Occupying Space

One of the many notions about the differences between men and women is what space they occupy, how much space they occupy, and where one’s own “space” ends and another’s begins. I think it is pretty universal to see men occupying a lot of space, more than they need.  They spread themselves out when sitting, use their louder and lower voices to talk over others, use their height and girth to intimidate, and they walk through the world as though it was made for them.  It was. Men have decided how the world goes.  They occupy public space and use private space as a refuge. They carry the space around them as theirs, sensitive to being crowded, bumped, and touched. They make room in their spaces for certain others who must be invited. They see it as interference with their being when someone gets in their space without invitation. Mostly, they take up a lot of space and define it as theirs.

Women, on the other hand, are not permitted their own space. Not when it comes to men. Women are used to their bodies being touched, watched, judged, and invaded. Their own space doesn’t exist independent of someone who wants in it which they become used to quite early in their lives. They are meant to live in the private sphere, out of the public life of men. They are meant to be looked at just a little too long.  They are invited in when they are attractive enough to be seen as sexual beings or caretakers. They are meant to be available as bodies and with behaviors that men want.  They are meant for making the private sphere a refuge for men.

This brings me back around to the idea and practice that women’s bodies are a means to an end. The end is whatever a man desires – sex, pleasure, dominance, dinner on the table, offspring or not, status among other men, clothes in his closet, obedience, nurturance.  When men believe that women are there for the taking and using, men become animals. That some men know how to love and care for other people is a most wonderful thing, but not something women can count on. What women do learn is wariness, heightened awareness of their behaviors and appearance, how to be among the selected and desired as a very important aspect of themselves, and sometimes fear. They learn to live in male spaces and to be smaller and less. Let’s not let this continue.