By Yamily Habib.

When I decided at 38 to move to the countryside, my mother immediately offered to help. Despite her autoimmune disease, she didn’t want me moving alone again. She understood better than anyone what it means to do everything alone, even when married.

Once I settled in and saw the neglected land ahead, my mother had a panic attack. “It’s too much work for you alone,” she said. But after watching her figure out her life, despite a husband who added to her burdens, I replied, “Watch me.”

Leaving home young taught me to be self-sufficient, but my new challenge was different. Still, I never thought it was impossible. I learned the tools and tricks for land management, survived accidents and mistakes, and remain stubbornly independent—not because help isn’t needed, but because my internal code resists it.

We’re All Breaking the Same Cycle

Seeing Erika Cruz’s reel on social media, I realized my experience isn’t unique. This conditioning is deeply rooted in many Latinas in their 30s.

“Most of us grew up watching the generation before us stay in situations that didn’t serve them because they heavily relied on a man financially and to make decisions,” Cruz wrote in the caption of her video. “That has shifted. Women are more likely to pursue higher education, and we are starting businesses at a faster rate. This doesn’t mean that we don’t want romantic love, but it does mean that we care about having independence and the opportunity to pursue our calling.”

To say she hit the nail on the head is an understatement.

My mother married at 20 while pregnant and had her three children before 30. She wasn’t financially dependent on my father, but social conditioning and pride weighed heavily on her. She raised us, finished medical school, earned many degrees, and after separating, became independent. That’s when I saw her truly shine.

These early lessons stuck with me. Growing up watching her bound by a self-imposed yoke fueled a building frustration inside me. By age seven, I swore I would never let anything tie me down that way. My choices—good or bad—would be my own, and I would refuse to depend on anyone, no matter the hardship.
And yes, this came at the cost of an irremediable reluctance to commit and an unbearable discomfort with intimacy. But this is most likely just my own issue. For I look around and see so many women of my generation achieving both, and I am grateful for our titanic capacity to break generational curses—though I am also grateful for therapy.

The Emotional Work Nobody Asked For

I am not the eldest daughter, and I greatly admire all those who are, like my mother, and the decision-making burden of parentification they were subjected to from a very young age. My experience was different, though not very far removed. As the middle daughter between two boys, my responsibility was (and still is, though I’m working on it) to tune in to the family’s emotions, to translate the emotional atmosphere, and to explain what’s really going on before the escalating drama devoured us all. These experiences also explain why Latinas of my generation are so obsessed with setting boundaries, returning emotional baggage to its rightful owner, and trying to sublimate our own.

These patterns carry into our professional lives as well. While we’ve diligently built our careers, honoring our mothers’ tenacity but learning not to repeat their mistakes, I see that there’s still work to be done—at least for me.

I recognize how hard it is to delegate, work as a team, or say “no” instead of taking on responsibilities that aren’t mine—filling weekends and losing sleep.

The Privilege of Choice

But as I write these lines, I realize that the bulk of the work is already done. At my age, my mother was tired enough for three lifetimes, and the possibility of doing things on her own terms didn’t seem possible. For my part, I live the life I always wanted, despite the difficulties and obstacles that come with the contract of life. I am completely independent, and it is by my own choice.

The privilege is undeniable.

By Miryam Valdivia Romero.

I was standing at the gate counter, passport in my hand, and the agent looked at me and said, “You can’t board. It expires in less than six months.”

And I swear, in that moment, everything in me just dropped. I had just landed from another flight. I was supposed to be on my way to my grandmother’s funeral. And suddenly I was stuck. I could feel the pressure in my chest getting heavier by the second.

Here’s the thing, though. I had been in this moment before, just a different version of it.

Five years earlier, when my grandfather died, I did what I had always done. I held it together. I flew to the funeral, showed up for my family, and stayed strong. I didn’t cry until I saw him in the casket, and even then, I pulled myself back together fast. I remember thinking, "Look at me. Look how well I’m handling this.” I was so proud of that version of strength.

And then my body shut down. Completely. I got so sick I couldn’t push through it, couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t “be strong” my way out of it. Because when you don’t let yourself break, your body will break for you.

So when my abuela died last year, I told myself to be strong, to hold it together, to show up for everyone the way I always had, even though I was breaking inside.

But standing at that gate counter, being told I couldn’t board, I didn’t get the chance to pretend.

