A Whole Post on Why Sitting in a Chair Backwards Is Dumb

Didn't these people read the chair manual?

Photo by Rodrigo Ortega.

Think of movies in the “inspirational teacher” genre, so: Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, Coach Carter — anything where a staunchly anti-guff and highly nonsense-averse teacher brings the best out of talented-but-underserved urban youths. Think of the scene where the kids question their new teacher’s authority. It’s time for student and teacher to talk on the same level — shit’s about to get real. The teacher needs a nonverbal cue that says “I’m not like your other teachers — I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Fuckin’ Life, and I’m gonna give it to you straight.” What do they do?

You’re goddamned right: They turn a chair around and sit in it backwards. The students’ eyes widen — such an unconventional use of a chair! This teacher is eccentric and just a little bit wild; perhaps their gruff exterior masks a hard-earned wisdom that could help me — a gifted at-risk youth trapped in the concrete jungle of Urban America — achieve my full potential. Their leather jacket and use of the word “ain’t” hinted at it, but the wanton disregard for standard chair-use protocol clinches it: This teacher is willing to break the rules to get results.

What the fuck is that? It’s universal — we all know that sitting in a chair backwards signals that you’re something of a rebel. You could probably go to Bhutan, sit in a chair backwards, and people who don’t share your language, religion, or perspective on the world, generally, would think: “Clearly this person defies convention.” Something we all pick up on is being signaled, but what exactly is it, and what does it mean?

Backwards is the “cool” way to sit in a chair. I’m sure we can all agree that sitting in a chair backwards belongs in this word cloud of “cool” things:

But what does “cool” mean? Clearly, it has something to do with nonconformity and asserting yourself as an independent adult. When we’re kids, adults make all of our decisions, so as we hit adolescence, we want to signal “I can make my own decisions!” We often — usually? — do this even at the expense of making dumb decisions, such as casting off centuries of knowledge about ergonomic design and thrusting our crotch into the part of a chair meant to provide proper lumbar support.

We all go through this period of rebellion. Occasionally it’s problematic, but mostly it’s a rite of passage that borders on being cute. I saw my 13 year-old nephew last week; he was wearing his hat backwards, and I just thought “awwww.” The boy’s growing up. He’s a great kid, and he’s going to go far in life, but right now he simply must mildly annoy his mother, even at the cost of looking like a rap rock douchebag. I’d honestly be worried if wasn’t showing faint signs of pointless rebellion; then I’d be worried that he’s going to grow up and join a cult or become the type of person who creates an unhackable 15-digit alphanumeric password just because YankeeCandle.com told him to. The backwards hat hints at nonconformity.

I have a lot of disdain, though, for people who never grow out of their childish rebellion phase. Adolescents rebel because they need to assert themselves, but a point in your life should arrive in which asserting yourself is over. It’s one thing for a 13 year-old to try to gain status; they have no status, and they need to affirm that one day they’ll be someone who matters. But a 40 year-old? A 40 year-old should not be ostentatiously trying to assert their place in society; a person who does that is either hopelessly insecure or just power hungry.

Consider the full message that’s being sent when someone sits backwards in a chair. Yes, it starts with “I reject conventional chair-sitting techniques,” but the further implication is “because I’ve discovered a superior way of doing things. I’ve transcended beyond your plastic, suburban, back-goes-on-the-back-of-the-chair humdrum conventions — I exist in an entirely new plane of partial repose! I am in a Brave New World of sitting techniques, the rules of which may seem frightening and strange to ignorant front-sitters!”

Rejecting societal conventions is, of course, good sometimes. Anyone who doesn’t believe that our civilizational apex happened in the Stone Age has to agree that old ways sometimes need to give way to new. But people who endlessly and ostentatiously reject societal convention are just jerks who like feeling superior. They like signaling that society is doing things wrong, and that they’re one of the enlightened few who are doing things right. I’ve chosen to write about the silly-and-uncommon example of sitting backwards in a chair, but I could also talk about how people are pretentious in their style, entertainment choices, or politics. By all means: Like what you like, believe what you believe, don’t let convention dictate your tastes. But also shut the fuck up about it, because we don’t need goddamned adults running around going “everyone acknowledge how cool I am!”

Imagine how different Dangerous Minds would have been if — when Michelle Pfeiffer turned that chair around to have a no-BS rap session with her students¹ — one of the kids had said “Oh, I see — you’re sitting backwards on a chair to signal that you’re some kind of hip, ‘down-with-the-streets’ sort of teacher. That’s probably what the leather jacket is about, too. And I suppose that you think that by rejecting the prim-and-proper behavior of your peers, you’re signaling that you have — in a manner of speaking — ‘thrown out the rule book’. I get that. But let me suggest that, ultimately, our respect can only be won the same way that anyone earns respect: By demonstrating through substantive actions that you’re a person of conviction who treats other people well. And none of that has anything to do with how you sit in a chair.”

That would have been a very different movie. I’m really not sure how Michelle Pfeiffer could have responded that — if I’m writing the script, she claps back with “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!!!”, but that’s why people don’t pay me to write movie scripts. Pfeiffer’s bad-ass chair sitting probably signaled exactly what it was meant to signal to the audience: That she was a different kind of teacher and also a very different character than the person she played in The Age of Innocence. Of course, to me, the flagrant contempt for proper chair-sitting technique signaled something pretty ridiculous.

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1. I thought that this memory might be the Mandela Effect, but it seems that Michelle Pfeiffer did, indeed sit backwards in a chair in Dangerous Minds.