Some women are cunts too.

Yes, some women are fucking dreadful.

Oct 24, 2024

Q: What do you do when you're sent a late-night DM telling you how wrong you are?

A: You write about it on Substack, of course!

I like to be challenged. I’ll listen to a point of view and it’ll either make me reconsider, make me look into the subject deeper, or hold firm my opinion. The latter is what happened last night.

I rarely get involved with social media discussions—for all the obvious reasons but this week, I made the rookie mistake of engaging in a post about manspreading. Yes, I hate the term as much as you do, along with mansplaining, microaggressions and anything else that makes my arsehole momentarily wink. Alas, all these terms aptly express real-life things that happen to women. And I gotta say, manspreading is a lovely way to describe men who take up space.

“Manspreading: the practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport, adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat or seats.”

Before we get into the meat and potatoes (trust me, this gets meaty and potatoey), here’s a bit of background: the man sending me late-night DMs is a LinkedIn connection (well, he was, he’s since blocked me). We’ve chatted in the past but I don’t know him. My initial judgement was that he was too keen for my aloof sensibilities. When we first connected, he wanted to jump on a call—a let’s get to know each other thing that twats on LinkedIn seem to enjoy so much. I don’t do that shit. Anyone can get to know me in the comments, let’s spar there and maybe graduate to DMs if we hit it off. But hang on, he said he might have some jobs for me, hence the call, even though we’re in the same line of work. If he did have gigs available, he never told me about them. He messaged some time later about a possible collaboration but just as before, nothing came of it. And although I thought he was a flake with over-familiar tendencies—not in a creepy way just in an earnest way, I responded politely to his messages and even listened to his voice notes (Christ).

Anyway, back to the LinkedIn post about manspreading published by a woman I didn’t know from Adam Ant…

My former LinkedIn connection made a comment (which he has since deleted) about how women also manspread. It happened to him once on a train. His view: this isn’t a man thing (despite the name) women do it too. It’s just a matter of rudeness, not sex.

Walk away, Sarah. WALK AWAY!

Sadly, I did not, instead, I said something like “Women don’t generally sit with their legs wide apart. A woman may have done it to you but she’s the exception, not the rule.” That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to him, no one said he was telling fibs it’s just not something women often do. Women aren’t raised to sit with their legs spread, it’s impolite. Unless you’re having sex with a woman or watching her in porn, they don’t, generally speaking, sit with wide-open knees in public. Years of wearing skirts and being expected to make themselves smaller does that to a girl. Do SOME women do it? Sure, I cannot stress this enough, SOME women sit like that, I haven’t seen them but I am not about to negate this bloke’s experience, this isn’t a ‘does a bear shit in the woods if you can’t smell it’ kind of scenario.

I’ll tell you what else SOME women do:

Pull the legs off spiders
Lack empathy
Commit murder
Become sexual abusers
Kill their children
Become perpetrators of domestic violence
Groom, coerce, and manipulate

Women, like men, are complex human beings who are flawed, inconsiderate, and capable of acts so heinous we can’t imagine a woman could do them (there’s a connection here with the Madonna-whore complex, men viewing women as two dimensional—saints or sinners. Universally, women are regarded as caregivers first, so when they royally fuck up, women and men are shocked).

Women do manspread.

There I’ve said it. They also leave bags on chairs and in gangways. Yeah, SOME women are fucking ignorant. Men and women can and do share similar traits and yet, disproportionally men, more than women, murder, sexually abuse, kill their children, become perpetrators of domestic violence, groom, coerce, and manipulate—and manspread. Why isn’t this guy interested to know why that is? Why is he more concerned about the SOME women?

And let me tell you, he was VERY concerned about the SOME women. In the words of Vic and Bob, he wouldn’t let it lie.

Sadly, the comments section spilt over into my DMs very late last night—I know, I know, I should’ve ignored it, but I don’t sleep well and I wouldn’t have written this superb piece would I? My late-night LinkedIn manspreading mansplainer ruminated for an entire day then, come midnight, instead of turning into a pumpkin, he decided to rehash the same argument all over again.

Lucky me.

Hark, is that the LinkedIn message chime…

“Have you got past trauma involving a man or more than one man?”

Is it me or does that sound a bit like, are you on your period? I’m probably being hysterical but his inference here is that because I disagreed with him, I must’ve been abused by a man because my judgement is skewed.

He continued:

“There’s no judgement here, by the way. I’ll share my experience with you [his past trauma with a man] if you feel comfortable opening up to me.

Er, no thank you. I’d usually love to talk to an almost stranger about intimate details but it’s gone Horlicks o’clock and you should learn some fucking manners.

“…I think people who perpetuate ideas like that that have deep-rooted resentment of men, or something that represents men…”

Oh god, he’s reached for the psychobabble. Never in my life have I wanted a dick pic more.

This chap was coming at this all wrong. He was making a widespread issue my issue alone. These weren’t my ideas or the ideas of any one individual, women were sharing experiences and ones he openly minimised and trivialised. He repeatedly mentioned tarring all men with the same brush (yawn), or some variation. (#NotAllMen rides again.) He made the worn-out misstep of making this about him. He got defensive and dismissed the anecdotal evidence as not proper evidence. He demanded to know how many men I’d asked about womanspreading. There was an implication that as I didn’t have any stats, I was talking out of my arse. Then I had a thought, how many social media posts have I seen about womanspreading? I haven’t seen any, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist but they are practically unicorns, right? If womanspreading is as great an issue, wouldn’t we know more about it?

It’s rather spectacular how SOME men can miss the point so epically.