I don’t remember walking away. I don’t remember calling my sisters. But I remember their voices, calm and steady from across the country, saying, “Hold on. We’re finding you an appointment. We’re getting you there.” My fiancé drove me three hours through the night to a passport office. The agent made sure I got out on time. TSA pulled me to the front of the line. Strangers moved aside so I could get through.

I sprinted to the end of the terminal, heart pounding, and made it to the gate just as they started boarding.

And then I broke.

For three hours on that flight, I cried. The kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath, where your whole body shakes, where you’re not even trying to stop it. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to hold it together.

I didn’t get sick.

The difference between 2019 and 2025 wasn’t just two funerals. It was everything we got handed without anyone calling it what it is.

I didn’t grow up in a family that talked about mental health. My parents were too busy surviving. They came here navigating a system that wasn’t in their language, that wasn’t designed for them, that made them jump through hoops just to exist in it. You don’t sit around processing your feelings when you’re fighting to keep the lights on, when you’re trying to figure out a form that nobody will translate for you, when you’re working two jobs and still being told you don’t belong here. You push, you endure, and you figure it out alone because that’s the only option the system gives you.

And as their daughter, I absorbed all of it. No one sat me down and taught me the rules; I watched. I watched my mother handle everything without asking anyone for anything. I watched the women in my family carry grief, stress, exhaustion, and uncertainty without ever naming it out loud. There were dichos for that. “Los trapos sucios se lavan en la casa.” You don’t air your struggles outside these walls. And “el que dirán,” the ever-present weight of what people will think, kept everything locked tight inside. You handle it quietly, you handle it alone, and you definitely don’t let anyone outside the family see you struggle.

I grew up learning to navigate that same system, except I had to do it faster, smarter, better, and in both languages.

Every achievement was a payment toward their sacrifice. Every milestone was proof that what they went through was worth it. You don’t ask for help when you’re trying to prove something, and you don’t fall apart when people are counting on you to be the one who made it. What they called strength, I had made into my entire identity. And I was so good at it that I stopped noticing it was costing me something.

Our parents were running an operating system built for crisis, and they handed it down to us whole, along with the food, the faith, the music, and the love. We became first-gen professionals, leaders, executives, and we carried that same survival code into boardrooms and team meetings and performance reviews, places where we were still being asked to prove ourselves, still being underestimated, still doing twice the work for half the recognition. But here is where it gets complicated. Nobody told us there was an off switch, and nobody modeled what it looked like to stop surviving and start actually living. Most of us never got the memo that we could update it. I thought I had. I hadn’t.

This is why mental health awareness advice so often bounces off first-gen Latinas like us.

The advice assumes the barrier is information, go to therapy, practice vulnerability, and ask for help. And we hear it, we nod, we maybe even believe it intellectually. But none of that reaches the part of us that learned, at a cellular level, that needing people is a liability, that asking for help is a burden, and that falling apart is a luxury we were never allowed. The belief that you have to handle it alone isn’t a mindset problem. It’s the scar tissue of surviving a system that was never built for you.

And here’s what that costs. Your nervous system is tracking everything, every “I’m fine” when you’re not, every time you carry everything alone because you think that’s what strength looks like. When you refuse to feel it, your body will make you feel it. I know because mine did, twice. The second time, I finally let it be different.

Real strength, the kind worth building, is building the capacity to break, building the capacity to ask for help, and building the capacity to let yourself be held instead of holding everyone else together. That is the unlearning that the women before us never had the safety to do.

You are not in survival mode anymore, even if the voice in your head still sounds like the girl who had to figure everything out alone, and asking for help still feels like it comes with a cost.

It doesn’t. And you deserve to know what that feels like.

Miryam Valdivia Romero is an International NLP Master Coach, Certified in Neurolinguistic Programming, Hypnosis, and Regressions. she is specialized in leadership and behavioral coaching through the lens of emotional mastery, communication, high-trust culture-building, and multicultural team development.

There are things so deeply ingrained in our collective imagination that we rarely stop to question them. One example of this is that lingerie is sexy (for whom, why, and whether it’s actually comfortable are conversations for another time).

Personally, I can’t help but think that, at some point, a couple of centuries ago, it was the symbol of liberation from corsets. Nowadays, of course, the argument that lingerie has become a means of objectifying the female body is a completely valid point.

