For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

  I was not longer living at home when this happened, but I remembered all the rules.

  When I got married, I lied and told my parents I was still a virgin. As a teenager, I had decided that if I was going to fornicate, I had to keep the number of sexual encounters at a respectable amount, and I would only fornicate within a long-term, committed relationship. Not only that, but every person I had sex with had first promised to someday marry me, and in my mind I figured that was within a socially acceptable range of fornication. That is how I went around my parents’ ideals but still tried to avoid becoming the unforgivable female trope of a whore. This was key, because being a whore meant total exile from respectable, smart, worthy womanhood. I played that game smart, and I played that game well.

  When I got divorced, I annihilated all semblance of respectability that I might have had. And once I accepted that I was, according to my church, ruined, respectability was out the window for me. I decided to have casual sex with as many people as I desired, and I decided to have casual sex outside the restrictions set by the male gaze.

  My sexual liberation was something I aspired to. Once I divested from the male gaze, the possibilities were thrilling. I had gotten married to please everyone; now I was going to ensure that I pleased myself.

  Losing the respect of my parents was one thing, but losing the respect of my peers felt overwhelming. After my divorce, I wanted to resist the social expectation of sexual gratification only within the confines of serious, headed-for-marriage relationships. I did not want what I had been told was safe and best for me.

  I just wanted to figure out what I enjoyed sexually. Constantly worrying about social performance—either by hiding sex with boyfriends before I was married, or having sex while married under assumed social approval—meant that I didn’t know what sexual pleasure was like outside the context of social approval. I decided it was time to become every father’s worst nightmare. It was time for me to intentionally become a whore.

  Even if sex was my avenue toward sexual freedom, and even if I didn’t care about social stigmas, I knew the threat of physical danger still surrounded me. I was, still, a woman. I could be overpowered by someone who does not understand or does not care how consent works. I began to carry a knife. And I dropped a pin and sent my location to friends when I headed out on dates. I even sent my locations to mi mami; she became my biggest supporter, even of my promiscuity.

  Tinder became my playing field, and my first messages outlined my expectations: sex, and nothing else. Because I was living in Tennessee, I vetted responders about their politics and their experiences with Brown girls, because I did not want to be anyone’s fetish. I was up-front about my mission to experiment sexually with complete strangers. And I had a blast, but unfortunately I learned some very interesting things about how non-Latinx folks viewed Latinas.

  Because the hypersexualized Latina trope is real, people assumed my sexual prowess was part of my culture. I had escaped a cage and was attempting to liberate myself sexually, but I was still surrounded by landmines.

  I was once told, before we had even left the restaurant, that I looked like I would be “wild” in bed. I was doing no sexual posturing; I was relaxed and eating fries, not thinking I was supposed to be doing any courting, since that had already been agreed via text. But I was being read as sexual regardless.

  I was once told by a lover that I should not attempt to come back to his place through the window, like his uncle’s Mexican girlfriend used to do. This man said that his mother had warned him about those “Mexican women.” We are all Mexican to white people in Tennessee.

  I was often told that I dressed too provocatively, and therefore any negative attention I received was merited. This one was hard, because I heard it mostly from other women.

  Sexism is so ubiquitous that women do a good amount of the enforcement themselves. The minute I became publicly single and a self-appointed whore, I lost the respect of women in my graduate program. I became trouble. I became a spectacle, an ethnic spectacle.

  Apparently, to some of my peers, my sexual desire translated to my sexual availability. I remember going to chapel with some classmates from my program, and hearing all the whispering around me. I was eventually told I was not dressed appropriately for church. I was wearing a circle skirt, heels, and a crop top. For me, when I no longer felt I had to dress to appear pure, that meant I could start wearing clothes I actually enjoyed. Even when surrounded by some of the most progressive and advanced theological students in the country, I was now being subjected to the same shaming and policing behavior I had experienced in my small-minded childhood church. Again, I felt the same tightness in my chest, that feeling of being trapped. And I did the only thing I could: I told my peers to shut the fuck up!

  During this time, one of the most admired and prominent scholars in my program, and a woman, told me and a group of my female peers to not wear lipstick in academia, to ensure that we were taken seriously. I remember looking down at what I was wearing and what my peers were wearing, and I understood: less feminine meant more intelligent. That day, I vowed to always wear red lipstick around that professor.

  If I allowed anyone else to dictate what I wore or how I looked, then it was not my body anymore. I reclaimed myself, and it cost me a lot. But belonging to myself was the goal, and there was no stopping me.

