What “manspread” means is “I own the space around me.” I do. I always will. Get over it, Malcontents—or don’t. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.
What “manspread” means is “I own the space around me.”
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That is exactly what it means. And it can either indicate proper self-confidence, or it can be anti-social if it intrudes into other’s space, or takes up more than one seat when seating is scarce.
Now take three young men traveling together, usually black in my experience, slouched down on their tailbones, knees out, two of them sitting with three empty seats in between them, and the other across from them. They have claimed a fifth of the subway car as their space.
I’ll take the suburbs and my car over all the things I endured on public transportation, where “manspreading” ranks low on the annoyance scale, but typifies the experience. Now my rare excursions on the subway offer me a kind of anthropological amusement at the quaint customs and rudeness of city dwellers, but I am so grateful not to deal with it daily.