There’s rude and then there’s this
‘Why does it matter to you? Do you own the subway?’ he says. ‘No! Do you?’ she responds. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Then how can you do whatever you want?’ she asks. ‘Is there a rule on this train that says I can’t put my foot on the seat right now?’ he asks. ‘There are lots of social rules,’ she retorts.
Let’s just start here: If you think someone is being rude — a stranger, who is otherwise keeping to themselves — and your method of attempting to teach them to be more courteous involves physically assaulting them, by sitting on them, say, then something has gone horribly wrong in your own etiquette lessons.
Perhaps by now you’ve seen the video that is circulating, causing much conversation, which shows an incident on a Toronto subway car. In it, a middle-aged woman, upset that a young man has propped his feet on the edge of a seat in an apparently mostly empty subway car, sits on his feet. He asks her repeatedly to get off of him. “I’m sorry, I can’t,” she says. He insults and swears at her. “I’m trying to explain to you that your feet shouldn’t be on the seat,” she says. “There are lots of social rules,” she says. “We’re a society. We all have to live together,” she says. Eventually the young man pushes her off — fairly gently, as pushes go — and she pushes the emergency alarm, and they continue to bicker as they wait for security.
This video shows an escalating cavalcade of petty incivility, both parties pointlessly piling one bit of misbehaviour atop another. There’s lots of evidence here of the kinds of things people do when they’re being jerks, if that’s what you’re looking for.
But to my astonishment, much of the reaction to this video as it’s gone viral — even here in my own office — involves celebrating the woman’s petulant stand in defence of seat integrity. As if she is some kind of propriety Charles Bronson, a subway bylaw vigilante scouring the underground looking for minor breaches of etiquette in order to teach the punks a lesson.
The impulse to teach some manners in a public venue is just one incivility piled atop another
They cheer her on, vicariously sticking it to every manspreader, bag-seater and loud-music listener who has made them mildly uncomfortable on transit at some point. “He shouldn’t have his feet on the seat! He deserves whatever he gets!”
This is warped. The lady in the video is out of line — more so than the young man (who is also out of line). And to understand why, we don’t even need to dip into the racial politics of a situation in which a middle-aged white woman asserts herself through physical domination to teach a young black man an unsolicited lesson in respect, and then summons authorities as the aggrieved party when he resists her corporal instruction.
More basic than those thorny social dynamics is the very basic rule that you should never put your body on top of someone else’s without their permission. There are very few exceptions to this rule. Certainly, if they are inflicting physical harm on someone else or are about to do so, then you ought to feel justified physically restraining them. But other than that, don’t do it. Violating this rule goes beyond discourtesy into the realm of assault.
But I am also of the opinion that even before she made her critique physical, this woman probably ought to have kept her Miss Manners act to herself. It is true that by perching his feet on the metal edge of a seat, this young man may have been contaminating it imperceptibly.
There’s a reason the TTC has a bylaw forbidding this. But it is also true that, seeing him doing so, it is hard to envision a way for her to help the situation by pointing it out and bickering with him about it.
He knows he should not do it, and knows why. Possibly he thinks the placement of his feet is not soiling the seat. Possibly he doesn’t care. Either way, he is doing it anyway. Some random bystander striding across the train to order him to obey will probably only cause him to be defensive and perhaps disrupt the lives of others on the train (as indeed happened not just when a screaming match erupted, but when the alarm was pushed, delaying them all).
There are lots of other situations where intervening in the face of rude behaviour does help: In a crowded train, asking someone to move their backpack to open up a seat usually achieves the desired effect. When someone is being very loud, a simple request will often cause them to lower the volume. When someone is doing something to hurt someone else accidentally — standing on a foot, say — bringing it to their attention often stops the behaviour and the harm. When someone is harming someone purposely — shouting insults or slurs, say — intervening may not de-escalate the situation, but can deflect the harm away from the intended target.
Those are good reasons when you see rude or uncivil behaviour to do something about it besides shaking your head and counting your blessings that you know better. But no such outcome could be expected in this case, and no such direct benefit to anyone at all was even possible here.
No, the impulse to come striding across the train to teach this young man some manners had nothing at all to do with helping anything, or preventing any harm. Like so many acts of performative busybody scolding, it had everything to do with publicly demonstrating for her own sanctimonious self-satisfaction that she was better behaved than he was. And it backfired because she demonstrated the opposite.
“We all have to live together,” she said. And it’s true. But living together is so much easier if we all resist the impulse to police each other’s etiquette and save the theatrics for situations where they might conceivably make the situation better instead of worse.
That said, people: Keep your damn feet off the seats. And for heaven’s sake, don’t sit on strangers. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire