Male scientist tries to justify manspreading, gets accused of mansplaining

According to a male scientist, men need to sit with their legs apart - and not just because they have testicles and a penis.

Mansplaining is a divisive issue on public transport. Or anywhere, really. Park benches, NHS waiting rooms.

People get rather emotional...

Even cats do it.

In New York, there's a campaign to prevent it happening - and countless blog posts denounce manspreading, calling it 'male privilege' and unnecessary.

Last year, two men were even arrested for manspreading in Brooklyn, New York.

A male scientist has attempted to explain the reasons behind thighs shifting left and right. It's not simply a matter of comfort and, according to the researcher, cannot be dismissed as a load of old balls.

Data scientist Mark Skinner says that male bodies are designed to do it. He talked to EconoMonitor about the maths of manspreading.

Based on our multivariate analysis of anthropometric parameters across multiple data sets, manspreading appears to be an adaptive strategy that men employ due to innate morphological characteristics.

Looking past the A-Level science exam, EconoMonitor explains that men have much wider shoulders in contrast to women - who tend not manspread, because they're not men.

Basically, if a man doesn't go a little wider, he won't be able to find the space for his top-half, his torso, because people will crowd around him and squash him into his seat.

In a sense, a man’s knees may function like the proverbial cat’s whiskers — used as a kind of heuristic to test if there is ample space for his torso to fit on the seat.

Jezebel calls all this 'mansplaining'.

The word is defined by Oxford Dictionaries like this:

(Of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronising.

Jezebel says that more mansplaining happened when Skinner went onto suggest that military dudes further example the need to manspread.

Because they're likely hench and muscly, they need even more to find the required room - “proportionally, a man needs to secure more seat space using his legs than a woman would need to in order for the man to maintain enough room to sit up straight in his seat.”

We daren't comment on such an issue. Who knows whether it's right or wrong.

But men definitely do it.