One day when I was in gym class, I overheard one of my (male) teachers exhorting a female student to put in more effort and grunt “like a guy.” While I’m sure he was trying to empower her to be the best she could be, I thought about that statement, and why women are always being held back from being the best they can be-- from the weight room, to the classroom, to the STEM career, to the world of art.

There’s a reason boys grunt when they work out but girls don’t—can’t even; she’d be looked upon as some kind of freak. Because we teach boys to take up space, to be loud, that the world is theirs. But girls are taught to keep quiet, to stay in the background, to take up as little space as possible.

That the world they live in is not theirs; they are merely living as tenants in a man’s world. When I'm in a space not my own, upon someone else's extended courtesy, but to which I am not entitled, I tend to get a lot quieter, lower my (normally loud) voice, become more timid and deferential. Women are told to behave in such a way all the time. Meaning: women are perpetually in a space not for them, begrudged an existence, told to make themselves as invisible as possible (unless they’re chasing men so they can make more babies—although that gets more complicated when it's poor girls of color with the accusation of “welfare queens”—again, every issue is intersectional) in a world structured and created of, for, and in the image of the bourgeois WASP.

So in gym class, girls work out and lift silently, don’t pant, don’t smear their makeup or muss their hair. Boys can grunt, and sweat, and have smelly feet, and howl as they lift weights, and that’s the proper way to be a man—rugged and wild, slightly untamed. Boys can sound their barbaric yawp like Whitman but girls just hover awkwardly, markedly out of place on the edges and in the shadows of the rooftops of the world, maybe tittering nervously. In this way they are subtly held back, from risks, from giving 110% for fear that doing so might cause them to slip across the line of acceptable female behavior. And anyway, even when they do excel they’re overlooked and denied acknowledgement, and if a girl is loud and demands to be acknowledged, she is being obnoxious while a man doing the same thing is ambitious and bold.

Girls lift lighter weights to keep from grunting or getting too sweaty or unfeminine, they may whisper among themselves but don’t participate too often in class; again, even if she does excel, she is overlooked, particularly in STEM careers which are male-dominated.

Girls need the space and freedom to excel.