‘Manspreading’ and ‘Shrinking Women’

I read this article yesterday Watch What Happens When A Woman Tries Manspreading On The Subway. Discussion about it had to do with the effect of size and gender on how you sit in various situations and it is interesting to hear men’s responses to this topic. It is not, at least to me, that men are intentionally seeking to take up more space, it is how simply and clearly this illustrates that women are taught, even in our modern world, to take up *less* space as part of our gender responsibility.

Over my life I somehow picked up the idea that “modesty” and “humility” involved me trying to take up as little space as possible. I thought that I was supposed to show that I could thrive in the smallest physical, emotional and spiritual place possible.

Then I learned that the Hebraic understanding of “humility” is “taking up the amount of space that God created you to take up in the world — no more, as that is stealing it from another, and no less, as that is failing to be all that God created you to be.”

Talk about FREEING!

I started expanding myself — not manspreading, specifically, but refusing to shrink for another person. I am a very intuitive person and when I come in contact with someone who is aggressively putting out there that they deserve more space — whether male or female, whether in how they sit, or how they speak to me/others — my initial reaction is to shrink and ‘show respect.’ BUT now I understand that respect is earned and the bullying tactics are intended to demand respect without having to earn it.

So I stop shrinking, and I step back, and I make sure I am taking up my own space — the space that God created me to take up — and eventually they, at least, respect my space.

It’s the heart of boundaries and it changed my life.

It is also, to me, the real foundation of the egalitarian issue. Are both male and female, created in the image of God, free to take up the full amount of space that God created them to inhabit?

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