In the fall of 2016, I helped coach my alma mater’s women’s rugby team. Playing on this team during my senior year of college was one of the most intense and formative of my athletics experiences, and I wanted to give back. One of the ways I did so was to provide intensive “introduction to weightlifting” sessions at the outset of the season. The goal was to empower these women with information and technical skill that would enhance their capacity as both rugby players and as female athletes more broadly.
 
I provided these sessions to the team in small units, reaching everyone over four or five meetings. Despite the smaller groups, we were still a presence in the weightroom. Women’s rugby players, like female weightlifters, are powerful and admirable athletes. There is something that comes with knowing how to deliver a monster tackle, knowing how to pick up a monster weight, that makes a woman carry herself with a sense of her own badassery. Simply put, standing at our three platforms, we were a cluster of goddess athletes, ready to throw down.
 
Despite our formidable presence, after the first session, I changed the lesson plan. The number one lesson ceased to be weightlifting and became one in occupying and reclaiming your space. I instructed the first session by demonstrating the lifts on the central of three platforms, sending the women off after each to try the movement under my observation. What I found was that every single time I asked the athletes to gather around me to learn a new movement, men would jump to the other two platforms and occupy the space for themselves. They would strip weights, take clips, take plates, spread their presence across the clearly in-use space. The immediacy with which these men took space from the rugby women was so abrupt that in all the subsequent sessions after the first, I explicitly told the women that their number one objective was not to learn how to weightlift, but rather to learn how to tell off the men that would, inevitably, come to claim space as their own. I was reminded by this experience of a lifetime of experiences of men occupying my space both within and beyond the gym, and I wanted these young women to feel empowered to demand space for their bodies and their selves in ways that are often denied women.
 
The world often expects women to be small, demure, and unobtrusive. Obtrusive women have historically been burned at the stake or ostracized from society. Attempts have been made to tame them. Our language has several gendered terms that specifically target difficult women, and there are several invectives that target the intersection of womanhood with other identity categories, such as being queer or a person of color. Our dominant culture is not particularly comfortable with loud, free, unapologetic women. The weightroom tends to be filled with such women, with pirate queens and rugby players trying to occupy both tangible and intangible space, trying to carve out room for their beings as they train their bodies. Each of these women likely has a story about a man who has invaded that space.
 
I have had a myriad of experiences with men invading my space both in the world and in the gym. In considering this article, I asked my athlete friends of all genders to share their stories with me. All of the women had similar narratives: Men in the gym took their equipment, refused to share space, and worst of all, offered completely unsolicited and typically poor advice on form, load, and their bodies. One of my male friends, poignantly, mentioned how despite being a more skillful athlete and better lifter than himself, he had numerous times observed his girlfriend be offered completely unsought and often useless advice on her behavior in the weightroom.
 
Is there a chance that these men are well-meaning, but simply deliver their attempts at helpful information in an awkward way? Yes, of course. But there are also plenty of examples of men posting videos of other men using gym equipment incorrectly as a means of mocking those other men. Why is unsolicited help often offered to women, while other men are often mocked? Fundamentally, each serves to bolster the male ego, to address some insecurity that there may be others that are better than him.
 
At this point, it feels necessary to slow down and acknowledge that we’re discussing these trends in a binary system. I’ve been talking about men and women, male athletes and female athletes. This is a muted and non-comprehensive view of gender and sex, and the language I’ve chosen does not even remotely capture everyone’s identity, nor do the chosen anecdotes capture every person’s experience. But I do feel that they capture certain trends. It is a trend that men feel entitled to occupy women’s space and comment on their bodies. In the hyper-masculine environment that is often the weightroom, this is especially so.
 
So, what do we do?  Men: Knock it off. If you’re not a perpetrator of this behavior (which not all men are!), consider if you’ve ever been victim to it. Consider if you’ve observed the women around you be victim to it. Being aware of these dynamics and trends sets you up to be part of the solution, primes you to be thoughtful and sensitive. Women: Occupy your space. Don’t apologize for occupying your space. Re-occupy your space when it is taken. Be a pirate. Go take back the clips that were pilfered, go take the plates that you need. To everyone of all genders: Engender a culture that respects all athletes and contributes to the betterment of all those who seek it.
 
In my experience, Olympic weightlifting-specific gyms tend to be the best in terms of equity and egalitarianism. Perhaps this is due to the utility of weightlifting as a sport; when the lift is your sport, as opposed to training for your sport, gender becomes less relevant. The weight you put up, the focus you bring to your training, and the character you embody are what truly matter. This is part of why I love weightlifting. I have only myself and the barbell, and the barbell makes me a better person.
 
Back to those rugby players… I told the women to occupy their space. I told them that in re-occupying their space and re-claiming items taken from their platforms, they had my permission as their coach to be unapologetic and even coarse, to make those who had tried to edge them out of the weightroom feel as small as they should when faced with a cluster of badass women, contact sport athletes with fearless hearts. I hope I made those women feel even more fearless, even more prepared to move through the world with purpose and with a sense of their own worth. Despite often being told the opposite by societal standards of acceptable femininity, I know these women have worth. I want every woman, every athlete, to truly feel and understand this worth. I want them to hold it in their hands, just as they hold the barbell, and feel empowered for having done so. Simply put, I want them to feel strong, able to move the world as they move their weight.