I was on the Northern line when a stranger’s thigh began rubbing against mine, and what started as a small moment of annoyance turned into a deliberate refusal to cede the space I was entitled to. In a Metro column, the writer describes planting her foot, pressing her thigh back and, after a tense exchange, watching the man move away — a victory she calls “liberating” and has since repeated on trains, buses and aeroplanes as a form of quiet resistance to manspreading.

She frames these repeated small acts as intentionally reclaiming crowded public space: refusing to give up an armrest on a long-haul flight, sitting squarely rather than folding away on the Tube, and sometimes — she admits — retreating when a situation felt unsafe. The column is personal and anecdotal, but it also presents the tactics and reactions she met: some men moved seats, others reacted with huffs or pushed back physically, and women around her often recognised and supported her actions.

The behaviour being protested has a name. Merriam‑Webster defines “manspreading” as men sitting with legs wide apart in public seating so as to intrude on others’ space, a neologism that gained traction in the mid‑2010s. Linguistic analyses trace the term’s rapid rise to public debate and transit campaigns — for example, city authorities and transport operators in places such as New York and Madrid produced visible anti‑manspreading messaging that helped the word enter mainstream use — and corpus data show spikes in public discussion after those campaigns were launched.

That public debate matters because unwanted touching and space‑invading behaviours on public transport sit in a wider pattern of harassment. Survey analysis shows a majority of women in London report experiencing unwanted sexual behaviour on public transport — from deliberate pressing up against them to groping — yet only a small proportion report incidents to police. Transport authorities have responded: Transport for London launched campaigns urging passengers to look out for and report sexual harassment, explicitly listing rubbing, groping, leering and taking images without consent among behaviours passengers should report, and stressing there is no need to show criminal intent in order to make a report.

Online discussion has amplified both condemnation and counter‑claims. Research into Twitter conversations around #manspreading finds that the hashtag surfaced many everyday accounts of men occupying space and also captured performative responses — including women posting about “womanspreading” as a deliberate rebuttal. That scholarship shows the debate is contested: some portray manspreading as deliberate dominance rooted in gendered power dynamics, while others argue physiological or inadvertent explanations; social media both documents harassment and becomes a stage for performative pushback and backlash.

That complexity has practical implications. Pushing back physically against an encroacher may reclaim space and make an individual feel empowered, but it can also escalate tensions or endanger someone who is isolated. Campaigns and academic work both stress the importance of reporting and of bystander support as safer, system‑level responses; the columnist’s experience of mutual recognition with other women — and of men generally not manspreading beside other men — reinforces the argument that such behaviours are gendered and socially negotiated, not merely random spatial habits.

Small acts of resistance, the writer argues, are a form of peaceful protest in a wider moment when women’s rights and safety feel contested. Whether those acts alone shift culture is uncertain — linguistic, survey and policy evidence suggests change will hinge on a mix of public awareness campaigns, reporting and enforcement, and shifts in everyday etiquette. Still, personal stories of reclaiming space do more than describe discomfort: they feed into public conversation about whose comfort is prioritised on shared transport, and they illuminate why some passengers see taking up space as a political as well as practical choice.

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Source: Noah Wire Services