However, while reflecting on what it is and what it’s for, a Reddit user came up with this brilliant question: What is the male equivalent?

The fact is, we’ve talked so much about female beauty that, often—and to the detriment of my heterosexual and bisexual friends—we’ve overlooked what is visually appealing in a man in certain contexts.

The responses are revealing.

“Fresh out of the shower, with wet hair and a towel tightly wrapped around his waist,” one user replied. “After 40 years of marriage, my husband still makes my heart race.”

Speak of relationship goals.

Another user shared their experience from their perspective as a man: “Wife walked into the bedroom to go to bed as I was getting up (she’s a night owl to say the least). I hadn’t done anything other than strip out of my night clothes (tee shirt and tighties) and was standing there naked. She let out a little squeal. After 38 years of marriage, I’ll take it!

Aprons (especially denim ones) with no shirt, nothing but oven mitts, suspenders, jeans, and a shirt buttoned up with the sleeves rolled up… the answers are so diverse it’s almost beautiful to read.

It turns out that, in reality, the female erotic imagination is much more diverse and creative than we thought.

I did my own research, too.

I decided that perhaps the answers from Latinas might be culturally specific. I asked my colleagues and friends, and I have to admit, they didn’t disappoint.

“Sweatpants,” a colleague told me. “There’s something about them that gives off a ‘I’m not trying too hard’ vibe, which I find really sexy.”

My best friend was more specific: “Gray sweatpants,” she said. “There’s something about that color that lets you guess what’s underneath.”

“Sleeveless T-shirts,” said another, laughing. “Even if there aren’t any muscles there.”

Although most of my friends agreed on anything related to cooking, one was very specific about the image of a sweaty man after working out. Though she also agreed on “whatever he’s wearing while he cooks,” so I think there’s something important there.

The wide gap in perceptions.

The biggest takeaway from this experiment has been the disconnect between women’s perceptions and men's beliefs about where their own appeal lies.

And yes, perhaps it has to do with so many decades of focusing sexual objectification on women. Have we forgotten to explore the erotic in men, then?

More recently, shows like “Heated Rivalry” proved that what women find sexy in a man isn’t necessarily an athletic body (though it seems to help a lot). Rather, it’s precisely that kind of sensitivity, the absence of masculine performativity as men have invented it in their own minds. It’s a man who cooks, the delicate vulnerability of a towel around his hips.

While men think their masculinity lies in the truck, the money, the inherent violence of the vernacular macho, on the other side of the spectrum, things are perceived in a radically opposite way.

What’s more, it seems that while for many men what’s sexy about a woman is her lingerie, for women it’s a web of meanings that, truth be told, they should start sharing out loud with the opposite sex.

By J Noa.

[ESPAÑOL MÁS ABAJO]

There’s a part of the music industry nobody tells you about when you’re starting out. At some point, everyone around you thinks they know exactly who you should be, how to talk, how much to share, what to show, which version of yourself “performs” best for the numbers.

And even when you don’t want to listen, eventually you do. I’ve wanted to fit in, too. I’ve tried to learn the game and play it. I let myself believe that growing meant making myself easier for people to digest.

Especially being a young, Black, Dominican woman in rap. Sometimes I feel like the industry doesn’t quite know what to do with someone like me. Or rather, it does know, but it would rather sand you down into something more comfortable, more commercial, easier to package and sell.

Over time, I’ve come to understand that so many decisions in this industry are driven by fear. Fear of disappearing. Fear of not connecting. Fear of not going viral. Fear of not making the numbers move. And when there’s that much noise around you, it gets incredibly easy to lose sight of who you actually are.

That’s when I started questioning everything. And I want to be clear: this isn’t about not wanting success. Of course, I want to sell out shows, build a long career, and take care of my family. I want music to let me live without looking over my shoulder. But going against the system doesn’t mean rejecting success. It means refusing to lose yourself chasing it.

That’s why I kept coming back to this idea of being “antisistema” (anti-establishment). Not as someone who rejects everything and wants to go to war with the world. To me, being anti-establishment means asking yourself: how much am I willing to change just to move forward?

Because that pressure is real, even if nobody says it out loud, it’s there in the obsession with going viral. It’s in softening certain things so they go down easier. It’s in turning your whole personality into content, in making decisions based on what the numbers need first and what you actually want to say second.

