"Am I Small Enough Yet?"

It is amazing how society conditions us in a way that we typically do not even realize that this is conditioned. Similar to how women are conditioned to be silent in the romance Silence, different genders are conditioned to fit into an allocated space of society. What really resonated with me when reading Taking up Space by Kyle Lukoff, was when he mentioned how society conditioned females to take up as little space as possible, hence the reason eating disorders are so prevalent in women. Now why would someone go through all that work and pain, just to take up as little space as possible? The answer: the amount of space a person takes up needs to be equivalent to the amount that person deserves.

I remember watching a YouTube video a couple of months ago, and it was this 19 year-old model telling people how she no longer gets any jobs because the modelling industry considered her too big, because her hips were ‘too wide’ and her butt ‘too big’. I found this disturbing because she notes that her body mass index is 17.5 which is underweight by any standard and the normal body mass index for her age and height is 19. She is considered too big overall, so even with diet and exercising, she may still be considered too big to continue her career. This is just one of many examples of how, if a female is not small enough, society will punish the individual to be smaller. In this case, the 19 year-old is punished to be smaller, because at her current size, she does not deserve a job in her industry.

The 19 year-old model who is obviously too big.

Society conditions us to be in certain categories and we must fit into specific boxes. If we do not literally and figuratively fit, then we must take actions to make ourselves fit through dieting and exercise. We are given unrealistic ideals to achieve to be smaller from the Barbie doll look to Disney’s princesses figures seen in media. This small unrealistic look even lead one woman who wanted to have a small waist like a Barbie so much that she wore corset waist-trainer where eventually, her ribs became so deformed that a person could grip her waist with one hand. Woman go through all these struggles just to get the approval of society, only to be told they are not good enough or small enough, like the 19 year old model mentioned before. We are told how to sit in a way to look more respectable, by crossing one leg over another, but this is just conditioning to make ourselves smaller, while men are encouraged to take up space, by splaying their legs apart. If women want to make space for themselves in society, like in business, then they must assume male characteristics, to 'deserve' that space. Until reading Taking up Space, I never realized that that even transsexuals are conditioned to be small, because society believes they should not exist, so they do not deserve any space. However, if society ‘allows’ these individuals to exist, then the individual needs to assimilate themselves to one gender or another to acquire their deserved space. When Kyle wants to bring up being transsexual in his support group, he is told not to because it basically does not 'exist' as an issue for why one would have an eating disorder. 

We constantly let these social expectations demean us as a person and lead to believe that all our value lies in how our bodies look to others, which is frankly ridiculous. Our worth in society should not be based off of our gender. Because honestly, why should men ‘deserve’ more space than others?