4: Buzzfeed Hates Men

Buzzfeed is a very popular youtube channel that is still growing to this day. They mostly release videos concerning the most recent news and trends, as well as some videos made for entertainment, such as their Tasty series(cooking) and their Try Guys series(guys who record themselves doing a challenge of some sort). However, Buzzfeed is known to be a VERY biased channel, one of these biases being toward men. Just from watching a couple of videos or even just reading the titles and thumbnails, one can tell that Buzzfeed is in favor of women and against men.

The video I am discussing in this blog can be found here.

Buzzfeed is notoriously known for its feminist editors who enjoy over exaggerating everything they do, and today's topic, is manspreading. Manspreading refers to how men "always" spread their legs too wide for the comfort of the people around them, taking up space they don't need and making others feel uncomfortable. Buzzfeed seems to believe that their argument is strong and makes sense but it's incredibly biased and is not supported well.

First of all, before I even discuss any of the content in the video, googling "purses taking up space" has 29 million results on google whereas manspreading has 300k. Let that sink in for a bit.

0:00-0:03: They start off the video with something that is already incorrect. They state an understatement, attempting to make men look whiny, when in reality, NOT opening your legs while sitting as a male causes major discomfort or even pain in some circumstances.

0:04-0:09: The camera man stands nearby as Tan sits down on a rectangular bench that is open to all sides. They choose to film this as she sits next to a "manspreader" but the male next to her is taking up none of anyone else's space, as there is still much room left on the bench for people to sit. In this scenario, Tan is exaggerating man spreading as she takes up about 30% more space he he does.

oo:13-00:16: Buzzfeed shows 2 clips of men "manspreading" while playing Tan's voice in the background as she explains how these men take up as much space as they possibly can, even though they are taking up a completely normal amount of space for a person on public transit.

0:51-0:57: Here, Buzzfeed shows 2 clips of Tan "manspreading". She takes up a reasonable amount of space in the first clip and doesn't even manspread in the second one. She attempts to take up as much space in the walking area between seats using her legs and calls it manspreading. There is a fine line between being a manspreader and being an obnoxious person.

As you can see, even before the video has passed the one minute mark, I've been able to point out ridiculous things Buzzfeed has tried to use to explain manspreading, all of which isn't helping their argument. All Buzzfeed tries to do is make men look bad and makes it seem as if men purposely go out of their way to make others uncomfortable.

Progress: In this blog post, I worked on supporting my own opinion while shooting down the opinions of others using logos. From writing posts such as this, I am able to work on my argumentative strategies, as I can apply my knowledge and support my counterargument. With this blog post, I am also able to inform people about Buzzfeed and what they do.

Reflection: By writing this, I have more practice with heavily biased writing- working against it and using it myself. The blog post is good practice for me as I am able to support my own opinions and claim that other peoples' are wrong as I have valid reasons for my statement. I thought this blog post was mildly adequate. It was nothing special in my eyes, but it was certainly different from my other blog posts, as this is more centered around my own opinions