Manspreading
… and why your wife doesn't want your last name.
Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?
The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the Avengers movie, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story), permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness: a kick in the nuts.
We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.
If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises, for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rogers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc., are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the “Thor” movie sequels. This is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Women® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that have been written for them to fill.
Manspreading
I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured (what we were told was) a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye, you can tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat, and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve seen similar protests before, and if you look at the video, you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in television commercials.
There was another woman who won a design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man, so I need to take up space.”
But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. Even male primates do this.
According to the primatologist Frans de Waal, manspreading is not unique to human males; it’s also found in the males of many nonhuman primates. In other primates, it functions as both a sexual display and a dominance display: Only the most dominant males feel safe enough to sit with such a vulnerable area of their bodies exposed.
Whether that’s the explanation in humans is anybody’s guess - but I imagine that manspreading is more common among confident guys than timid ones, so perhaps there’s some overlap in the psychology of manspreading in humans vs. nonhuman primates.