And yes, there were moments where I even got confused. I got too caught up in the metrics, in external validation, in trying to decode what people expected from me. But the more I tried to adapt, the further I drifted from the reason I started making music in the first place.

That’s where “ANTISISTEMA” came from.

I didn’t start rapping to become a brand. I started because I had things to say. Because I grew up watching hard things happen. Because I figured out early that sometimes the only way to truly exist is to speak loudly. Rap gave me a space where I could feel free without asking anyone’s permission. And for a while, I forgot that.

“ANTISISTEMA” is about finding my way back to that part of myself. Not some “back to my roots” narrative, but understanding that growing up also means learning to make decisions with more intention. Understanding the business without letting the business decide who you are.

I don’t want to spend my life fighting the industry. But I don’t want to spend it obeying it either. And I know a lot of young artists feel exactly the same way, even if they’re not saying it out loud.

Everything moves too fast right now. There’s constant pressure to prove yourself, to stay visible. Someone is always telling you how to talk, how to dress, what to post on social media, and what kind of song to make. And the louder the noise gets, the harder it becomes to hear yourself.

So this era doesn’t feel like rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It feels like clarity.

It’s about stopping the habit of making decisions out of fear of disappearing. It’s about recognizing that not everything that gives you exposure is actually good for you. That not every opportunity is worth it. And that not every kind of growth requires you to cut parts of yourself off.

I know I’m still learning. I’m 20 years old, and I don’t have all the answers. But here’s what I do know: I don’t want to become a hollow version of myself just because the industry finds that version easier to consume.

Maybe that makes the road slower. But I’d rather build something real. Because at the end of the day, when the numbers fade, when the trends die, when the viral moment passes, the only thing that actually remains is the authenticity of your voice.

And that’s what I’m fighting to protect.

Como artista joven, negra, dominicana y rapera, me rehúso a dejar que la industria me diga quién soy

Por J Noa

Hay una parte de la industria musical de la que nadie te habla cuando empiezas. Llega un punto en el que todo el mundo cree saber quién tú deberías ser: cómo hablar, qué tanto decir, qué enseñar, qué parte de ti “funciona” mejor para los números.

Y aunque no quieras admitirlo, eventualmente terminas escuchando. Yo también he querido encajar. También he tratado de entender el juego y jugarlo. También me dejé llevar pensando que crecer implicaba volverme más digerible para la gente.

Especialmente siendo mujer joven, negra, dominicana y rapera. A veces siento que la industria no sabe muy bien qué hacer con alguien como yo. O mejor dicho: sí sabe, pero prefiere moldearte hacia algo más cómodo, más comercial, más fácil de vender.

Con el tiempo he entendido que muchas decisiones en esta industria nacen del miedo. Miedo a desaparecer, a no conectar, a no volverte viral. Miedo a no hacer números. Y cuando hay tanto ruido a tu alrededor, es muy fácil perder de vista quién eres de verdad.

Fue entonces cuando empecé a cuestionarme muchas cosas. No se trata de no querer crecer . Claro que quiero llenar conciertos, tener una carrera larga y cuidar de mi familia. Quiero que la música me permita vivir tranquila. Sin embargo, ir en contra del sistema no implica rechazar el éxito. Es no querer perderme en el proceso.

Por eso empecé a pensar tanto en la idea de ser “antisistema”. No como alguien que rechaza todo o quiere vivir peleando con el mundo. Para mí, ser antisistema es preguntarte hasta dónde vale la pena cambiar para avanzar.

Porque esa presión existe, aunque nadie lo diga en voz alta. Está en la obsesión de volverte más viral, en suavizar ciertas cosas para que sean más consumibles. Está en convertir tu personalidad en contenido, en tomar decisiones pensando primero en los números y después en lo que de verdad quieres decir.

Y sí, hubo momentos en que hasta yo misma me confundí. Me enfoqué demasiado en las cifras, en la validación y en entender qué era lo que la gente esperaba de mí. Pero mientras más intentaba adaptarme, más me alejaba de la razón por la que empecé a hacer música.

De ahí salió “ANTISISTEMA”.

Yo no empecé a rapear para convertirme en una marca. Empecé porque tenía cosas que decir. Porque crecí viendo cosas difíciles. Porque entendí muy temprano que, a veces, la única forma de existir era hablando duro. El rap me dio un espacio en el que podía sentirme libre sin tener que pedir permiso. Y por un momento siento que me olvidé de eso.

