According to the Google overlords’ AI Overview, “the phrase ‘taking up space’ doesn’t have a single inventor It’s an idiom that has evolved over time, gaining prominence in various contexts, particularly in discussions about social justice and personal empowerment. It refers to the act of asserting oneself, expressing one’s opinions, and general occupying a space (physical or metaphorical) with confidence and visibility.”
If you’re at all interested in any form of social justice, or have spent significant time amongst anyone fluid in therapy speak, you’ve probably heard the term before. I like how a 2017 Refinery29 article succinctly puts it,
The phrase “taking up space” has become somewhat ubiquitous lately. The concept, of course, means different things to different people beyond literally existing somewhere and therefore taking up a part of the world. Oftentimes, it’s about asserting our right to exist proudly, whether it’s calling out the manspreader on the train, or reclaiming words that other people might use to try to insult us.
At face value—and in its current vernacular iteration—taking up space is fundamentally a good thing. The phrase is most often utilized by anyone who can consider themselves a minority—ethnic minorities, racial minorities, women, older folks, members of the LGBTQ+ community—whom our admittedly heteronormative, ageist, patriarchal, predominantly Caucasian (cue an irate white reader emailing me, a middle-class white man, to inform me that I’m being awfully “racist towards white people”) society encourages to minimize experiences and not advocate for ourselves in a way that’s, I don’t know, say, going to make people feel like you’re rubbing your lifestyle in their face.
Taking up space can mean a woman being assertive at work without the fear of being labeled a bitch, a gay man correcting a colleague who used gay perjoratively without the fear of being labeled dramatic, or even someone at the gym that doesn’t has an Instagram-approved body confidently finishing their set while a steroid-built, but Instagram-approved body looks on impatiently. An immigrant speaking their native language at Ingles is taking up space. So is a man who wants to paint his nails in public and not hide it. Hell, even walking into a bar where your entry metaphorically makes the music stop and has everyone turn to stare at you, is taking up space. Again, it’s a fundamentally good thing, and more people should feel comfortable doing it.
However, true to form, some Ashevillians are taking the concept, well, maybe a bit too literally.
To wit: I was in one of my favorite used bookstores the other day browsing before dinner at The Admiral (which, if you’re familiar with the latter, may help you guess the former). All the fiction selections are along one wall, with patrons traversing a narrow aisle. Three women and I were browsing. Two were there together. The other was alone with her dog. At one point, one of the two who were there together, excitedly approached the other with a book and said, “I need to read you something.” That’s fine. While I find people who read aloud in public annoying and performative, that’s admittedly a subjective opinion.
She then proceeded to find the stool used to reach high shelves, plop it in the center of the aisle, and motioned for her friend to sit. In doing this, the women blocked the aisle so that if I or the woman with the dog wanted to look at books on the other side, we’d have to walk out and down another aisle and around to reach them, and also effectively blocked the shelves containing fiction authors with the last names of F-M. As one woman sat, the other woman read to her. I thought it was rude and annoying, but I thought it’d be done quickly. It wasn’t. She read an entire chapter. I wanted to grab a book by Tana French (last name of F), and after waiting 3 minutes (way too long to block a shopping area in a small store for something that could’ve been accomplished in an area that wasn’t blocking anything, I politely asked, “could I get behind you to grab a book?” The women moved, but slowly and not without exchanging some very knowing looks. I’d bet money that they bitched about me later, and how I wasn’t happy with women taking up space.
The next night, I was at the Sauna House. Upon entering the sauna, my friend and I found a woman who had laid her towel along half of the second row of seating and was spread out in some sort of yoga pose. We like to sit on the top row, as that’s where it gets the hottest, and all the seats not in front of the woman were taken. My friend politely asked if we could get around her to access the empty seats.
Now, there was absolutely a universe in which she could’ve moved one row down to the empty first row and continued her yoga pose. There was also a universe in which she could’ve simply moved over slightly, to allow both us and her to sit where we wanted. She decided to go the eye-role route, and when my friend asked her to shift her towel slightly so that we could put our feet down and not sit cross-legged, she got, well, I don’t want to say she got dramatic…
“This is a community space,” she said, “and I can take up as much or as little as I like,” which isn’t accurate at all. A community space would be a public park, or a library, not a non-public sauna people pay to use with rules and guidelines, one of which being that it should be able to fit up to 20 people, which happens when folks don’t take up more spaces than is warranted when it’s busy. Luckily, I didn’t have to point that out, because she did move after making her point.
Physically taking up space in a way that becomes burdensome and annoying isn’t taking up space to make a stand. It’s just inconsiderate.
AshevilleExplorer 