this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
1538 points (94.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
8757 readers
2842 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can someone mansplain mansplaining to me? It seems like any time someone with a beard inhales sharply.
Kind of like how manspreading is men sitting down.
And the male gaze is men looking at things.
Mansplaining is when you explain a subject to a woman as if she doesn't know it, when she would be fully expected to know it. An example would be a man without an astrophysics degree explaining astrophysics with condescension to a woman with an astrophysics degree. It sounds silly but I've seen it happen, more often than not it happens online though because terminally online people tend to be more condescending.
Manspreading is more often when dudes intentionally take up more sitting space than they clearly need in public when it's obvious there is enough space for additional people. Often it's a lack of self awareness.
Male gaze is the way women are most often portrayed in visual arts and media from a heterosexual, masculine perspective, often objectifying them as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. It suggests that media is often constructed and consumed from a male perspective.
Hell, even a lot of sexualization of men is from the male perspective. Having spoken to a lot of women about how they experience attraction, most aren't very interested in the hypermasculine view of the male "ideal body" and are far more interested in certain behaviors and mannerisms, or even just the look of their face and hands, rather than everything else.
I'm writing this not as an argument, but as taking your questions in good faith. I hope it was in good faith.
What I picture in my head when I hear the term manspreading is the guy on every bus or subway who is sitting in a middle seat with legs spread wide. It could also be arms around the backs of the surrounding chairs.
Yeah pretty much the jist of it.
Tbf I see teenagers do it a lot too but their brains aren't fully developed yet.
You know men tend to be larger than women?
I had a live-in partner complain that all the clothes in the laundry basket were mine, implying she was doing most of the laundry. I looked. We wore the same amount of clothes, mine were just bigger, taking a larger volume.
Size doesn't make you spread your legs, blocking two other seats or make you wrap your arms around the back of the other seats. I've seen plenty of men who can keep their hands and knees in front of themselves.
But .. it does? If you’re tall, your arms and legs are longer, so they stick out further. As I found out on an 11 hour flight where the people to my left and right decided they both needed both arm rests, it’s painful to sit with your knees and elbows touching each other.
Wrapping my arm around a seatback would have been a godsend.
Alright, I see the problem. I'm describing how some men literally spread their arms across the back of multiple seats and how some men literally spread their legs out so that each knee is blocking access to each seat beside the and you are interpreting that as people complaining about guys being allowed to use their armrests. No one is complaining that you take up physical space. They are complaining that you are spread out in a way that blocks access to the space around you that you don't need. If you don't sit down and spread your knees wide enough to block access to the seats next to you, then the term manspreading doesn't apply to you.
So taking up unnecessary public space is something particular to men? Do all men do this, or just only men?
Or are we gendering bad behavior to win internet points?
Trans woman who pays a bit more attention to mannerisms than most people, both in men and women.
Picture a teenager in black sweatpants and a hoodie, on his own in a bus. That's the most common I think. It's generally men who try to project an image of strong masculinity or coolness. They don't really do it with other people because it's silly. It might be an unconscious thing, idk. It still looks stupid. It's mostly men because it's a masculinity thing.
It's great if you don't do it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if you didn't. But there very much is a type of guy who does it. And there is no common type of woman for that specific behavior.
Doesn’t match my experience but I appreciate you sharing your perspective.
Sadly, my experience is that post-covid everyone is always rude and selfish and oblivious to others. People seem to love standing three-across on sidewalks or in doorways for a LONG time.
I just came from Costco where EVERYONE leaves their carts perpendicular across aisles regardless of their genital configuration or gender presentation.
I’m beginning to enjoy ramming them out of the way.