Grant Turner
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

Good grief, I sure hope Medium doesn’t have to compensate you for this drivel VanSickle. Pointless, disingenuous, poorly argued and hyperbolic.

Given that you seem to be in agreement with the original articles author’s qualifier that the social phenomenon of manspreading is in fact rude: ‘None of this, to be clear, justifies guys being assholes on public transportation, where we all have to put up with a little discomfort to coexist.’ Why write the article in the first place? If you wrote it to show off a complete misunderstanding of the subject matter, you’ve succeeded!

Your cultural line of reasoning doesn’t make sense and regardless they can’t refute the biological reasons you freely acknowledge. You reference a study that says knees together sitting is not universal in any culture, which in no way undermines the point, tone or arguments of the original article, but only serves to undermine your own reasoning. People historically have done things that are uncomfortable for a bunch of reasons (who would ride a horse sidesaddle if not for modesty concerns or wear a neck tie or high heels if not for fashion). When man is free to sit as comfortably as he desires (at home or at the office) his individual preferences shine through. His normal seated posture becomes habitual and in the cases where he doesn’t have freedom of space, those habits are still a part of how he prefers to sit, regardless of how politely he takes up less space on the train.

You completely misuse Wolff’s Law. There is not a commute in the world that would undo the fact that many men’s hips are more comfortable spread, especially because those men will be spending most of their seated time spread. And if those hips are then trained through the many athletic training activities that would promote further knee spreading tendencies Wolff’s Law is then either moot or actually better explains why knees together sitting is uncomfortable for many men. The combined training effect and the time effect will result in lasting skeletal changes that would trump any forced time spent with knees together, meaning that there would be no adaptation in the way you want their to be. Any adaptation would be to the acetabulum promoting either cartilage loss or inflammation akin to arthritis and have very little to do with flexibility or bone changes.

To explain away biological determinism the way you did is laughable. In McGill’s field of expertise ‘the skeleton’ is destiny in many ways. Athletic success is determined by uniting biology, opportunities afforded by culture/society with timing. Neither nature or nurture are dominant, but if a weightlifter squats in a way that isn’t optimal for his biology he will perform poorer than possible and eventually end up injured. Finding a way to succeed with what you have been given is what Stu McGill proposes for his elite athletes or chronically pain’d clients. If someone has the freedom to sit in a way that acknowledges their individual needs, then great, do it and don’t apologize for it. A person with a Jockey’s build will have a really hard time playing NHL Hockey or being an Olympic medalist sprinter, regardless of how much he enjoys those sports. Same as a naturally spread hip, can’t just be forced into an uncomfortable position and magically change through Wolff’s Law.

Any insinuation that he is racist or bigoted is completely unfounded. There are plenty of cases where racially informed determinism (likelihoods of specific traits increase, but not to the level of certainty in many racial groups) of athletic success has been studied by legitimate academics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3874308/

This genetic distribution of some traits is statistically significant, what McGill and others do with these facts is what makes them either bigoted or not. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2008/12/white_men_cant_jump.html

But regardless of how poorly argued and ultimately pointless your article and thoughts are, the worst part about your work here is that you insinuated McGill into taking a side on a debate that he isn’t even aware existed: “McGill had never heard the term “manspreading” before we spoke, but he immediately thought of a context that explains how it relates to his work with elite strength athletes.” That you omitted this is disingenuous and lacks any semblance of integrity, journalistic/academic or otherwise. Shame on you and your biological anthropology professors for teaching you to reason and argue in the way you have here. Your assumption that you can speak with any authority on a discipline you’re not even tangentially informed on is unfortunate. I only hope that this doesn’t reflect the level of intellectual sophistication I can expect from your discipline as a whole.