A University of Brighton graduate has won a national award for designing a chair that stops men from manspreading.

The online Oxford dictionary describes ‘manspreading’ as:

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The practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport, adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat or seats.

Laila Laurel, a 3D Design & Craft graduate, designed the chair as part of her final-year project titled ‘A Solution for Manspreading’. It’s basically a chair with a triangular seat, meaning it’s pretty difficult to sit any way other than with your legs closed.

She 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. Erm… I guess that’s one way to fight the ‘patriarchy’, turn the tables on them!

Laila told the Independent:

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’.

Below we see the two chairs ‘in action’:

Who said uni students don’t contribute anything to society eh? One’s a men-only chair with a triangular seat that makes it difficult to manspread, the other is a women-only chair with the triangle turned the other way and a piece of wood in the middle so that you can womanspread. Both look uncomfortable as fuck. Genius!

Come to think of it, we might have to order a bunch of these chairs for Sick Chirpse HQ. Definitely too much manspreading going on.

For the Russian woman who is going around pouring BLEACH on men who she finds manspreading on public transport, click HERE. Definitely a more proactive approach.