Manspreading is plain rude – not another front in the gender wars

Men have called the shots for a rather long time, so it’s hardly a surprise that now that the tables are turning, they’re turning hard. These days the masculine sex, once able to get away with figurative murder, is taken to task for everything from its way of explaining things (mansplaining), to its way of doing business (which caused the “he-session” of 2008).

And then there’s manspreading, the practice of spreading the legs wide in public seating areas, especially on trains and buses. Long the scourge of commuters the world over, manspreading is back in the news as the transport authorities in Madrid, under pressure from Left-wing political parties, have decided to crack down on it.

Now, manspreading is deeply annoying in a number of ways. There’s the insouciance of it, the not so much as a by-your-leave before the chops are let to flagrantly sprawl, forcing the person next door, in all likelihood already crossing her legs, to make herself even smaller (not fun after a long day of work, encumbered with bags).

Then there’s the repulsiveness of it, the dodgy, unwanted fleshiness of it. For even if contact with the stranger’s thighs can be avoided, his thigh heat is harder to escape from. The problem for those seated opposite is also acute, for when a man spreads, the eye is drawn to the only feature of note in that tundra of leg – not a view that most desire while commuting.

Yet the stance of those who pushed for the ban, who view manspreading as the “exhibition of machismo and a micro-aggression”, is wrong-headed. That men spread their legs on public transport while women – trained from birth to carefully control and conceal their bodies – refrain does hint at troubling inequalities. But the reality is that manspreading itself is not first and foremost about men being awful; it’s more about men being thoughtless.

Which is why it is the anger over manspreading, not the manspreading itself, that is the real problem. It is our increasing inability to hold people to account in real-time, in public, that we need to address.

One reason we don’t tell people off anymore is that we’re worried about being stabbed or mugged for doing so. The bigger reason, though, stems from the schizophrenia of our digital society. Online, we’re a font of anonymous vitriol and bile; offline, in professional and social circles, we’re under unprecedented pressure not to offend.

This means that we would rather let people litter, blare music, and refuse to get up for old people in public than risk addressing them to their face. We’re scared of being seen as mean, politically incorrect, and, increasingly, of getting sued. We’re also lazy – we want an easy life, and we’re getting off at the next stop, anyway.

The result of this skewed balance between real-time evasiveness and online spite is that our emotional responses to things are dangerously deferred. This deferral, this placidness in public, means that things build up, so that we’re permanently on the brink; now all it takes is a seating posture to enrage us. We need to return to a time when telling someone off for being rude and inconsiderate in person was not only the norm, but our duty. This would be a far more effective way of ridding the world of manspreading than an overwrought debate about patriarchal aggression. follow Zoe Strimpel on Twitter @zstrimpel; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion