Hey y’all.
We’ve all heard about, and experienced, some degree of manspreading on buses and subways. I’ve seen it at sporting events. Maybe even in the chairs in a pharmacy waiting area.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, there is a new frontier for manspreading: the weekly department-wide conference at an academic hospital!
Here’s what happens: Every week, we have a multidisciplinary conference, where we present cases and argue about the best way to manage them. It’s a good time, for the most part. We have attendings from two departments, fellows, nurses and techs, in addition to a number of other members of the team.
With so many people in attendance, the room fills pretty quickly. There are rows of seats in the back, and often, people need to sneak in and out to answer pages.
So, every week, *without fail*, there is a man in attendance who pulls up a rolling chair, places it so that it obscures any pathway to the back row, sits in the chair, then spreads his legs apart to a comical angle, ~100 degrees (I want to take a protractor to this one day). If any of us would like to take a seat in the back row, we have to ask him to please let us through.
He never seems to take a hint that people, repeatedly, need to ask him to temporarily stop obstructing access to seats.
Here’s what gets me: once I realized this was a pattern, the first thought to cross my mind was “Hmm, who is that? Is that an attending that I’ve just never met before?”*
Essentially, in my mind, I found myself wondering, “Does he rank high enough in this system to justify obstructing a row a seats?”
How crazy is that?! NO ONE is justified in sitting that way. It’s probably a fire hazard. But, in my mind, as a reflex, when encountering someone asserting their dominance over space, I first check and see if they perhaps have the RIGHT to spill into the public space without apology.
We, as women, have been conditioned to believe that everyone deserves space more than we do. This is why we don’t even tend to notice the manspreading until it ACTUALLY DISRUPTS A DEPARTMENTAL CONFERENCE.
Ladies- let’s keep on calling out manspreading any time we see it. On the train, or, perhaps, in the middle of an academic meeting.
Defiant Bitch, MD
*Of note, this man is not an attending. He’s a tech who does not work directly in the departmental subsection related to this conference. I am still trying to figure out why he is even there every week. Other than to annoy me.