Genderspecs – changing gendered perspectives, one blog at a time.

It’s always a joyous moment when I receive an email telling me that the next podcast episode of ‘The Guilty Feminist’ is out. This time the theme was ‘Taking Up Space,’ and how women don’t tend to do it quite as much as men.

I’ve suffered from bad shoulders for years. Part of it is the curse of the writer/student I became in later life – carrying my laptop about on my back like a tortoise with a portable office. Running doesn’t help. WhenI get tired, I start to hunch over, my shoulders creep up and I find I’m tensing, without thinking about it. But the other culprit, which I’ve only just discovered, is the way I walk.

My ‘normal’ stance is weird – I hunch my shoulders, my head is down, and my arms tucked in. Part of this could just be crap posture, but there’s something else going on. It’s a way of carrying my body that makes the smallest physical impact on the world around me.

So today, buoyed up by the challenges on the podcast (if you’re not listening to it yet, please do!) I tried something different. I dropped my shoulders, let my arms swing and held my head up.

I felt enormous. I felt like I was taking up too much space, impeding on others. It also felt great. There’s a theory, based on the observation of chimps in the wild, that adopting powerful physical poses can have an impact on your sense of power and importance. Simply standing in a way that makes you look confident can lead to more assertive behaviour and boost your self-belief.

So why did walking like that feel uncomfortable for me? It’s no big shocker to discover that, statistically, men take up more space than women. From manspreading on the train to dominating conversation in the pub, men are far more likely to demand attention and physical space. It’s something that girls and boys are taught from a young age, especially if we look at notions of what is considered ‘ladylike’ or ‘manly.’

In relation to this, an interesting phenomenon is the way people move out of the way (or don’t) on the pavement. Next time you’re out and about, take note. As Deborah Frances-White discovered in her challenge, it doesn’t take very long to notice a pattern. More often than not, women move out of the way for each other and for men, while men are far more likely to stay their course, irrespective of whether someone is approaching from the other direction or not. And this stuff matters. As Sofie Hagen pointed out, feeling ‘invisible’ in the world impacts of feelings of self-worth, value and confidence.

So I tried it out. Along with my new, confident walking stance, I decided that I would play a bit of ‘pavement chicken,’ and see if I could stand my ground. Focusing on a point behind the person walking towards me, I kept my head up and strode purposefully, and took note about how others responded. Invariably, if I was a woman, she moved out of the way (I didn’t adopt this strategy for people with prams or who looked a bit unsteady on their feet).

However, there were some that just didn’t move. One in particular springs to mind. A large guy, tall and wide, who had clearly spent his whole life expecting others to get out of his way. I stayed strong. Keeping my path absolutely straight, I resisted the urge to move to one side, flinch or apologise. He didn’t move either. We got closer and closer together – neither altering our course. At the very last moment, he almost jumped to one side, looking rather surprised. Others smacked straight into my shoulder, a little grumble coming out for daring to intrude on their personal space. It was starting to get enjoyable.

I decided to take it to the tube, and do a bit of femspreading. After all, good ventilation is important to guard against yeast infections, so why should men get all the crotch space? I have to say, it felt pretty weird. I felt exposed, as if someone was going to sit down and tut at me. I felt unladylike, as if I was resisting every urge to be ‘neat’ and ‘modest,’ and other such terms that only get trotted out when talking about women. Perhaps if more of us took this awareness of the physical space we take up and acted upon it, we could start to make an impact on the way male and female space is perceived, along with giving ourselves a well-needed boost of confidence.

But there are other spaces we need to claim for our own. Multiple studies have shown the prevalence of men interrupting women, men dominating conversation in mixed gender groups, as well as the infamous ‘mansplaining’ phenomenon. Many’s the time when, after trying and failing to enter a conversation, I’ve slapped on my -oh-how-very-interesting face, inserted a few ‘hmms’ for good measure, and got on with thinking about a lesson plan or a plot point I’ve been working on, as I’ve admitted defeat at ever getting a word in edgeways.

There are a few techniques that can work, perhaps after I’ve been striding down the road and bashing into people, when I’ve decided that I simply won’t be left out. One is to just keep talking. Just continue the flow of your talk as if nothing has been said, and they will usually stutter and fall quiet, once they’ve got the hint. Another is to wait for the interruption to finish, and then simply pick up from where you left off, as if nothing had been said. A final possibility is to make it clear to everyone else – and him – that it’s happening. A simple, ‘actually, I haven’t finished’ might make people feel awfully uncomfortable (especially in the hyper-polite culture that is the UK) but by drawing attention to it, perhaps making eye contact with other people when you say it, hopefully they feel like enough of an idiot to shut up. Of course, there will always be some men that will not respond to any of this. Possible alternatives include changing jobs, wearing a wig and fake moustache to your meeting, or perhaps taking some sort of ‘interruption buzzer’ around with you, to be used whenever someone feels the need to cut you off.

So let’s make femspreading a thing – making our bodies and voices more prominent in society, in order to lead to a more positive future for girls everywhere.

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