Bear with me because this is in large part me thinking aloud. And no, I’m not being a male chauvinist dickhead; I’m genuinely trying to understand a (modern?) phenomenon.
Manspreading — when a man sits with his legs wide apart on public transport encroaching on other seats — has recently been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. So this seems a suitable point for some thoughts on the subject, which actually goes wider than public transport.
Men are always being castigated for sitting with their knees apart, taking up too much room and (supposedly) showing off their jewels — or they would be showing them off if they weren’t clad in OMG jeans. I agree this posture is ungainly and unattractive; nevertheless I’m as guilty as the next bloke.
I have a four-pronged theory as to why this is, and why men don’t — indeed can’t, comfortably — sit with their knees together as women (mostly) do. This is at least in part based on personal experience and observation.
- Yes, the dangly bits get in the way. This doesn’t help.
- And the dangly bits get in the way even more with our modern tight underwear and trousers, where there isn’t the jiggle room to adjust their position, whether manually or automatically.
- We’re all fatter than we were, and the fatter the thighs (and remember men are also generally larger than women) the harder to get the knees together. Our forebears may have been fitter and had better muscles, but they were not generally as fat as we are, hence they were more able to sit decorously — not that they always did, as evidenced below!
- All this is exacerbated by men’s pelvic anatomy. Women’s hips are placed further apart than men’s (for good child producing reasons), which means men are already having their thighs squash their dangly bits. But having the hips closer together also means it is harder to comfortably get those knees together — the thighs are angled outwards more (presumably to provide better stability) so getting the knees together puts significant additional strain on the muscles of the hips and across the lower back. Try it guys, and see how it stresses your lower back.
You can see how this works in this photo …
Look at the angles of this couple’s thighs and the closeness of the knees. See how it is anatomically harder for the man to get his knees together. Just think about the tension in the muscles.
So now let the sensible debate begin, and hopefully we’ll have some scientists prove me wrong (or even right).