Each day my legs are more and more open in public. I force myself to unlearn the exact number of degrees at which my legs, if spread, are considered obscene, inappropriate, or just absurd.

As we travel, and sort of a homage to my thousands of hours studying geometry, I have developed a theory about how the number of degrees at which your legs spread while in public spaces are proportional to your gender privileges in a patriarchal society. From none to 100% male-privileged.

Cultured womxn have been raised learning that the proper thing to do is to close their legs while in public. Typically, they/us show a degree of leg-spreading that ranges from the 0 degrees (legs closed), to a shy +5° or even 10° for the most liberated.
And there is even a sitting leg posture that has historically been associated with femme that is the legs being crossed. This posture shows a negative angle of approximately -45° depending on the geometry of the legs.

Above, one of the numerous samples for the theory in which, in a reduced space, cis-men spread their legs to take the maximum space at the expense of non-cis-men.

Each day my legs are more and more open in public.

In this particular example, both cis-men sitting by my side subconsciously -I want to think- assumed that myself, as non-cis-male, was going to close my legs as soon as they entered the vehicle. So they just took up almost all the back seat space. Myself, I was pushing hard to get the same leg spread angle as them and took this picture for the record. I have to say, they pushed really hard to maintain their angle, and it was difficult to keep my position and sometimes I felt like I should give up and just go to a standard non-cis-male 5 to 10 degrees. But I didn’t.

ANGLES IN PUBLIC SPACES AND PRIVILEGE

TIPS ON HOW TO GET YOUR SPACE BACK WHEN SUFFERING FROM MANSPREADING

I have developed some tricks while traveling and wanted to share with other folks. They are just a start and are incomplete, and they might not work for you, your body type, etc. But I will leave them below in case some of them do, and please feel free to collaborate with your tips too.

– Keep you hands between your legs as a reminder that you can and should take your public space back from that man-spreader by your side.

– Keep your bag, backpack, etc between your legs so the man-spreader can see that you ARE going to spread your legs.

– Push smoothly, but constantly, your legs against the man-spreader. This will also help define your gluts while you travel, so 2×1!

This is a collaborative post, if you have more tips on how to better reclaim your public space while traveling and you want to share with the community, please send them so we can update with better and stronger tips. We would love to have more tools to deal with this situations. Pics are also welcome!

A LAST BRIEF NOTE ON CIS-MEN BEHAVIOUR

Just wanted to add a brief note that came to my mind yesterday while on an 8 hour-long bus trip, seeing and listening how a man was mansplaining to a woman for hours, robbing her of her own space and politely forcing her to listen to his stories. This kind of deeply unaware behavior that cis-men have sometimes, really affect womxn experiences of traveling, and even if this article is written from a humorous perspective, it is denouncing a very real and unfair situation in which womxn get less space to sit, less space to talk, less space to exist.

We feel we ALL have a responsibility first to call it out when it happens and second, to fight it back, if we feel safe doing it.