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Feminist wins award for chair designed to stop ‘manspreading’

Chair encourages men to sit with their legs closed

Sunday 21 July 2019 14:27 BST

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Student designs a chair that could put an end to manspreading

We’ve all been there: having successfully bagged a seat on the tube against all odds, we find ourselves squished between two men, both sitting with knees so far apart that our own could not get closer together to avoid being knocked.

Yes, manspreading is possibly one of the biggest bug bears for women on public transport – and now a feminist designer has come to the rescue.

Laila Laurel, a 3D Design & Craft graduate from the University of Brighton, has designed a chair that features a triangular seat which encourages men to sit with their legs closed, creating a potential solution to the scourge of manspreading.

Created as part of her final-year project entitled “A Solution for Manspreading”, Laurel also created a second chair intended for women which uses a small piece of wood in the centre of the seat to encourage female sitters to rest with her legs parted, allowing them to take up more space.

The graduate says that her design is not to be taken too seriously but admits that the chairs do give a “physicality to an issue women face in quite a fun yet literal way”.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

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According to the online Oxford dictionary, manspreading describes “the practice whereby a man adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat”.

Speaking to The Independent, Laurel says: “My design practice is contextualised within fourth wave feminism and another huge inspiration for these pieces was Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project, a platform in which women can testify about the sexism they have experienced.

“I designed and created these chairs in order to identify and challenge problems surrounding the act of sitting that might potentially be more gender specific, such as ‘man-spreading’.”

Laurel added that she is delighted with the response her design has received, saying: “The reaction of the people who engaged and interacted with my pieces at my Graduate show was really encouraging and exciting as it seemed to spark interesting conversations and also make them laugh, which is something I really value in my work.”

As well as receiving plenty of praise for her design, Laurel’s work has been presented with the Belmond Award for emerging talent.

The luxury hotel and leisure company says it looks for designs that show “imaginative and cleverly presented ideas with a considered overall look and feel along with the quality of work displayed”.

Following the announcement, the judging panel said that Laurel’s chair was “a bold, purpose-driven design that explores the important role of design in informing space, a person’s behaviour and society issues of today”.

(Laila Laurel)

Reacting to the award, Laurel said: “I am completely shocked but very happy and honoured to have won the Belmond Award – and I am looking forward to designing with them this year.”

As part of her prize, Laurel will be commissioned to create a product for the hotel and leisure company and receive a £1,000 bursary.

(Laila Laurel)

In 2017, Madrid took a stand against manspreading by banning men from indulging in the leg extending move on its trains and buses.

The city’s Municipal Transportation Company (EMT) installed a series of new signs in all its carriages and vehicles, showing an illustrated man spreading his legs wide apart on a metro seat with a giant red “X” indicating that it is unacceptable.

(Laila Laurel)

Madrid followed in the footsteps of New York, which was one of the first cities to reject manspreading on public transport back in 2014.

Its “Dude, please stop the spreading” campaign on the city’s metro network won widespread support with some NYPD officers even going as far as arresting offenders who did not comply.

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