  While in my program, one particular male staffer made advances toward me. Eventually he kissed me, and I was deeply ashamed about the entire situation. I did the dance of, “Did I incite this?” Still, I pushed past my doubts and I reported him to his superior. The whole thing became a show. The Vanderbilt lawyers asked me what I had been wearing and how much I had drunk before the incident, and I was immediately reminded about the shame I had been taught. I felt like I had just begun to live, and they wanted to shove me back into my box and make me behave better. Since the men around me seemed unable to control themselves, I was the one responsible, the one who had to be controlled. The misogyny was unrelenting, and I was close to graduating anyway, so I walked away from the investigation. That is why survivors do not come forward: society will blame us for what happens to us before going after a man with seemingly uncontrollable urges. By that point, I had already lost the support of a dear female mentor and professor, and my peers suddenly saw me as entrapping. The staffer was older and had more power, but to them, I must have asked for it.

  I knew that my decision to become independent would cost me. But I also knew how exhausting it was to be a respectable woman, when it meant campaigning every day to convince society that I was honorable. Being a woman is already dangerous, but it is even more so when women give up their own agency.

  We are socialized to seek admiration and approval to a fault. When does the social performance end? How many of us will follow the prescribed roles—marriage, motherhood—just to be respected, heard, or legible as adults?

  We cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on our lives.

  —bell hooks

  My worldview began to shift in graduate school. To fully understand the male gaze and its impact on my life, I first had to redefine what I valued within myself. I had to turn away from my church’s teachings on what it meant to be a good woman, and away from its rules around modesty and morality. I began to learn that concepts of purity and protection were actually methods of social control—and methods of justifying male violence toward women. To break with the rule of modesty, I had to embody immodesty.

  I had loved crop tops and short dresses. My church taught me that suitable husbands wanted modest wives. Given my background, shorter hemlines and smaller tops were my way to defy the male gaze. I truly was not trying to attract male attention; I was dressing to please myself in defiance of what was “best” for my image, the image of an honorable woman.

  Having been forbidden from getting tattoos, my tattoos were an act of reclamation. I had this impulse to claim the skin that wrapped my bones. My flesh
was finally mine. One of my very first tattoos was of the word LOCA, because that word had been weaponized against me many times. I had been dismissed with that word for years, by my papi, by other men, even by women. So, I reclaimed the word that mi mami used to insult me when I left my ex-husband. I reclaimed the words that were meant to stop me and keep me in line and well-behaved. I etched that word on my skin and told myself that if being free and happy meant that I was crazy, then so be it. Claiming your body back is a radical act, especially for BIWOC, whose bodies are often crucial sites of oppression.

  I learned a lot in the time leading up to that ritual event in 2014. I learned that everyone wants to talk about smashing the patriarchy until it comes time to live those ideals. I learned that allies are rarer than I ever thought imaginable. I learned that there was no way that I was ever going back to being that girl who got married to just to escape a controlling household. I learned to live for myself, rather than for others. It wasn’t as lonely a fate as I had feared, and I was happier with the results. But most importantly, I finally understood in my core that a husband was never the prize—I am.

  If performing as a “good woman” was a daily campaign, defying male expectations also requires a daily practice. For me, I first had to acknowledge how male expectations had traumatized me and left me unable to define what womanhood could look like without male approval. I had to distance myself from harmful men: men who take up space, men who want to be the center of attention, men who feel emboldened to talk about my body without my consent. There are a lot of these men. I cannot pretend that I am free of all my gendered trauma. Instead, I embrace the skills trauma has taught me about self-preservation. And then I shut out the demands of the male gaze, and I listen to my body.

  I do not position myself as palatable to male readers. I won’t hold my male readers by the hand. I expect them to understand their complicity in male toxicity. Then I expect them to do the work to undo male supremacy. If society teaches men that they are naturally superior, and our systems reinforce that belief, then it is up to men to disown a system that benefits them.

  Even the work I do, I do despite men. I write specifically for women, to resist the indoctrinating idea that the “universal” audience must center men. I also deliberately shield myself from the male gaze. My femme and female friendships keep me in touch with parts of myself I was taught were not valuable. Through these friendships, I have learned a new skill: running away. I had been taught to stay and work to earn male approval. And now I know what that resulted in, so I run unabashedly.

  I come from women who have stayed in patriarchal marriages through cheating, public shaming, and emotional abuse, with overall shitty male partners who treated them as inferior from the minute they were wed.

  I come from women who, by staying, taught their sons that this was all okay, and those sons then turned against their mothers and treated them as inferior from the minute they felt like they were “men.”

  I come from women who cried, packed their bags, and wrote goodbye letters, but stayed anyway because they had nowhere to go, because it was unsafe to leave. I come from women who have scorned me publicly for my independence, but who secretly smiled knowing that their niña is brave.

