Everywhere there are feminists, there's a sexist statue.
Last year, it was the "sleepwalking man" at Wellesley. Student social justice warriors vandalized and called for the removal of Tony Matelli's fiberglass sculpture of a man stumbling about in his underwear. His crime? He reminded feminists of sexual assault.
This year, it's a statue at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. This statue, by sculptor Paul Tadlock, is also of a man. He's doing something even worse: He's talking to a woman!
And as every feminist knows, that's "mansplaining"! And we can't have that–so let the Twitter war begin!
And also the fem-splaining, as in this, from the Daily Dot:
As every woman knows, no matter your level of experience or knowledge in any given subject, you can expect to be undermined, interrupted, railroaded, or otherwise condescended to by a certain brand of man who will make a point of telling you that you're wrong, misinformed, or under-educated about whatever it is. Even if the subject is one men can't possibly have first-hand knowledge of, like street harassment, or vaginas, you're guaranteed to find at least one man, or several hundred, who'll be happy to explain to women that their experiences of these things are wrong….
The statue, with its demonstrative body language, also demonstrates another commonly experienced sexist micro-aggression that's become known as "manspreading": a tendency certain men have to sprawl out and take up public spaces, while women cross their legs tightly and attempt to take up as little space as possible.
"Mansplaining" and "manspreading"! That's a double microagression!
Actually (oops!), the statue, titled "New Friends," depicts a scene that looks quite charming: an attractive young woman sitting on a bench with a book on her lap wears an amused expression as a young man standing with his foot on the bench says something to her. Since she's sitting and he's standing, she looks in charge, like a queen seated on her throne during a courtier's audience. There's certainly nothing erotic about the scene. As Tadlock told the Washington Examiner's Ashe Schow, the model for the seated young woman was his own daughter.
But to a feminist….well, men are bigger than women–they "take up public spaces," and that's scary.
Sleepwalking-man scary.