Op-Ed: To all of the Manspreaders out there
Disclaimer: “This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of PERIOD”
I sat sandwiched between two men in my lecture hall… It’s as if their egos were competing to see who could take up more space. It was their unspoken right. As they seized the arm rests, entitled and expansive, I scrunched as small as I could to make room for them.
As any woman knows, the spread goes inside the sandwich. But, here lies the contradiction (maybe because two men made this one)… No part of me is small. From my outspoken personality, to my boobs, and to my crazy loud laugh. But, that day in the lecture hall societal conditioning made me feel like a contradiction. Like a messed-up sandwich covered in strawberry jam.
I couldn’t help but ponder, why I felt obligated to give up my comfort in class for theirs? With that thought in mind and some research, I found that there was an actual defined term in the Oxford Dictionary for this phenomenon. I realized that other women had experienced it too, most commonly on the bus as well as in class. They call it “manspreading”.
While society approves of manspreading— the practice whereby a man sits with his legs widely apart, encroaching other people’s space — it tells women the proper way to sit is with crossed legs, contorting to be as teeny-tiny as they can be because small is submissive and vulnerable, equating to femininity.
As I began to delve a bit deeper into this, I found a book written by Marianne Wex, tracing back the history of manspreading, called “Let’s take Back Our Space”, with the Subtitle: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures. In her book, she argues that when women are around men, they are more likely to contort their bodies into smaller shapes, while men are likely to exhibit more expansive gestures, perpetuating the age-old gender roles created by society. Intriguingly, sometimes the most minute gestures, like body language, reveal volumes about people and society. While the message here is to not encourage manspreading battles (although don’t hesitate to grab that arm rest first), it’s to be cognizant of how a simple action like manspreading may reflect power and gender roles in society — something we’ve all grown accustomed to.
