wall Street folks or various coalitions of city dwellers who feel justice is not being dispensed equally.

I could go on.

But in the midst of this, there is another campaign underway that is also generating a lot of heat--the movement to get men seated on subways to be more discreet. Discreet and subways may be an oxymoron but nonetheless there does appear to be a growing awareness and disdain for guys who sit spread-eagled in a V-shaped slouch, in effect letting it all hang out, especially when there is an attractive women seated nearby or, better, across the aisle.

Things have gotten so out of hand, some claim, that there are organized groups mobilizing various forms of persuasion and humiliation in an attempt to raise men's consciousness (another oxymoron) so that they will sit more discreetly, even making room for weary straphangers.

As the newspaper of record, covering all the news that's fit to print, the New York Times on Sunday reported about this on the front page in an article with a wordplay tittle, "Dude, Close your Legs: M.T.A. Fights a Spreading Scourge."

The Times quotes one V-shaped sloucher who insists on sitting this way as saying, "I'm not going to cross my legs like ladies do. I'm going to sit the way I want to sit."

So there you have it--it's not so much sexual aggression but fem-phobia. Real guys don't want to be mistaken for women.

Making this a personal crusade, Brooklyn-based actress Kelley Rae O'Donnell confronts men sitting this way, also taking their pictures and Tweeting them in an effort to embarrass offenders. This far to not much effect, though she did get the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the New York Times to join her in paying attention to this growing phenomenon, including persuading the M.T.A. to plaster subway cars with posters calling on spreaders to man up. (See below.)

Some men have counter-argued that they need to sit that way for procreative reasons--if they cross their legs, they insist, this will so warm up their sperm as to render them infertile. I am not making this up.

But since this has become a public issue, let me assure these metro-sexual men who long to be fathers that there is no corroborating scientistic evidence that this is true. Dr. Marc Goldstien, director of reproductive medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, says that though testicular temperate may in fact be raised a degree or two if legs are kept crossed during a half-hour train ride, it would not be high enough to render sperm less frisky.

So there you have it--what we're fighting about these days in the Big Apple.

Be merry.