Ladies, there's a rather delicate topic that's been weighing on my mind of late, and I feel it urgently begs addressing. I will attempt to be circumspect.

For about a year now, I've been hearing and reading in various places reports of women's disgust for men on the subways and buses who sit with their legs spread wide, airing out their, er, jewel purses. While I share these ladies' unease at the blatant and provocative display of these, er, squirrel hoards, and deplore the way practitioners of said sitting position so often take up a seat and a half or more on crowded conveyances with their callously splayed limbs, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that your male fellow travelers are in all likelihood not truly attempting to impress you with the contents of their, er, fruit baskets, except possibly in an entirely unconscious evolutionary sense.

These men may indeed be clods, but they are clods in the sense of blithe social obliviousness rather than one of creepy cloddish lasciviousness. My attention having been called to the queasy-making effects of this practice on the distaff sex, I've been putting forth a concerted effort to monitor the degree of the interior angle between my own resting appendages, and I've been horrified to discover that even a male as relatively enlightened as myself tends to open his, er, equipment locker to public inspection during unguarded moments on the commute. I have striven mightily to keep my knees in close proximity but have discovered to my dismay that this necessitates concentrated effort. I'm sorry indeed to report that the airing of the, er, lumber bin would appear to be the natural state of the seated male Homo sapiens.

It's all in the construction of the pelvis bone, you see. The way our femurs connect makes the leg turn naturally outward when sitting. To draw our knees together, our thigh muscles must flex, must perform work, must burn actual calories. I say this not to excuse our troglodytishness but merely to explain that our wretched behavior is directed at you only on a genetic level, not a conscious one, and that when our, er, birthday parcels are pointing your way we've merely momentarily relaxed our vigilence, if indeed we possessed any in the first place, in exhaustion.

With knees locked firmly together and thighs a-tremble, I remain
yr humble servant