Twitter, allow me a wee thread on taking up space in public: a tale of two seatmates.
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He did wake up once or twice, to eat and to chat with the steward or adjust his blankets, but the seat stayed back until the plane descended, and when he slept, he snored. Loudly. Which, yeah, people can't always help that, but it was very much salt in the wound in this case.
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Because of him, I had to move seats to the spare one on my right, so that I couldn't talk to my husband and son. He never looked around at us once, nor did the male steward ever point out that he'd chosen the least inconsiderate seat to recline.
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These are two small incidents in the scheme of things, but in combination, they've made me think a lot about how we take up space in the world, and how others perceive our entitlement to that space (or lack thereof).
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See, the thing about the train journey was that, while all the individual *seats* were booked, the cabins at the front were not. Seeing an injured woman in pain struggling to lie flat in a way that inconvenienced others, the conductor might have offered her a cabin. He didn't.
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Instead, he chose to shame her for doing what she needed to do to accommodate her illness, which prompted her friend to come up with a solution instead, where as the conductor on my flight, in response to the same scenario minus any visible injury, did nothing.
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I specify visible injury, because it's quite possible the man in front of me required accommodation for an invisible ailment. He might not have been physically able to lie down across all four seats in comfort, and that's fine! But he still had a choice of seats to recline.
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As I said, it's not a big deal in the scheme of things. Nonetheless, I think it's a salient microcosm of the wider phenomenon wherein men are allowed and expected to take up space in public, while women are censured for doing the same thing. FIN.
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End of conversation
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