Cowgirl71: taking up space

Recently a friend posted about taking up space. About the conscious decision to take up space as a woman, to not make herself small for the convenience of men.

I've been thinking about that a lot. How many ways I make myself small. How I learned from a young age not to take up space. It's been a message not only for how I take up space in the world in regards to men, but also my mother made it very clear that she didn't have the emotional capacity for me to take up space with wants or needs.

Key things I learned about (not) taking up space when I was growing up:
1. Don't be an inconvenience.
2. Don't make other people uncomfortable with your Truth.
3. Don't have needs (no matter how bad things are).
4. Don't ask for help (no matter how bad things are).

Something that has been really sitting heavy with me is how we aren't allowed to take up space as victims/survivors. How many times have we heard "protective" men boast about how the will k*ll anyone if they ever sexually assaulted one of their loved ones, but when the latest headline of one their stans SAing someone comes out they just brush it off as "no big deal" or some how do the mental gymnastics to make it the victims fault. And these same fellas wonder why victims don't report, or report sooner.

If we tell our story we are shamed, if we don't report we are shamed, if we wait too long we are shamed, if we disclose we are shamed. And Gods forbid if women disclose about abuse by a famous person, it's always "she's just trying to get money (and/or fame)".We can never win. No one wants to hear it. Shame on us for telling our stories, shame on us for not tell sooner.

I think about how there is shame and stigma associated with being a victim of sexual abuse/assault, but not so much with the offenders (case in point: a man credibly accused of sexual assault multiple times, including by multiple Epstein survivors still managed to get elected president).

What would it be like instead of victims carrying the shame, the actual predators carried the shame? What if we got to take up space as victims/survivors? I know I tell a lot of hair-raising stories in my blogs, and social media, but I don't tell the "bad" shit- the shit that has had me in therapy for over 30 years, the shit that keeps me awake at night, that crawls under my skin (although my last post published since starting this post starts to delve a little deeper into that particular pit of snakes). What if ALL of me got to take up space, even those horrible things that have made me try to make myself small so no one will ever know, so no one will notice me and do those things to me again?

***Although I'm only publishing this today, the meat of this blog has been in my head for a couple weeks. The combination of my friends "taking up space blog" along with my wife telling me about Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir really got me thinking about how we (victims of SA) are supposed to keep quite, keep the secret, protect the men, protect the peace, protect the reputation of the family/institution/church/etc, and in doing so make ourselves so small that our soul eats itself. The fact that our truth and experience is continually dismissed, and denied- the recent memes say it so well: "The fact that people need a dead man's files to believe to believe thousands of women tells you what you need to know about whose voices they value".

We talk about the statistics of how many victims there are of SA, but we don't talk about how many predators there are. We talk about how women can stop attack, but not about how men can stop being sexual predators. Discussions of consent get turned into jokes. And at the end of the day, it's always the victims fault for being vulnerable, for being pretty, for being too "masculine" (thus challenging his fragile sense of masculinity), for being drunk, for being at the wrong place, for not fighting hard enough, for smiling, for not smiling, for being nice, for being a bitch, for saying the "wrong" thing, for not saying "no" the right way, for not reporting, for reporting, for waiting to report...for existing. And if everything is your fault because you simply exist, then you better make yourself small, but even that doesn't protect you.

What a mighty revolution it would be if so many of us told our truth unabashedly that the tables turned and the predators, and the rape-apologists were forced to carry the shame, and the predators actually faced appropriate consequences?