  I come from women who have stayed in volatile situations. They did it for their kids, and for their partners, but they never stayed because they wanted to. They stayed because they felt a sense of duty to everyone but themselves.

  I come from women who have kept secret bank accounts and crushed sleeping pills into homemade dinners, just for the fantasy of a freedom they would never actualize. I come from women who, si pudieran regresar al día que se casaron, would not marry at all.

  I come from women who wanted careers but somehow ended up supporting husbands instead. I come from women who stayed because they were supposed to, because the world is cruel, and they said: “Todos los hombres son iguales.”

  I am a runner. I need to run, because I was taught to stay and I have seen where that has gotten us. So, I take flight, fast, because I need to, because staying means that I will inevitably pass this tradition to my future daughters.

  I run, fast. I take vacations. I book next-day flights to exotic locations. I spend an entire day at the beach drinking champagne alone, or I lock myself in my room, block his number, and light candles.

  But I run. I run for my own good. I run and carry the women in my line in my heart, even as they stand in shock at my behavior. I run for me and for them, and for all the women who were taught to stay.

  I had to unlearn “staying,” and learned to run.

  I know, I know that running is a luxury. I get it. But I had to pursue this type of self-preservation. Because while running hurts—staying kills.

  CHAPTER 9

  WHITE FRAGILITY

  Whites as a group seem unable to grasp the significance of race. They ultimately misunderstand the world they have created, shocked by the lines on the palm of their own hands.

  —Cheryl E. Matias

  I have a lot of feelings when I write about this topic because of my own lived experiences with white people who are filled with fear about being revealed as racist. There is a difference between racism and white fragility, because white fragility prevents white people from even having conversations around their own racism. White fragility functions to shift the blame of racism from white people to BIPOC. White fragility buffers white people in their belief that they are always good, and they consider anyone who challenges that belief to be bad.

  During my penultimate year of graduate school, I went on a trip with my peers to the Mexico/Arizona border. My graduate program does this trip every other year, and I had avoided it my first year because of my aversion to white saviorism and voluntourists. However, when the next opportunity arose, several faculty and staff assured me that this trip was not done without careful thought and reflection. I trusted them when they said they had taken serious measures to ensure the trip was ethically conducted. After I had gone on the trip and I learned what those measures actually were, I was disillusioned with the idea that these kinds of trips can ever be ethical.

  We were forbidden from taking photographs of anyone, “the local color.” And the speakers, hostel hosts, and organization leaders we met with were all activist and grassroots organizers, who I was led to believe were compensated fully for their time. There was an abundance of good intentions here.

  Academics have mastered the art of saying enough big words to justify some pretty heinous things. But I was still persuaded this time that these academics knew better. They convinced me to join the trip. Turns out I was wrong in that assessment, and this trip would prove all my fears and hesitations to be completely valid.

  At one point, we were asked to play with pretend money and to attempt to buy groceries with the equivalent of what someone in Mexico is given as their weekly wage from a machiladora. As if the United States has a living minimum wage to begin with, as if class in the United States is somehow race neutral. These “learning” moments felt more performative than I had anticipated.

  And a lot of these immersion practices were still familiar realities for me. They were things I was still grappling with as an adult, and I felt that these exercises were playing games with vulnerable parts of my experience as an immigrant Latina. It was an exercise in empathy and bridge building with immigrants that did not take into consideration the re-traumatization of the immigrant students also in this trip. Clearly, even a trip that purported to be about helping immigrants was designed only for the benefit of white people.

  Another thing that we were asked to do was cross the US border, on foot, with our passports. I was the only noncitizen, and because of this the whole group was detained for a considerable amount of time in a separate room as they verified my identity and whatnot. Again, these moments of otherness felt inconvenient to the white students, but they were harsh realities in my life and the lives of so many of us immigrants.

  This was an experience cur
ated to show the white students in our program the plight of undocumented immigrant Latinx and Indigenous people from Latin America. Our itinerary had everything you could think of, like walking through maquiladoras, crossing the border on foot through the desert, going to an ICE detention center, and even some discussions with local undocumented artists and activists.

  Of course, this class was led by a woman—a Black administrator in our program, Dean Amy Steele. I say of course because white men (who are the majority in academia) focus on more purely academic endeavors and are the ones teaching the dominant required classes and not these ethnic electives. I should also note that of the twenty or so people in our group, I was the only one who was an immigrant.

  There were plenty of uncomfortable moments during this entire immersive experience for me as an immigrant, and I cannot even begin to fathom how an undocumented immigrant would have felt in these scenarios. Like the total lack of awareness about the immigration process by my supposed friends and self-identified allies. And the lack of even conversational knowledge about how visas work. Their lack of desire to inform themselves about even these basic parts of immigrant life prior to this trip was baffling.