In the Madrid metro, a new pictogram is now displayed alongside those asking passengers to give their seats to priority people, to use headphones to listen to music, not to smoke or not to put their feet on the seats : " respeta el espacio de los demás " says the caption of the drawing prohibiting the occupation of more than one seat by a man with large legs Apart. Thus, after New York, Tokyo and Seoul, the Spanish capital intends to fight against " manspreading ".
But what exactly is it? Is it a matter of ordinary incivility or a witness to gendered behavior, of symbolic occupation of public space? How are commentators from various backgrounds reacting to the current movement that sees new concepts of the fight against sexism taking their place on the agenda of the media and organizations ?
Mansplaining, manterrupting... and now, manspreading
The notion of " manspreading " is in line with other neologisms in Globish built on the prefix " man " and therefore designating a reputedly masculine attitude.
Mansplaining (a term that appeared in 2008) describes the behaviour of a man who explains to a woman what she already knows, and possibly better than he does. This is perceived as a sign of paternalistic condescension.
Manterrupting denounces the tendency of men to cut off women (see our full article). This is often compared to the notion of bropropriating , which highlights the way in which some men take up ideas or well-meaning formulas that a woman has pronounced before them.
Manspreading refers to the way in which some men spread themselves out in a supposedly shared space, thereby eroding the place of others. The most obvious manifestation of manspreading is the position of the legs wide apart on public transport. This is experienced as an invasion of the collective space but also, for certain.es, as inappropriate behavior when it leads, in fact if not intentions, to encroaching on the living space (or even elbowing the body) of one's neighbor.
" Anti-guy" cabals ?
The denunciation of these behaviors, by definition attributed to men through the prefix " man- ", makes some jaws grind. According to certain.es, there is a sexist prism in the fact of assigning incivilities to a gender.
The same people note that shamelessness is not an exclusively male vice: on the Twitter feeds of men who receive anti-manspreading campaigns as a form of anti-guy harassment, photos of women who also spread themselves by putting their handbags on the next seat. It remains to be seen whether a sac, a priori inanimate, causes discomfort of the same nature to a neighbor as a human body. In practice, is it as easy to suggest to a person to squeeze their legs as it is to ask them if they can push their things ?
Male and female body postures in the public space: an eternal nature/culture debate?
Those who see the fight against manspreading as a form of aggression directed against men also argue that there are physiological differences between the sexes, which are the direct result of differentiated body postures. Men are said to be less comfortable than women to cross their legs. Nevertheless,ergonomists advise everyone not to cross their legs when sitting : it is bad for blood circulation, for the lumbar, for the coccyx, for the perineum, for digestion...
But then why do women cross their legs ? We invoke, with the historian Christine Bard, the effects of clothing : skirts and dresses would impose a certain way of sitting to preserve one's modesty, and the habit would remain even when one wears trousers. But in mirror, we can't say that a man's position with his legs wide apart is particularly modest. We, women and men, have differentiated relationships to what should be hidden from our intimacy in the public space.
For the academic, it is therefore not only what we carry on ourselves but also and above all what we carry within us, the vision of what woman/man's behaviour should be in the public space and the perception of what our place can be there, that influences our bodily postures. An entire culture would encourage men to conquer space while it would subject women to the obligation to be discreet.
Shared spaces or distributed spaces?
This hypothesis of differentiated gender expectations producing spatially segregated effects is explored by numerous research works on inequalities.
Thus, for example, those of the geographer Edith Maruéjouls, who observed and analysed the occupation of spaces in playgrounds : boys occupy the majority of the central area, playing space-saving games (ball games, in particular) and girls take the margins, in small small groups, for space-saving occupations (skipping rope, elastic, hopscotch) and not very noisy. For Nicole Abar, a former professional footballer and expert on gender issues in sport (editor's note : a speaker at the Eve Programme), this is both the first manifestation of inequalities in access to collective space and the source of self-censorship on the part of women who are learning to see places of action as areas where they do not naturally feel at home. but where they will have to be invited or have to impose themselves.
In the same vein, the geographer Yves Raibaud studies the mapping of gender in urban space to reach similar conclusions: " women occupy less space than men in the street " and more generally in the city. He points to a stereotypical education that inculcates in girls from an early age a duty to protect themselves from aggression while it values the spirit of conquest in boys ; but also urban planning policies that favour investment and the allocation of resources to leisure activities practiced mainly by men (2/3 of public action in favour of young people's leisure activities, according to his calculations), which are also more greedy in terms of space (co' sports grounds, skate parks, etc.).
In the end, the space that is supposed to be shared (the schoolyard, the street, the urban facilities and we could extend to the different floors of the company's premises ) turns out to be distributed : women and men live there and evolve surreptitiously in cohabiting tension rather than in mixing.
Can we make room without leaving a little of our place ?
At this stage of the reflection, the question of the issues raised by manspreading takes on other dimensions than that of the simple questioning of a form of ordinary incivility. What if the symbol of a certain " struggle for places " was at stake, at a time when women's rights and freedoms are moving beyond the sole position of principle to enter the field of effectiveness ?
Alongside the discourse that values gender equality that is beneficial to all, there are also signs of anxiety among some men who fear for their place when it comes to making room for women. In other words, can we make room without giving up part of our place ?
The answer is in the image showing the person with the legs wide open who occupies his entire seat plus about a quarter of the one on his right and a quarter of the one on his left. By renouncing his or her deviations, this person will not be chased out of his or her seat or put on the ground, but will occupy his or her full place, no more and no less, leaving others the opportunity to take full place in the common space. In the allegorical field, this means that the disempowerment that some men fear in the face of women's empowerment is not a reversal of inequalities, but only a renunciation of an excessive share of the occupation of concrete and symbolic spaces.
