NEW YORK CITY — Anti-manspreading crusaders aren’t taking the problem sitting down. They’ve launched a nationwide campaign to snuff out the rude male behavior—by training guys to sit with their ankles primly crossed.
“In etiquette classes, properly raised young ladies are taught to sit with their ankles crossed—never with their knees spread wide, which is of course quite vulgar,” explained retired etiquette instructor Clarice Bowdlake, who spent her 30-year career at a girls’ school for manners. “It is time we teach men to do the same. There is no reason why even the most uneducated man cannot learn to sit with the grace and decorum of Queen Elizabeth.”
There is an epidemic of manspreading on public transportation, experts say.
NEW YORK CITY — Manspreading is when a man sits with his knees spread brazenly apart, particularly on a bus or subway seat when doing so takes up extra space. The inconsiderate conduct has become a bane of female commuters, who complain that they end up either having to stand or sit squeezed uncomfortably to one side.
The training program is the brainchild of activist Courtney Featherstein, who has pushed through numerous ordinances regulating manspreading across the country. Her organization Close Your Legs has hired dozens of expert instructors like Bowdlake to lead classes in 20 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and D.C.
“Manspreading is more than just an affront to basic civility, it’s a primary symbol of male privilege,” Featherstein declared. “Men use it as a way to project dominance.”
Manspreading is used to communicate power, as in this case where two leaders vie to out-manspread each other.
The two-hour training sessions, which cost $140, don’t just cover sitting. Male enrolees are also shown the proper way to hold a teacup—one pinky extended—curtsey, avoid burping and other basics.
Many of the students are progressive men hoping to learn more sensitive behavior and earn points with their girlfriends. Others have been sent to the classes by forward-looking businesses that cough up the fee and give employees time off to attend. For now, participation is voluntary, but Featherstein hopes that one day soon, high schools will make such classes mandatory for all young males.
“I’d like to see it become as routine as taking a driver’s ed course,” she said.
American men need to be educated on the important issue, the activist revealed. Stunningly, many still don’t even know what manspreading is.
Admits Nick R., 35, of Bangor, Maine, “When I saw a headline with the word ‘manspreading’ in it last year, I thought it was some kind of new gay bedroom move, and I skipped the article.”
But ignorance and homophobia aren’t the only obstacles to stamping out manspreading. So-called “men’s rights” organizations have been whining that the whole movement is anti-male.
“I’d love to sit with my knees pressed together on a bus or subway, but we men have something between our legs we call testicles,” insisted Jerry Nogland, president of the Male Liberation Brigade. “These women are trying to create a society in which all men are effete wusses, like in that movie Zardoz. It’s not right.”
In the bizarre 1974 sci-fi film Zardoz, Sean Connery plays the last remaining masculine human on the planet.
Copyright C. Michael Forsyth
If you enjoyed this news satire by fiction writer C. Michael Forsyth, check out his collection of incredible stories, available on Kindle and in other eBook formats.
Following the gun massacre at a Texas church in which 26 worshippers were killed, Fox and Friends hostess Ainsley Earhardt commented that if she and her fellow Fox staffers were to be blown away in a mass shooting, “there’s no other place we would want to go other than church.”
The thought-provoking remark has led many Americans to ponder where they would prefer to be gunned down in an upcoming mass shooting. An informal survey yielded a wide range of locales.
Alison K., 38., of Greenwood, S.C., says she’d choose to meet the Grim Reaper while relaxing on a beach, listening to her playlist. Wayne T., 44, of Montgomery, Ala., would spend his final hours in the Playboy Mansion, surrounded by bosomy Playmates. Crafty, 26-year-old Sheryl N. of Boise, Idaho, picked a hospital, where trauma surgeons might be able to extract the bullets and revive her.
A GUN MASSACRE is preceded by a relaxing day in the beach in this scene from the movie American Assassin.
If you had your druthers, where would you be pumped full of lead by America’s next top gunner?
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The statues of 13 Confederate war heroes have come alive to seek revenge on the living, according to horrified paranormal investigators.
