Equal Space - the final frontier
Over the years I’ve done quite a bit of work with women’s groups – personal development, bible study, activity based etc- and I am always intrigued by the response I get when I talk about groups for women only.
A significant number of me tend to react in a way that shows that they are threatened by women getting together. They seem to think that we are putting our heads together to make their lives complicated and are probably plotting ways of making them obsolete. I have seen how some men display these feelings of insecurity in various humorous and frustrating responses :
• Making “huffing” noises
• Laughing at the group for being all women
• Saying they will put on women’s clothes and come
• Saying they are going to have a men’s group outside in the car park
• Calling it the “man haters” club
• Suggesting that all we’ll be doing is crying, gossiping and bitching about men
• Climbing on the roof of the building, running through the building, climbing out of windows, locking themselves in the toilets when the group has been going on (granted this was the response from teenage boys to teenage girls meeting once a week in a local church hall. But I soon put an end to their spidermen antics!)
Some ways I’ve found around this, is just explaining clearly what goes on in the group, I jokingly reassure them that we are not plotting there obsolescence and explain that women sometimes need space.
This should be for another post, but on the issue of “space”, I’ve noticed in a mixed group, men will naturally take up more of the “space” in the group and women seem to go into this automatic pilot of trying to reduce the space they are in – through body language, not contributing as much in a group discussion, not volunteering themselves or lessening their gifts and abilities. Not every woman does this but I have observed that women, in mixed group settings, who do not attempt to shrink their space are in the minority.
I remember at youth club all the girls used to hang out in the girls toilets. It was the only place they felt was theirs, because so much of the youth club was the boys space e.g. sports hall was for football, the minor hall was for snooker, pool, foosball etc. I’m not saying that this is a conscious or malicious choice on behalf of men, I’m saying this is what happens and it isn’t beneficial for both sexes. We need to work hard at creating shared space, the solution isn’t single-sex groups only, because that doesn’t do anything to foster harmony between the sexes. So if you run a youth club, the solution of getting the girls out the toilets is not a beauty room, get them football coaching, do a personal development course, run some dance classes for the boys (a guy who can dance is guaranteed to win over the ladies) and then develop mixed sex football teams and dance nights!
This is why I’m an advocate for women, for a set period of time*, to be in an all-female group, because it allows women to express more of who they really are and therefore grow in confidence. Therefore when they are in a mixed group setting they are less likely to shrink and make a full contribution to the group.
*basically it isn’t healthy or realistic to spend no time with men at all.
A brilliant example of this was a teenage girls Christian youth group I ran a couple of years ago (it wasn’t meant to be only for girls, it just turned out that way). It consisted only of girls aged 12 – 18 (they didn’t seem to have a problem with this, but that’s for later) and we spent our time with them, teaching them, encouraging them, correcting them, laughing with (and at) them and just trying to support them in becoming the people God created them to be. One night we joined up with another group, from a local church, that was mixed and the boys went into the sports hall to play football. Normally on those occasions, the girls would hang around in another room or on the edges watching the game, but my girls didn’t, the got stuck in a played with they boys. Even though they weren’t as good as the boys at football, they just confidently enjoyed taking part. I was so proud!
So this post turned out longer than planned! I guess what I want to say is – Men don’t worry, we generally do like you, want you, need you in our lives, the same way you like, want, need us. But we want to play too. This earth only has limited space for all of us, so we are all going to have to learn to share it and that might involve us women getting together sometimes, so we can feel better able to tell you move over a bit and stop hogging things.
I’ll write soon with women’s responses to women’s only groups – which is definitely not as clear cut as the men’s responses!!