Manspreading isn’t about him—or me, it’s about the bigger picture. In one response to his barrage of messages, I asked if he would take such a view about racial inequality. As an example, I said: “Sorry pal [Black guy], you’ve got a chip on your shoulder because a white bloke must have hurt you or summat?” Unfortunately, he misunderstood that and thought I was referring to him as the person with a chip on his shoulder (we both got a little confused by this point).

I was told manspreading was nowhere near as serious as racism. As a single thing, I agree but the bigger picture of sexual inequality is.

However…

“Racism isn’t comparable to what this woman [the author of the post] faced by the way. That’s her not capable of being an adult and having a difficult conversation and looking for sympathy on LinkedIn… …you cannot compare that situation to racism or violence or anything of that nature.”

Do you know what can happen when women have “difficult” conversations with men?

Violence can happen.

Women carry out instant risk assessments. When they’re among strangers, they become acutely aware of their surroundings. Hypervigilance is their default state. If a guy gives zero fucks and confidently spreads his legs all over her seat, she knows if she says something, there’s a chance he might be rude/aggressive/drunk/follow her home/be a fucking mentalist carrying a knife. However unlikely those things are, there aren’t many women willing to take that risk because it only takes one arsehole to ruin/end your life. See, although most blokes are reasonable, the bad eggs don’t wear a fucking badge so every time you leave home, you’re unwittingly playing a game of Russian roulette.

I wasted so much time on this argument. I was in deep enough to miss an entire episode of The Son. (Pierce Brosnan how do you look that good in your mid-sixties?)

But nothing I said made things any clearer.

He was convinced the women commenting were projecting past trauma. (Or just sharing the millions of negative incidents they’ve had with men. Does that count?) Perhaps SOME individuals were projecting. It still doesn’t explain the ubiquity of men taking up space. (No, not the long and/or beefy guys that can’t help it but the wankstains with entitlement.) Here was just another man not listening to women—another man taking up space in my DMs, insisting his voice be heard—he was going to lecture me whether I wanted it or not. Sound familiar? This man, from the Not All Men fraternity, continued to miss the point while simultaneously proving mine. Just another guy encroaching on my time, expecting me to justify my position.

As we continued our back and forth, I was informed I was man-bashing.

“Using a term like manspreading is, by definition bashing man.”

Is it?

So if a Person of Colour experiences racism, however unintentional (because most whites aren’t aware of it due to unconscious bias/ignorance/refusal to learn) when that Person of Colour draws attention to it, does that mean they’re bashing whites? I’m not getting bent outta shape when Black people call us out on our bullshit. Or when a Black woman rightly brings up the hypocrisy of white feminism. We need to hear it. We need to GET IT.

‘Man bashing’ like ‘racism against whites’ is a misnomer. It all comes down to power imbalance. When one group dominates another, it is impossible to victimise or subjugate the oppressor. Yes, individual men can be victimised by women, even a minority of men can. The same goes for white people experiencing racism. Anywhere humans find themselves marginalised will inevitably experience oppression from the dominant group. But when we talk about sexual inequality, we’re talking about a systemic, millennia-old multi-pronged issue. Atypical experiences, although valid, aren’t the same thing.

This guy feels uncomfortable and that’s why he’s reacting this way but men should feel uncomfortable, it’s an uncomfortable reality and women are tired of considering men’s comfort above their own safety. I certainly wasn’t comfortable when I got all this crap in my inbox. And it’s just like a man to have the kind of unbridled overconfidence to hitch up into someone’s DMs, late on a Wednesday night, with zero consideration for the poor sod on the other end. He seemed to have no clue about boundaries or how combative he was, and like so many men, he didn’t get the message that I wanted him to stop. I continued to be ambushed by his ranty stream of consciousness. He even scoffed when I called him rude for ignoring my objections to his uninvited DMs:

“I don’t need an invite to start a conversation with someone 😂 anyone can come into my DMs or your DMs or whoever else’s.”

But he wasn’t starting a conversation he was continuing a discussion that was done and dusted—and one we didn’t agree on. I can’t imagine having the kind of entitlement that presumes private messages like that would be welcomed. Now I’m calmer, reading the messages back, it’s startling to see how condescending and arrogant he was, therapising his language to legitimise his shitty agenda.

“Just try to establish why you feel this way about men. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

He’s using the same, tried and true misogynistic tropes: calm down dear, you’re overreacting. It’s like a how-to guide on gaslighting.

Towards the end of the conversation, I realised he doesn’t believe women are marginalised, at least, not anymore. Can you imagine traversing the world, not only being that oblivious but refusing to acknowledge the issues when presented with them? He thinks this is about manspreading but you could swap it out with anything women face, the pay gap, the glass ceiling, street harassment—you name it, manspreading is one tentacle on a huge fucking octopus.

The guy is desperately trying to level the playing field by seeking validation for the time a woman invaded his space. He wants to be heard, not shot down in flames (politely told where he’s missing the point). Oh, the irony! He isn’t interested in learning about this stuff, he wants someone to soothe him. He wants all the women on that post to say yes, that woman was rude and he didn’t deserve it—yes, it was out of order—SOME women are cunts too.

Isn’t it wonderful that despite the negative impact of the patriarchy (on men and women), and the predatory shit women navigate—shit they blow off and take in their stride, they still manage to have deeply fulfilling relationships with men. Women aren’t idiots. They know it isn’t *all* men. They’re fully aware most men are considerate, sweet, and kind—with their own emotional clutter to deal with. I’m rooting for you fellas to just fucking get it, so we can finally move the fuck on.