Look, we’ve all been the unfortunate middle of an airplane seat sandwich.

And the plane seat pain is even worse for the tall among us. But in this story, did one man stretched things too far?

Let’s see where the story lands…

AITA for manspreading on a plane?

A few months ago I (26M) was alone on a long flight, ~6 hours. I had a middle seat between a young woman (20sF) in the window seat, and a woman (30sF) on the aisle.

I’m tall and am never comfortable on planes. My knees always dig into the seat in front and it can be quite painful.

Already, a nightmare.

I usually try to take a walk around the airport before flights to stretch my legs, but neglected to this time.

It was Spirit airlines so even less legroom than usual.

That’s NOT the spirit.

About half an hour after takeoff I found my left knee inching to the side for the sweet relief of open space — specifically, the no-man’s-land in between seats, level with the shared armrest.

But I wasn’t paying attention to my knee the entire time. I’ll concede it’s possible that at some point I was occupying space that rightfully belonged to my window seat neighbor.

All was well for ~2 hours.

Two hours into the plane, things started to get turbulent.

At this point, the woman in the window seat called over the flight attendant. She asked her something like “Could you tell him to keep his ****ing leg in his own ****ing seat.”

With horror, I understood she was talking about me. I instantly retracted my leg in deep shame. She added something about “his enormous ‘limb'” — my understanding was that it was meant to be a snide reference to the idea that spreading your legs is about male genital comfort.

Eesh. It’s like SHE kneed HIM where it counts.

But she wasn’t speaking very clearly, and the flight attendant (50sF) didn’t seem to understand her. The FA asked her some sort of clarifying question but she didn’t answer and eventually the attendant went away.

I had been shocked into silence, but when the FA left I frantically began to apologize. But she refused to speak to me.

Apology not accepted, it seems.

She acted like she didn’t hear me. Instead she started furiously texting on her phone (yeah, texting during a flight. I thought it was weird too).

Aisle Seat woman said she had some extra space on her side I could use, but then promptly went to sleep. Oh well.

I tried again to apologize to Window Seat woman, but again she ignored me.

I went from embarrassed to confused. I kept replaying it in my head, wondering why she didn’t simply ask me to move my knee instead of calling over the attendant.

This is definitely a bumpy flight.

I started sneaking peeks at her phone. My defense is that I was baffled by her behavior and wanted answers. I’ll admit that I was being judgmental, too.

Here’s why: she spent the last 3 hours of the flight watching TikToks about shaming obese people and texting someone she called papi.

I didn’t see all of it but a significant portion was definitely about me; she wrote, “Men really do be too much sometimes” with a laughing emoji.

Was TikTok her tell?

She ignored me the whole rest of the flight and I ignored her.

I got a good but painful workout of whatever muscle it is that keeps your knees together.

Spirits were low on this Spirit flight. But was this guy wrong to stretch his, er, limbs?

Let’s take a look at the comments.

This person says, pay for more legroom even if it costs an arm and a leg.

Another commenter has a problem with the more minute details of this story…

Although this commenter thinks the Window Seat Woman was wrong, the snooping and spreading are worse:

This person says intrude on the aisle, not your fellow passengers.

Last but not least, this person says, own up and pay up!

I’d take a little actual turbulence over this kind of conflict at ten thousand feet.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.