At least eight deaths and 36 sword and cannon injuries have been attributed to the golem-like figures, since their removal from public parks and town squares. The victims have primarily been liberal activists who had pushed for the removal of the controversial monuments, but the take-no-prisoners statues mow down anyone who stands in their way. Even an ice cream vendor was trampled to death when he inadvertently blocked the path of the mounted statue of General Robert E. Lee as the frightening figure galloped down the sidewalk.
“These entities are very, very angry,” said psychic researcher Ted Luebeck. ” We’re asking for the public’s help in tracking the statues down before they do more harm.”
Community organizer Margaret Fisling fell victim to a 102-year-old statue of General Stonewall Jackson as she was erecting an “Impeach Donald Trump” lawn sign outside her Charlotte home. Her husband Keith watched in helpless horror as the marble menace bore down on the 45-year-old woman, sword waving.
“First, we heard the eerie sound of ‘Dixie’ whistling over the wind,” said Fisling. “When we looked up we saw the statue, which we recognized from protest marches, charging straight us. I dove behind our garden gnome, but Maggie couldn’t get out of the way in time. Gen. Jackson’s horse knocked her down, then after about 50 feet, he turned around. He pointed his saber, galloped forward at full speed and sliced off her head off. It was like something out of a horror movie.”
Authorities were initially skeptical of the far-fetched story, until police discovered horse tracks on the scene and residue consistent with pigeon droppings.
Since May, scores of monuments honoring Confederate generals, as well as Jefferson Davis and the judge who ruled in favor of slavery in the Dredd Scott decision, have been removed from cities in North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and other states. While some have found new homes in museums, or as lawn ornaments for Civil War buffs, most have been shipped for temporary housing at warehouses. The 13 that sprang to life were all kept at the Old Times Warehouse and Antique Shop on the outskirts of Charlotte, according to investigator Luebeck.
REMOVAL of statues of Confederate greats like the beloved General Robert E. Lee has sparked a nationwide debate.
A statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became an organizer of the Klu Klux Klan after the war, was the first to go missing from the storage facility, on August 16.
“That morning, I was wheeling in the latest addition, some colonel who fought in the Battle of Bull Run, when I found the spot where the Forrest statue had been gathering dust for months was empty,” said warehouse employee Stan Beasby. “At first, we figured it had been stolen, but it was funny because that statue weighs over 3,500 pounds. Who would have thought these guys have been marching and riding straight out of here?”
Over the following several nights, the statues of other legendary soldiers went on the lam, as well as a bust of General P.G.T. Beauregard that’s believed to have hopped to freedom. Paranormal experts can’t explain how the statues, most chiseled out of solid stone or made of bronze, and have no joints, are moving about. However, they do have a theory about the supernatural mechanism that has animated them.
“The warehouse also holds old store mannequins, junk from amusement park haunted houses, and figures from a wax museum in New Orleans that shut down last year,” Luebeck revealed.
“Back in 1988, a group of college students carried out a ‘voodoo’ ceremony that briefly brought some of the wax figures alive for two days, including one of Lizzie Borden. There were several serious injuries before they were put down with a blowtorch. We believe it’s conceivable that the surviving wax figures somehow ‘infected’ the Confederate statues.”
STATUES rarely come to life outside of movies like the 1963 Ray Harryhausen classic “Jason and the Argonauts.”
While baffled police race to track down the missing monuments, dozens of self-proclaimed “monster hunters” have converged on the area to put a stop to the killing spree. But some proud southerners profess sympathy for the hard-charging symbols of the South. And they reject any connection between their idols and slavery or racism.
“It’s not a racial thing,” insisted Beau Castland of the organization Keep Your Yankee Hands Off Our Heritage. “The media doesn’t point this out, but only one of the victims was black. Four were white, two were Asian Americans and one was a visitor from Samoa.”
Copyright C. Michael Forsyth
If you enjoyed this mind-bending yarn by fiction writer C. Michael Forsyth, check out his collection of bizarre news, available on Kindle and in other eBook formats.
C. Michael Forsyth is the author of "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Harry Houdini in The Adventure of the Spook House,""The Blood of Titans," "Hour of the Beast" and "The Identity Thief." He is a Yale graduate and former senior writer for The Weekly World News
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