• ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      It was definitely malicious as his hand found its way onto my thigh during that bus ride as well.

      As I suspected.

      How does one not realize they’re pressing their leg into someone that is scrunched up and trying to get away from them? You think men are just dumb and oblivious to everything besides themselves? That’s not a very charitable view of men in general tbh.

      Well, considering that’s not how I described men in general at all, that isn’t really relevant.

      All I said is that the ‘wider stance’ is how male bodies naturally ‘lie’. The average man will definitely ‘tighten up’ when they realize they are encroaching on another’s space, and that’s regardless of the sex of the other person. I just explained that it does take a deliberate/willful act to do that, because, like holding your hand in a fist, that’s just not how male legs ‘want’ to be by default.

      The “manspread” phenomenon is absolutely gendered behavior

      Yes, but notice how I deliberately spoke about the actual fundamental misbehavior, which is ‘taking up more than your fair share of space when in a crowded public place’, instead of the narrow subcategory ‘manspreading’ that conveniently can only be ‘committed’ by males. There’s no reason to consider, as an example, a woman who refuses to put her purse on the floor or in her lap, instead of on the seat next to her, depriving another person of a seat, as any different than a man who refuses to close his legs when it becomes clear someone wants to sit in the adjacent seat that they’re partially taking up.

      The level of inconsideration, and fault, of the individual are identical in both scenarios.

      If you purport to actually care about the root act of inconsideration, there is no justification to focus solely on one specific variant of it. Similar to how “mansplaining” became a viral term, even though ‘condescension as a result of assuming one’s ignorance of a subject for a reason that has no actual relationship with knowledge of the subject’ is something both sexes do to both sexes, and that the aforementioned reason can be many things other than sex (e.g. assuming an old person isn’t tech-savvy), “manspreading” being seen as the end-all-be-all of this behavior is ironically misandrist, letting all non-males off the hook even when they misbehave in an equivalent way.