Well, for mansplaining, it’s because the people doing it were misogynists. It was deliberately a gendered insult as a way of getting back at them. It’s only recently been applied to other situations.
Manspreading just sounds better than just “spreading.” Maybe legspreading would work.
BTW, I do find it much more comfortable than holding my legs together. It’s just about relaxing certain muscles, not avoiding squishing what is in between.
Though I do note that what’s in between them is different when sitting than when standing.
Do your nuts hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you sit without ‘em squishin’?
For more space are you a wishin’?
Do you throw 'em o’er your shoulder
Like a continental soldier
Do your nuts hang low?
Usually when I pointedly move towards sitting down in the space their leg occupies, people tend to move the offending limb out of the way. On the one occasion where the person strangely tried to stare me out I shamelessly ripped off David Niven and told him he was exposing his shortcomings. He very kindly got up and walked off muttering something, which I assume was polite thanks for me correcting his etiquette.
As for the bags on seats thing, I see as many males doing it as females. Schoolkids seem particularly prone to it. As such referring to it as shebagging is rather inaccurate. I don’t think I’ve even seen a woman on public transport though sitting with her legs wide out, so manspread seems like a reasonable term.
The only public transportation I’ve used in recent years has been campus buses, where no one sits next to anyone else or makes eye contact. I doubt they even notice my massive bulge.
Exactly. Which is why Tithonus’s desperate false equivalence is both pathetically obvious and obviously pathetic. So much anger against women, masking so much personal insecurity.
I define mansplaining as “men explaining to women, women’s issues”. For example that gym thing recently. Women would come in saying why they might feel comfortable in a women only gym and gave examples and stuff and yet men kept coming in telling us how we were wrong. That is mansplaining to me.
That’s not quite the same thing - you’re not doing it for no good reason. It does seem to be a recent phenomenon; I don’t remember it being so prevalent even a decade ago.
This issue is so stupid in my opinion. If there is room to spread out and no one is put off by it, spread out. If it’s crowded, don’t do it. Just don’t be an asshole and there won’t be a problem.
Strikes me everyone was busy agreeing in one of your threads that you don’t have to be a parent to understand and sympathize with parental issues, and I thought the points well-made.
Presumably, you also don’t have to be a parent yourself to have an opinion on things like the problems parents face in everyday life, and whether they are as serious as other problems non-parents face. So why is it impossible, irrational, wrong or impolite for a man to have an opinion on issues that women face?
Both are examples of walking in someone elses’ shoes, attempting to see things from their perspective, and can be done well or badly depending on the individual.
I think then my question is why anyone needed to pretend this phenomenon is uniquely male and therefore merited being named as it is was, or why the LinusKs of the world want to turn it into a “women are worse” argument.
Some people - not many people, but some - take up too much room on public transit. That’s a fact. Why does it have to be made into some kind of political debate? Why create new gender-specific words for it?
I think maybe it’s not so much a battle of the sexes thing as it is the Internet phenomenon of creating new words and terms of art for common things in an effort to make them seem new. Recently a fun one is “ghosting,” the phenomenon by which someone who doesn’t want to see you romantically anymore just doesn’t return your calls and texts. To read some articles on this wholly unnecessary new term you’d think this was both a new phenomenon and the worst thing since the Killing Fields. In fact it’s just, you know, s/he isn’t that into you, a phenomenon as old as the human race itself. But it sounds cooler if you invent a word for it.
That is not at all what I said. Is it? If it is, then I apologize for being unclear.
Look. Men can certainly have an opinion on what women’s issues. But I definitely think it’s mainsplaining to come in and tell us that our opinions are wrong…that clearly we are not seeing it in the way we should.
If I tell you someone sexually harassed me and you say, “No, that wasn’t sexually harassing, that was simply him being nice to you,” That is mainsplaining.
I’m not sure what putting the label “mansplaining” on something means. Does it mean the opinion is invalid, because a man cannot know what sexual harrassment really is? Is it offensive? Could, say, a male jury member rule on the matter, if you charged the guy with an offence?
Does the same work for a non-parent stating that a parent is wrong about a childrearing issue? If a non-parent says “no, from your discription of that incident, it sounds like you aren’t appropriately disciplining your child”, is that invalid/offensive “childfreesplaining”?
Do you have similar analytical difficulty with, say, the label “whining?” It’s a label that means a certain thing is happening. When somebody says the label describes particular behavior, they mean that the behavior fits that description. It doesn’t mean some bullshit about a jury. It means somebody’s fucking whining.
I don’t think I want to keep on explaining over and over again. This kind of argument is what makes this board suck, quite frankly. You try to say something, and you explain it, and you explain it, but people frankly refuse to listen and understand but continue to demand you explain yourself!!!
