Back in 2022 a woman named Kayla Ancrum posted a now-viral short line of a poem on Tiktok. She said, “I had a dream that I was commissioned to write a poem from a bug to god, and I do not remember any of the poem, except for the last line which was: I pray nobody kills me for the crime of being small.” I think about this poem almost daily, usually when I am saving one of my jumping spider office-mates from one of my cat office-mates. I am also a typical queer Millennial whose comfort movie (and novel as a child) is Matilda. Most will recognize the line from one of the antagonists, which is taken directly from Roald Dahl’s book, “I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.” In a world full of big things, how are small things meant to survive? You can reread that sentence a few different ways, including replacing “big things” with “Patriarchy and violence against women” and “small things” with simply, “women.” If Patriarchy is big, if Patriarchy is the boot above the bug, women are the small bugs, killed, often, for the crime of simply being small.
Being small does not always mean in stature. (Though in my case it does, which adds extra layers of distress.) Often it appears when we–women–don’t speak up for ourselves, let male colleagues speak over us, or don’t correct others when we are wronged. It is sexual harassment in the workplace, it is sexual harassment by an intimate partner, by a President. I feel I am so small when someone with 100+ pounds on me makes a comment about my body that I cannot protect myself from the violence inflicted by it. I am a small jumping spider, all the evolutionary power to have survived this long, waiting to be smashed under the shoe of a man who has decided I look like his type tonight–unless I decline his advances. Then I become the prodigal whore, a slut once again because I have rejected him. I have nightmares those nights; I try to punch my attacker but my fist slides off his face like Silly Putty and he laughs, he feels nothing, I feel everything, but I especially feel small. I don’t even feel like a spider in those moments, I feel smaller somehow, more defenseless, maybe squishier, even? Did you ever hold a rolly polly in your hands as a child? Picked a worm off the concrete in a rainstorm? Defenseless, squishy.
I wonder how the spider feels, I feel guilty about how many I’ve smashed instead of relocated in my younger years. I have a very strange and visceral connection to bees, holding them and feeding them in the palm of my hand like they’re tiny puppies, terrifying my wife when one lands on my face and crawls across my eyelid and into my hairline. Never have I been stung and always do I pick up a struggling bee and move her to safety or water or a flower. When I realized there was no difference between the stinging bee that has never stung me, for I have always offered a hand and not a foot, and the venomous spiders that will likely not bite me either, I felt my empathy expand to all creatures: creepy, crawly, and small. I will not squish anything but instead let them out my back door very gently, very respectfully. Today they will not die for the crime of being small.
I wonder about this empathy then–if I am capable of overcoming severe arachnophobia to extend my empathy to a spider, can man overcome his fear of the illusion of feminization and extend empathy to women? The running joke in my house is that men have a lot of things, but they especially have the audacity…I’d like to imagine a world where they have no audacity to hold a boot over us but to hold out empathy instead.
I ask my wife frequently, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?”
Graciously they reply, “I would love you so much, I’d build you the greatest terrarium you’ve ever seen!”
“Well, thank G-d for that,” I reply.
In the middle of a ven diagram between "Fran Fine," "Joan Didion," and "insufferable lesbian," Ann (she/her) @beegirlfriends finds herself waxing poetic about a California that maybe doesn't exist and women who have taught her how to love while kvetching about why the Moschino heart bag is still so expensive and the importance of a 90s animal print mini dress.
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