Beth Breslaw had had enough of manslamming, and she wasn’t gonna take it anymore. Thinking that perhaps her friend’s results were skewed (surely this was an entitled-finance-dude thing and not an all-dude thing?), Breslaw decided to conduct her own experiment. Instead of automatically moving out of the way for people in her path, she would spend some time taking a more masculine approach to city living. She would stride confidently in whatever direction she chose, refusing to alter her route for anyone, male or female. I’m going to be the Frogger, and this person who’s rapidly approaching me is going to be the log, she told herself.
Breslaw had one key standard: “If they don’t make any indication that they’re cognizant of the fact that our bodies are impacting each other, if they don’t sway a little bit to the side or move their shoulder a little bit back,” then it counted as an instance of manslamming. The result? She spent most of November and all of December colliding with dozens of men, on sidewalks and in train stations and outside of cafés. On one particularly eventful instance in early January, every single man who came across her path on the stretch of narrow East Village sidewalk between the N train and her sister’s apartment smacked right into her, she says. It was like that for the whole experiment, wave after wave of men knocking into her with an elbow or a shoulder or a full-on body-check.
“I can remember every single man who moved out of the way, because there were so few,” Breslaw told me.
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