This Is What It’s Like When Men Feel Entitled to Grab Your Body

November 26, 2016 / Reagan Myers

(Content Warning: sexual violence)

“I don’t know when I became a space to be filled.”

In a disheartening example of how men can often violate women’s bodies without consequence, the US just elected a president who’s been proud to say that he grabs the genitals of women he finds attractive.

Far too many of us know how it feels to be those women – to have our bodies treated like objects to be used for other people’s power and pleasure. And too many of us know men like Donald Trump – men who feel entitled to violate our consent, and even brag about doing so.

If you’ve ever been sexually violated or assaulted, you’re not alone. In this stunning performance from CUPSI 2016, Reagan Myers captures what it’s like to live with the everyday threat of being touched or having your space invaded simply because you’re a woman or perceived to be a woman.

We wish her experiences didn’t feel so familiar. And like Reagan in The Girl Becomes Gasoline, we won’t stop fighting the cultural norms that make them so common.

With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism

Click for the Transcript

Button poetry CUPSI 2016, Austin, Texas

Reagan Myers: A series of things that have happened to me on airplanes:

As a child with motion sickness, I threw up on the first eight flights I was ever on.

On my way to Amarillo, I threw up in my seat.

On the way to California, I threw up on my sister.

On the way to New York, I threw up in front of the bathroom door.

Last year, I was seated next to a man in a three-piece suit who loudly berated the flight attendants because e-cigarettes shouldn’t count as smoking.

Why are you wearing a suit on an airplane?

You sound like an asshole!

And you look uncomfortable.

On my lasts three flights, I’ve been seated in front of the plane’s required screaming child.

Maybe it’s a tired baby.

Maybe I’m actually the one screaming.

Maybe it’s my vomit-covered sister time-travelling to haunt me.

On the last flight, I fell asleep next to a man who looked like my father, which means I wasn’t worried.

I woke to his wedding ring digging into my waist

His hands on my thigh like an unwanted houseguest.

It is moments like these I feel more sputter than storm

More candle than bonfire.

My friend Greg is asleep behind me undisturbed.

Ben is talking to the woman next to him about her grandchildren.

And I, in the center of this airplane, am taking up too much space by existing.

I’m apologizing to this man next to me in hopes that this will be it.

If you don’t follow me off the plane to my next gate like the man did on my way to Denver

Or on my way to Minneapolis

Or on my way home

Or the way across the country.

A man is reclining his seat into my 14 year-old sister’s lap

Is yelling at her for her legs

For having a body.

Or the way the boy in my Geology lecture follows me from seat to seat

Ignores empty rows

Puts his arm on mine

Mistakes my shrinking for permission –

Which is to say that my body is too woman to really mean anything

Is too woman to be considered a threat

Is too woman to have rights to my own space

Or to have rights.

I don’t know when I became a space to be filled

My thigh, open lease

My neck, a wishing well

His hot breath, a coin

A demand cast into me

So know this:

Each unwanted hand, gasoline

Each prodding hand, flint

Each time a man assumes my space, he is just stoking the flame

And a spark stoked enough will burn down the whole house.

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Reagan is the youngest Grand Slam champion to ever come out of Nebraska, and the first woman to hold the title in six years. She’s been to two National Poetry Slams, represented the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational two years in a row, and was the Woman of the World Poetry Slam rep for 2016. You can see her work on Button Poetry. Her current job is a teaching artist with the Nebraska Writers Collective, which is the coolest job that has ever existed. Follow her on Twitter @rrrrreagan.