“ANTISISTEMA” fue volver a encontrarme con esa parte de mí. Nada de “volver a mis raíces”, sino de entender que crecer también es aprender a decidir con más criterio. Entender el negocio sin dejar que el negocio decida por completo quién eres tú.

Yo no quiero vivir peleando con la industria, pero tampoco quiero vivir obedeciéndola. Y sé que muchos artistas jóvenes se sienten así, aunque no lo digan en voz alta.

Todo se mueve demasiado rápido. Hay que estar constantemente intentando demostrar algo, mantenerse visible. Siempre hay alguien diciéndote cómo deberías hablar, vestirte, qué subir a las redes, qué canción hacer. Y mientras más ruido hay, más difícil se vuelve escucharte a ti misma.

Por eso esta etapa no se siente como rebeldía por rebeldía. Se siente como claridad.

Se trata de dejar de tomar decisiones desde el miedo a desaparecer y de entender que no todo lo que te da exposición te hace bien. Que no toda oportunidad vale la pena ni todo crecimiento tiene que venir de sacrificar partes de ti.

Yo sé que todavía estoy aprendiendo. Después de todo, tengo 20 años, y no tengo todas las respuestas. Pero sí sé esto: no quiero convertirme en una persona vacía solo para que la industria me encuentre más fácil de consumir.

Y quizás eso haga el camino más lento. Pero prefiero construir algo real. Porque al final, cuando se apaguen los números, las tendencias y el momento viral, lo único que realmente queda es la autenticidad de tu voz.

Y eso es lo que estoy tratando de proteger.

By Yamily Habib.

At 25, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted out of life. The plan was to earn a Ph.D. and pursue a line of research at a university that would be intrigued by my outlandish ideas about combining art and quantum physics. I was still working six days a week on the night shift at a bar so I could pay my bills and keep studying during the day. The instinct for survival was so overwhelming that I didn’t have time to sit down and ask myself if this was still what I wanted to do. Until my visa expired, and I couldn’t renew it.

My options were very limited, so I decided to move and try to take my research to another university in another country. No one was interested in the ideas that seemed groundbreaking to me at the time. And that’s when, one night with my head in my hands over my books, it hit me: this isn’t what I want to do with my life.

I looked around and realized that all my friends were enjoying life, going from party to party, to concerts I never knew they could afford, traveling everywhere. I had become so fixated on one idea of life that I was letting my actual life pass me by. I slammed the books shut and turned off the computer and my phone. That very night, I realized I had spent my whole life chasing an idea of stability, hoping to one day have a job teaching at a university that would allow me to do what I truly loved in my free time: writing. That was it. That was what truly made me happy.

The next day, I put together a resume and a couple of clips of articles I’d written for a friend’s magazine and started looking for work as a writer. Today, thirteen years later, I’m immensely grateful for all the hardships I had to endure in those early years, writing up to eight articles a day for less than $30 just to survive. I had the opportunity to work with editors from the old school of Latin American journalism; I learned not to bury the lede, to rewrite headlines up to 50 times, to lay out a magazine, and, eventually, to coordinate an editorial team.

That’s why, when I saw Hali’s viral video where she says, “From about 26 to 32, you enter your ‘existential crisis era.’ It’s very important that you ride that crash out,” I couldn’t help but smile and say, “Absolutely.”

What so many of us experience at that age has a name: “quarter-life crisis.” And it’s one of the defining moments in any woman’s life.

It’s a real transition, not a personal failure.

According to a 2017 LinkedIn survey, 75 percent of people aged 25 to 33 have experienced a quarter-life crisis. The average age of onset is 27. And hey, this isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. It doesn’t imply either that your experience is a collective tantrum. It’s a developmental milestone that happens when your early-life assumptions crash into reality.

A quarter-life crisis typically occurs between the ages of 20 and 30, though it can extend into the early 30s. Specialists describe it as a period of uncertainty marked by anxiety, confusion, and dissatisfaction with various aspects of life. In my experience, it’s a time of constant questioning, whether it’s your career choices, relationships, or even what you’re wearing every single day. And Hali is right. Even if you don’t recognize this as a normal part of growing up, please, listen to it.

The collision between expectation and reality.

