Twitter, allow me a wee thread on taking up space in public: a tale of two seatmates.
Story 1: Two weeks ago, I had to take a ten hour train journey from Sydney to Melbourne. The woman in front of me got in her seat and immediately put it all the way back, which meant I had basically zero room. However, before I had a chance to be annoyed, she turned & apologised.
When she did this, I saw that one of her eyes was covered with gauze & a huge plastic patch. She'd just had two eye surgeries in the space of five days and was unable to fly home from the hospital for this reason; hence taking the train. She'd paid for 1st class just to lie down.
Technically, she was meant to be lying flat to recover, but the seat was all she could manage. I accepted this, because clearly she was in a lot of pain and discomfort. The male steward who came by & chastened her for having the seat back, however, rolled his eyes & was cross.
A few minutes later, her friend, who had the adjacent seat, turned to me and offered to swap places until they got off, so that she'd be the one with her sick friend's seat in her lap. I accepted, and we all had as pleasant a trip as possible. Both women were lovely.
The other relevant information here is that our train was fully booked, a fact announced multiple times by the conductors. Even if her friend hadn't kindly switched with me, I wouldn't have been able to find a new seat, nor could she have moved either. So all of us made do.
Story 2: Yesterday, my family & I took a nine hour plane trip from Australia to Hawaii, our layover on the way to LA. It was not a full flight; our row had one spare seat, while plenty of four-seat rows had only one passenger - including the bulkhead-facing row in front of ours.
At the start of the flight, the lone male passenger in the row ahead of us was sitting in front of the unoccupied seat to my right. However, after a conversation with the steward, who pointed out that he had the row to himself, he relocated to the seat in front of me.
As soon as the plane was properly airborne, this guy - who had an ENTIRE FREE ROW to lie down in if he wanted, and who'd vacated the one seat with nobody behind it - put his seat back as far as it would go and went to sleep, snoring like a chainsaw. He did this the whole flight.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
FIN.
