Are you giving up space? How to stop people-pleasing
Women talking to little, Gender Bias & all that other shit | The Muse Letter No. 94
Imagine you are a shark. A female shark to be precise. You live in an aquarium in Seoul. The aquarium is all you’ve ever known. You’re eight years old which means that you are somewhat in your late twenties, early thirties. You have seen some shit. You know who you are. You marked your territory and let people know. You’re a shark and not just any shark but a sand tiger shark which says it all: You slay.
So one day when you are just minding your own business, swimming around in your space, this 5-year-old shark, so like this shark that recently graduated from high school or whatever, he bumps into you: the audacity! He bumps into you, on your territory and you don’t like that. – So you eat him.
It takes you 21 hours to devour his body, head first. The people outside of the aquarium are watching you, pulling their cameras out. But you’re focused. This is an act of strength and total commitment. Though you appreciate the attention. The audience obviously loves you and that boy shark had it coming.
You know that eventually you are gonna throw most of him up again. But it was worth it. You smile for the cameras, swim another round enjoying your undisturbed space. That will show them. That will show everyone.
This incident of said female sand tiger shark happened in 2016 but has recently been brought to my attention via TikTok and it felt like it was directly speaking to me, divine intervention style, saying: You need to be that shark!
It said you need to take up more space.
And maybe: you need to eat some people on the way.
Obviously, I am not proclaiming any cannibalism here, I’m also not meaning actual violence for that matter, I mean it metaphorically, as in when someone is entering your space without allowance or more likely you are thinking of giving up your space out of fear of repercussions or because you want to please: I want to be that shark from now on. I want to open my mouth and take any motherfuckers head and swallow it whole and if it takes me 21 hours to devour that piece of shit: I will do it. No questions asked. No mercy.
I deserve my territory. I deserve my space. My time to talk.
The first time I realised that something was wrong with my voice was when a schoolfriend said that she prefers male narrators, that their voice was just better, better to listen to, more soothing. She was not the only one who said this to me in my lifetime and she probably won’t be the last, because likely very highly likely someone is just about to be offended or stop reading or turn away because they think the same which is okay. You know? I am not going to bite your head off for that. Or maybe I will because I’m a shark now. We’ll see –
Anyway. Obviously, there are preferences we all prefer certain things, that’s fine. It’s just strange or it felt very strange to be ten years old and that was all you ever heard. Which made it feel like less of a preference but more of a dominance as if there actually was something being seriously wrong with women’s voices: too high pitched, annoying, too timid.
Is there?
Sorry, I don’t think so. If you have a general problem with female voices then maybe you should figure out your mommy issues and dig deep. Or read some research like this paper by Victoria L. Brescoll titled “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations” from 2012 that states that “powerful women are in fact correct in assuming that they will incur backlash as a result of talking more than others—an effect that is observed among both male and female perceivers.” But that is not even the real shocker, because another research by Anne Cutler and Donia R. Scoot called “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” shows how women are regularly perceived as talking more in mixed group settings compared to their male colleagues even though they are not: “Across a large group of subjects and four dialogues, we found that the contribution of a female speaker to a mixed-sex conversation was systematically judged as greater than that of a male speaker, although in fact, the contributions were identical.”
They have various assumptions about why this bias constitutes itself in men and women such as “Kramer (1975) and Spender (1980) suggested that women are undervalued in society, and as a consequence women's speech is undervalued - female contributions to conversation are overestimated because they are held to have gone on "too long" relative to what female speakers are held to deserve. Preisler (1986) similarly argued that evaluation of women's speech is a function of (under)evaluation of the social roles most usually fulfilled by women.”
I remember how little the women spoke in my class. I wrote about it in my book of essays: “We all started writing comedy. Because the guys in our class preferred that. And yes unfortunately none of the women in my class fought against it for a while. Because the problem was not the few men, the professors, the problem was that internalised hate we had against our own themes, our own narratives.” I remember how I often had a fire in my stomach, pure rage, of not being able to get a word in, of easily being interrupted, of just sitting there with my fist clenching, my foot tapping, just waiting for a gap, a pause to finally say something. And when that happened, when I did in fact say something dealing with the possible ostracising process of having said: too much. Of being that kind of woman.
I remember how I was sitting in a room with three men and one woman in an academic mid-term evaluation and one of the men suddenly felt so offended by my presence he had to say that: You should cheer up a bit. And then talk about my character for 15 minutes and how it had been too grumpy at times in class.
I wish I had had some statistics at hand. To shove it down his throat.
I wish I had realised what was happening and not instead walked home crying, utterly scared that I was perceived in a way no one had ever described me before. How it tore my self-image into two, alienated and unsure how to be at all after that. Because I had to believe it right? These were smart men. They knew what they were doing. Why would they want to hurt me?
“They may love women,” says BYU political-science professor Jessica R. Preece in a study examining the female experience in a top-10, predominately male collegiate accounting program “They may even be a woman!” But as a society, we have been “slowly socialized over years to discount” female expertise and perspectives.
Which is why I am a shark now.
I’m tired of being a woman.
Because I know.
I know better.
My territory. My place. I protect it.
A female sand tiger shark.
I slay.
And if you bump into me
And I don’t like it
I will eat you.
SHOP
Things I Have Noticed - Essays on leaving / searching / finding is a poetic memoir I wrote in these weird pandemic times, about the process of finding one’s own voice.
IN CASE YOU MISSED LAST WEEK’S MUSE LETTER
Doing Hard Things: Receiving A Lot Of Rejections And How Do We Feel About It?
“Fuck that rejection. Fuck that copy-paste email that is not even addressed to you. Fuck that feedback-less little piece of digital information that is purely a means of someone else was luckier or not the right fit or there wasn’t even a real job opening anyway. Don’t make it about you when it’s not. Don’t let it get close to you, not even an inch. Treat it like the unwanted tongue of a stranger in your mouth: cut it off. Let it die in your hand before it reaches your insides. You don’t have to grieve rejection. ”
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