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Dial It
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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I didn't assume the teacher's intent at all. I speculated on what the comment was made in response to, based on the reaction of the person who 'received' said comment.
I mean, how likely do you think it is that an art teacher said "dial down the feminism" in response to a one-off reasonable comment about sex equality? I think there's a very good reason she didn't give more backstory, and started her anecdote at his comment, lol.
I'd say it's pretty near to 100% of the time. As a male, sitting with my legs parallel feels 'unnatural' in the same way holding your hand in a fist is: I can certainly do it, but I have to deliberately do it for it to happen, that position will never happen spontaneously—it's just not the default/'neutral' position of those body parts.
This is not really gendered behavior, though, so I feel it's disingenuous to frame it as a 'men thing'. While it may not be caused by how far apart their knees are, it's arguably just as common for women to take up extra space on buses etc., by taking up either or both of the seats adjacent to them with belongings like a purse, as one example. I see no need at all to put a sex/gender filter on 'lack of consideration for the space you are taking up in a crowded location'. Deficiencies of empathy are easy to find in both sexes.
But that is the reason the default position is different between the sexes. This:
assuming it was a deliberate act on his part, which you didn't state outright but implied, is in a completely different ballpark from the simple fact that men naturally sit with their knees further apart than women, pretty much without exception. And the vast majority of men who, when they notice, or it's brought to their attention, that they happen to be spread out enough that it's taking up another seat, will readily adjust themselves to accommodate the other person, because they're obviously not acting maliciously.
As I suspected.
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.
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.