“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl… Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”- Sylvia Plath 

I want to talk a little about space and what it feels like to have none. To edge around perimeters not of your own making. To understand oneself circumscribed, dissected down familiar lines, stymied. It is one thing to talk about freedom in the abstract, the legal- it is another to ever live it. 

The body is the first point of social inscription. A living breathing mass of values, protections, bonds. It is the only thing we come into this world owning and the first thing we learn to have authority over, from the time you make a fist around a finger. The body is therefore ground zero for systems of oppression; if one can control the body, one can delimit the whole. 

Ann Cahill writes about the body. She writes from a long tradition of feminist writers- Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartkey, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler- who recognise the body as social scripture. However, where Foucault talks of the body as a docile being shaped and constructed by society, and Butler sees the body as a blank canvas upon which anything can arise, Cahill sees
something else- that danger fundamentally dictates the bodily experience of women. 

Women are so often at war with their bodies. Cahill neatly summarises the paradox that arises from this battle; “If the feminine body is constituted and experienced as the enemy of the woman- not a docile body in relation to power dynamics, but a hostile one in relation to the social desires of the woman- it is also a paradoxically weak one.” It is this ‘weakness’ that embodies what it has meant for the female body to function within society’s bounds. To be kept thin, controlled, hungry and sexually submissive- to be kept down by the threat of near constant danger.

As identified by de Beauvoir and re-iterated in the work of Young, many women subsequently experience the body as a burden, a harbinger and invitation for danger. This is the body experienced as both at risk from patriarchal domination and somehow complicit within it- an unwilling accomplice in its own subjugation. Functionality for women has been reflected through the paradigm of control and myths of liberation from the prison of one’s physical self, the blame for female disempowerment deflected back onto the woman herself.  

If it is this battle that shapes the corporal lives of women, it is the threat of sexual violence that delimits the spatial life- dictating how women are expected to be in the public arena. Whilst men express their sex uninhibited, women contort their bodies to conceal their sex and protect it from violation; “the smallness of a woman’s step, the gathering in of her sitting body” all express the conscious restriction of movement and the sexualised power dynamics inscribed upon the female form. It is a refusal to be consumed that, in its turn, makes us consumptive- dwindling, wasting.

The understanding of the link between our bodies and our safety is inscribed in women from so young. It is sexual terrorism- often well-meaning, sometimes genuinely designed to keep women safe, but nevertheless delivering a message that contorts and confines. Whilst young boys are taught about masturbation, young girls are taught to keep their keys between their fingers and to aim for the eyes. It is prescribing an understanding of space that tells us, crucially, we have none. We have to know how to fight. We have to accept wewill probably lose. 

The issue is that sexual violence is endemic & it is impossible to measure how many terrible things have been averted by the way women are conditioned to act in public space. What can be measured however, is the degree of sexualisation inherent in these precautions taught by rote in the schoolteacher’s room, the public safety notices, the discussions among friends. 

Consider this: a 1985 study showed that most women fear rape significantly more than they fear murder. Countless studies over the intervening years have led to the rise of a theory called the shadow of sexual assault theory that suggests womens’ fear of crime (disproportionate in relation to how often we fall victim to it and un-tempered by the real crime levels in the places we live) is a generalised fear of sexual assault. Cahill notes this: “for the male subject, the threat presented is one of the destruction of the body; for the feminine body, the trenchant threat is one aimed at their sexual being and freedom”. This fear limits the way women live their lives- leaving “entire portions” of the 24-hour day out of bounds for half of the population, the streets radiating danger.

Yet, of course, most women who experience violence experience it within their own home, are raped by people known to them, are coerced and harassed at school and work. Our understanding of womens’ safety does not extend over the threshold or beyond the garden gate and thus is rarely about protecting the body (if it were, we’d be taught proper self-defence and domestic violence services wouldn’t be woefully underfunded) but about protecting the soul. Apportioning accountability. Avoiding the stranger. 

There is so little space available to women. This is a well-worn, threadbare feeling; something turns, and you realise the space you are in was never yours to begin with. The space you thought you could live, sleep, wander, rest, work or dance in was yours on borrowed time, ready to submit itself to a more malignant authority, ready to cast you back into the fire. There is a shift- you make yourself small again. You talk around the subject. You plan an escape and plan for if you can’t make one. I am always ten steps ahead. Things still sometimes go wrong. 

I tell myself that to travel west- as Plath puts it- is that desire to run, to shed the bonds of learned experience and return to the pre-knowledge, fearless state of pre-adulthood. To mingle without compunction, to take whatever space you want and to hell with everyone else. And yet if I am really honest, I remember age 7 the terror of a man who offered me a KitKat and asked me my name. The whisperings of the white van man in the playground. The footsteps behind me on my walk home from primary school. If I am really honest this is something I have always known. The earth is huge, and I can’t touch it. And yet I can taste what it would be to experience otherwise- to be part of the scene, anonymous, recording. 

This ground was never really ours & maybe never will be. These bounds placed upon the female form are unyielding within a patriarchal world- both the root and the sustenance of gendered oppression. Yet our collective body cries resistance. Networks of care, protection and solidarity among women are like nothing else I have ever seen - powerful, immutable, impenetrable. Simmering with latent rage and manifest joy- an intimacy that demands its own space. To encase these solidarities in iron, to escape our alienation from the Self into each other, to hold space for one another outside of male-owner-occupied rooms, to walk each other home- this is my consuming desire. 

I no longer recognise myself in Plath’s vision so much as I did as when I first read it many years ago. I now know much of what goes on in those rooms- the late night lock-ins, the barracks, the boarding schools. It is not all that. I do want the open road, the open field- but do not care too much for those doors opened into a world that was never meant for me. I want freedom but not at the
cost of my femininity. I want freedom but not that brand. And those times when I am free it is not through emulation, imitation, parody (it is not, thank God, the 90s).
I am free because other women make me so.