At a pizza joint, the TV was playing a sports talk show. I watched it while I ate my slice and I was struck by how uncomfortable the hosts looked sitting in their chairs. They’d all clearly been told to sit up straight and were all managing to do their best but only one guy looked comfortable. The older guy and the woman were both struggling a bit while the younger white guy looked confident, poised and absolutely in charge. But it wasn’t his race, his age or his emotional state that made him look appear so. It was his chair. The chair he was in was the right size and shape to allow him to sit upright in it with almost no effort.
It was as if that chair was designed for his body. His colleagues, however, had to make small adjustments to even look mildly comfortable in chairs that were, for them, either too high, or too short, depending on the person. The older man had to lean back a little and hold his hands clasped in his lap to make it work – the woman’s knees had to come up a bit, so she looked a little like a giant sitting in a child’s chair. As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I looked at this and wanted to go right to their TV set and make adjustments to their chairs. I wanted to put some extra support under the pelvis of the woman and under the feet of the older man.
I couldn’t help thinking about how all of those anchors are probably told by their producers and agents and managers and so on, to “Sit up! Improve your posture! You looked uncomfortable for some reason! Why is that guy dominating the show and you guys look like kids?” These TV presenters are likely trying hard to re-adjust themselves when what really needs adjusting are their chairs.
This makes me think about how we handle issues of social justice. So many of us, when addressing social inequality, will be told to adjust ourselves, to improve our attitudes, to be more confident, etc. but really, it’s just the stupid chairs. We’re trying to fight for the same comfort as everyone else, while the world insists that we adapt our bodies to fit the chairs.
It is the simplest thing in the world to put a couple of pads in the seat of a chair to raise it up for someone with long legs, or to put something under the feet of someone with short legs – but in a world where a selected few are really well-suited to the chairs they’re in, those selected few look really good. They look confident and in charge because they’re sitting on chairs that were made for them. It is the young wealthy white men for whom these metaphoric chairs are made. And usually, just as it was on this show, the rest of us have to work extra hard to reach that same level of comfort and confidence.
As a culture, we need to figure out how to raise up the chair or the floor to get everyone on equally comfortable footing.