Why should ‘manspreading’ be just for men?
Zoe JewellThis word is now in the Oxford Dictionary – and as a woman who finds this sitting position rather comfortable, I think it’s an unnecessarily gendered issue
Yesterday, the term “manspreading” was added to the
online Oxford Dictionary. It made the news and I felt surprisingly pissed off about it. On the way to work, I counted three women participating in fine examples of “manspreading”. Ever since I was a teenager, it has always irritated me that sitting with your legs open was seen to be the preserve of men. It seemed to be based on the outmoded assumption that women always wear skirts and that even in trousers they should be making themselves small and polite in public spaces. In an admittedly minor rebellion, I started to sit like that too.
Of course, I don’t think anyone should ever stop someone else from
sitting on a train
because they need space for their own knees, but frankly when there’s room, it’s pretty comfortable to sit with your legs open. Just be good-mannered about it. Then yesterday’s win for the term “manspreading” made me think that even when a man or woman is doing it in an irritating way, when the body language isn’t exactly endearing, the word describing this seated position has become unnecessarily gendered.
There are obviously bigger feminist battles to be fought and I write this very aware of the brilliantly feminist roots of “manspreading” and the need to highlight an action men feel entitled to and women often feel they can’t do. Squishing women on the tube isn’t cool. Other man-prefixed words work the same way.
I laughed in recognition reading Rebecca Solnit’s essay
Men Explain Things to Me, which later inspired the term “mansplaining”, and I too have been the victim of “manterrupting”. Others cite the scourge of “mandermining”, though I can’t say I’ve experienced “manslamming”, when men refuse to move out of the way on a crowded pavement. These terms are a useful and often funny way to point out behaviours that have become the norm for men in our working and social lives, shutting out women’s voices and their physical presence, often aggressively. You just need to look at the language of internet trolls for an example of all this. Women occasionally explain things patronisingly to me, but men do it more often and they think it’s more acceptable too.
In the end, though, it seems to me that the man prefix compounds the idea that men are aggressive and women are always pleasing, always good, never in the way, and that they can’t act up sometimes themselves. Their knees always remain where they are meant to be, while assertive behaviour is still only associated with men.
If as a woman you indulge in “manspreading”, “mansplaining” or any other type of “man” action, you’re not just doing something irritating, you’re doing something unfeminine too. These terms have a really important function to point out acts which silence women, but they risk reinforcing the supposed differences between men and women. There’s a danger that, though helpful now, in the long run they could start to shame women as well as the men they are aimed at.
If my leg spreading annoys you, then tell me off for what it is, whether I’m male or female.
Language
has power and, despite the feminist intentions of the word, my 15-year-old self is unsure about having “manspreading” preserved in the annals of the Oxford Dictionary, even if it was just the online version.