Manspreading is a problem, but so is woman-squishing

Recently, I was having a rather rambling, woo-woo conversation with a friend. She told me about ‘somatic experiencing’, about how our bodies store emotions, bear an imprint of any psychological injury that’s happened to us. I’d told her I was trying to fix my terrible slouch, and she said, well, you know, that comes from a kind of trauma too.

- Amulya.Gopalakrishnan @timesgroup.com

And you know what, she’s dead-right. Too many women are schooled into femininity with a hunching, a shrinking. I could always tell Indian women and NRI women apart by their bearing. Too many of us have a ‘don’t notice me’ posture, with rounded shoulders, indrawn chests; we carry our bodies around instead of inhabiting them. Girls start to do it to deflect attention from their breasts, or because they’re too tall, or because they’ve faced sexual harassment in the streets, or would just like to live free from raking stares. And often, that head bent, demure look is beamed at us as a beauty ideal. That’s how the mousetrap closes in — shrinking becomes such a norm that a woman simply taking up space and aiming ahead is conspicuous, seen as unruly.