The other day I posted a photo to Instagram of a man rudely stretching out his legs on the subway. I didn’t think much of it. I made a joke that we need to, “Forget man-spreading (when men sit with their legs wide open on the subway, taking up two, or maybe more, seats),* we need to stop man-lengthening.” I also said, “I wish I had intentionally tripped over this man’s legs, which he made me step over,” and was tempted to face him about it. A few days later, I saw what I could have been and I didn’t like it.
This time, I sat down on the train next to a man-lengthener. A few minutes later, a middle-aged man in suit walked onto the train and kind of bumbled around this other man’s legs. The business man went to grab onto a pole but decided he should walk back over to the man-lengthener and started kicking at his feet. As this began, the man-lengthener pulled his feet back. The business man said, with a smug look on his face and unable to formulate a cohesive sentence, “Keep it away, that’s better, smarter, nicer.”
Out of defiance, the man-lengthener put his legs back out.
The next stop was mine. As we pulled into the station, the business man noticed the re-lengthened legs and smugly looked over, smiling, and said, “Keep it back,” with a head nod.
The man-lengthener responded understandably with, “Get the f*ck out if here.”
The business man and I both exited the train, however he got back on one car over. I guess he just couldn’t even.
* I’m a skeptic of the “man-spreading” problem. I don’t deny the act exists and is annoying to deal with but “man-spreading” is the most overblown of all the overblown outrages. The availability heuristic is generally the cause for people to think this is a real problem.
