Talking about Men on Buses

Two days ago, overwhelmed by extreme public transport discomfort and everyday feminist rage, I made the following status update:

'Sitting on a bus completely contorting myself in order not to rub up against a man sitting next to me who is happily sprawling across twice as much seat as he needs. So angry. Gender is literally hurting me.'

And the internet exploded.

While a bunch of fellow Gender Studies students ‘liked’ my status and commented with tips for dealing with this behaviour, some men I love and respect got very, very upset with me. And this is not the first time.

I don’t think it is possible, or even desirable, to get everyone to agree on what it means to have gender and be in the world. If that were the aim Gender Studies would be more dogma than discussion, more application than analysis. It would impoverish our understanding of human diversity and experience and leave big holes in our mapping of the social.

But I think the disagreements in cases like these are of a different order. I think there are some underlying, first-principle misunderstandings that act like railway switches in these discussions, almost imperceptibly sending us off on different tracks. The recurring tensions look like debates, very often, however, we are  in two different conversations, barely talking to each other at all.

This is an attempt to explain two basic starting points for my feminist analysis of Men on Buses that might prevent conflict caused by misunderstanding. Since I think these starting points are common ones, I hope the discussion might prevent misunderstanding in other discussions too. Here goes:

One: ‘Gender’, a provisional definition

The first problem arises from confusion about what exactly ‘gender’ means. This is not surprising. These days I use the word in the context of my training in a complex body of theory that specialises in unpacking ‘gender’s different uses and observing how the languages and ideas associated with those uses are embedded in everyday life. So for me ‘gender’ is a complicated word with a complicated history, history I can no longer separate from my view of the world.

However unlike most academic language you don't have to be an expert to talk about ‘gender’. I hazard a guess that most of us don’t know what the word ‘copolymer’ means, for example, but we know we don’t, and probably think we don’t need to. By contrast, ‘gender’ has a busy extracurricular schedule, one that overlaps rather haphazardly with the work it does in academic debates. 'Gender' is a word with both specialised and everyday meanings- both of which are important. All of this means that we won’t be able to pin down a definition of ‘gender’ that works in all contexts. 

But I can tell you what I meant by it in that status. I used ‘gender’ to point towards a pattern of beliefs, behaviours and practices that differentiate ‘men’ from ‘women’ and ‘femininity’ from ‘masculinity’ (a pattern that has a complicated relationship to ‘male’ and ‘female’).

When you walk onto a bus and sit down next to someone do you notice whether they are a man or a woman? If you do (even if you later remind yourself that you know nothing about their biological status or their chosen identity) you have on some level noticed that there are recurring patterns of behaviour and practices that allow you to relatively reliably predict ‘man’ness and ‘woman’ness. It also means you have a patterned series of beliefs about what ‘men’ and ‘women’ act and look like that inform those predictions.

Two: Patterns Aren’t Rules

If gender is a pattern of beliefs, behaviours and practices that differentiate ‘men’ from ‘women’ and ‘femininity’ from ‘masculinity’, then what is a ‘pattern’?

Wiki says a pattern is ‘a discernible regularity in the world’ and that patterns ‘are often chaotic, never exactly repeating’. This is what I mean when I say gender is a pattern. Our beliefs about men and women, along with the behaviours and practices of men and women, have a discernible, if imperfect, regularity. If they didn’t you would never walk on to a bus and imagine that you know the gender of the person sitting next to you.

‘Pattern’, when used in this way, is not the same as ‘rule’. I really do believe that gender variation exists, and I really do believe that patterns can be changed. Indeed, for me being a feminist means noticing gender as a pattern, knowing it is not a rule, and insisting that pattern should change. This is partly because I believe that pattern tends to disadvantage women and the feminine, but mostly because the pattern creates limits that hurt us all.

In short: gender is a pattern, not a rule. I believe it is worth pointing the pattern out because I believe it can (and should) change.

Men on Buses (Revisited) 

I posted my status update because as I sat on the bus, contorting my body to accommodate the unnecessary sprawling of the man sitting next to me I recognised my experience as part of a gendered pattern. I recognised it because of tumblers like this, blogs like this, and articles like this one here. I also recognised it as part of a broader gendered pattern about how men and women tend to get taught to use their bodies in space, a pattern I have read about many times, but most memorably in the article ‘Throwing Like A Girl’ by Iris Marion Young.

I realised that I (and enough other girls to make it a pattern) have learnt to be very careful about extending my body into the space around me, very cautious about touching strange men on public transport, and very good at making my body seem as small as I possibly can (because small is thought to make girls polite and also beautiful).

I reflected on the fact that while individual men might learn about manners, and may think about taking up too much space on public transport as a manners issue, the man sitting next to me (along with enough other men to make it a pattern) probably wasn’t taught that it is dangerous to touch strange women you're sitting next to or that he will be thought of as unattractive or unmanly if he fails to contain his body politely.

I also reflected on the fact that physical size doesn’t seem to have any discernible correlation with sprawling or perching. I understand and have no problem with the fact that some bodies are bigger than others. The pattern I was observing was not one of different sized bodies, but of the radically different ways similarly sized bodies get used and moved.

So I thought about the fact that my back was developing a serious ache from the unreciprocated effort I was putting in to maintaining personal space and said to myself:
1) It hurts!
2) It is annoying that this individual is so oblivious…
3) but not suprising given the patterns mentioned above, so
4) really gender itself is implicated in this physical pain.

And then on Facebook I said, "Gender is hurting me!"

All of which is completely compatible with the existence of space-considerate men in the world. I know quite a few. It is also completely compatible with the existence of some women who are not. But neither of these qualifiers change the fact that there is a pattern (that is, a discernible, if imperfect, regularity) regarding the gender of those who sprawl and those who accommodatingly perch, and that that regularity corresponds to a set of beliefs we have about gender more broadly. Beliefs I happen to think are rotten to the core.

Let’s Talk 

I don’t for a second imagine that everyone will agree with me, but I hope now we are in a position to work out exactly why. Then we can have a real discussion. I will get you started. Perhaps you agree with me, but if you don’t

• Perhaps you don’t believe in gender as a pattern?
• Perhaps you do believe in gender as a pattern but believe that pattern is caused by a corresponding biological pattern that is unchangeable?
• Perhaps you do believe in gender as a pattern in general, but don’t believe in the particular pattern of gendered space-taking on buses?
• Perhaps you believe gendered patterns are a complicated mixture of biological and social factors and that in the case of Men on Buses biology is clearly implicated in a way that makes the gendered pattern inevitable (and perhaps not worth talking about)?
• Or perhaps you believe that gender is a pattern, and there is a gendered pattern to the distribution of space on buses, but you actually think women deserve less space because they are inferior to men in some way? 

If the last one is the case we have a much bigger problem (and if you plan on pretending you believe this you are a troll, please go away). But I think that most of the time the disagreement belongs to one of the other categories. Or perhaps to possible disagreements that I haven't mapped here?

In any case, let's talk.