Quarter-life crises don’t emerge from nowhere. Gabriel Kwakyi, who runs The Musing Mind, identifies several common triggers. They include misalignment between the life you imagined and the one you’re actually living. An un-integrated loss. Excessive self-expectations tied to age-based timelines (being married, buying a house, earning a certain promotion by a specific birthday). Comparisons to peers who seem to be moving ahead. Life changes that isolate you. Lack of validation from people who matter to you.

For many of us, it’s not a catastrophic event you can pinpoint. Instead, it’s the accumulation of smaller stressors that eventually demands attention, or directly crashes you out.

What it actually feels like.

The onset of a quarter-life crisis can feel like mental vertigo. You’re drawn toward questions about who you really are, stripped of the scripts you’ve been following. MindWell Psychology NYC notes that this period is marked by feelings of being stuck or directionless, even when you’ve “checked the boxes.” You might feel anxious about money, purpose, or the future. You might feel disconnected from yourself. The pressure to figure it all out right now can feel suffocating.

Kwakyi writes that “it is in times of confusion, stress, or pain, when we are knocked off balance and finally take a look around that there arises a golden opportunity for these repressed voices of our inner selves to come to the surface of our consciousness and be seen.” It’s uncomfortable and exhausting, and you experience insomnia, changes in appetite, or persistent anxiety.

Moving forward means honoring what’s shifting inside, and moving past the rubble.

The path through a quarter-life crisis isn’t linear, and it doesn’t require having all the answers. City Scape Counseling recommends starting with small, achievable goals that build momentum. Reflect on your values, relationships, and whether your current work feels purposeful. Set limits on social media, which often amplifies comparison and self-doubt.

Others recommend seeking a connection. Talk to people who’ve been through this. Find a therapist if you need one. Read. Listen to people who’ve survived their own reckoning. Kwakyi writes that “when you find the courage to listen to the voices of your deeper self and the will to evolve your perception or your life situation as a result, you will come through this experience stronger and happier.”

My recommendation? Throw your expectations out the window. As John Lennon used to say, “life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

What I learned in those early years of working as a writer for almost nothing was that I wasn’t a failure. I was actually being honest. I learned to stop chasing someone else’s definition of success. To align my actual life with what actually made me feel alive, not in an imagined future, but every single day.

The quarter-life crisis doesn’t last forever. But the person you become on the other side of it does.

Only over a week ago, Carmen Teresa Navas learned her son had been dead for almost a year. Ten days after she received the information, she passed away.

For more than 16 months before learning the truth, Carmen searched for her son. El País reports she was 83 when she began visiting Venezuelan prisons, hoping to find proof he was alive and that someone could tell her where he was.

On May 7, 2026, officials finally told her the truth. By that time, Víctor had been buried in a secret grave for nearly ten months, and the government had kept this hidden almost as long as Carmen had searched.

The Arrest No One Acknowledged

Víctor Hugo Quero Navas was 51 years old. The Miami Herald describes him as a merchant, while other sources call him a businessman. In early January 2025, officers from Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency arrested him without a judicial warrant.

The charges were terrorism, conspiracy, and treason to the nation.

But according to the BBC, eyewitnesses gave a different account. They said Víctor was not carrying explosives or weapons. Instead, he had hallacas, a Venezuelan cornmeal dish, and candy. He was on his way to celebrate New Year’s Day with his mother.

What happened next was silence.

Carmen never received an official notice about the arrest. The Miami Herald reports that authorities gave her no information about where her son was, his condition, or his legal status. The system had completely hidden him.

Searching Through Closed Doors

For the next 16 months, Carmen represented a common Venezuelan tragedy: a mother waiting for news that never arrived.

According to the BBC, she visited detention centers across Caracas, including the DGCIM of Boleíta, the Helicoide, the center at La Yaguara, Zone 7 of Petare, and many times to Rodeo I, a maximum-security prison known for its harsh conditions. At each place, multiple sources say officials told her they had no record of her son, no information or confirmation he was alive, and no permission to visit.

But other inmates knew. The BBC reports that prisoners in Rodeo I told Carmen when her son arrived and later when he became ill. The government never gave her this information.

On May 4, 2026, just days before officials told her the truth, Carmen stood in Altamira Square holding a photo of her son. CNN reports she spoke out: “Give me proof of my son. Where are they holding him? If he is alive… because since they arrested him, I have not seen him a single time.”

Her desperate question challenged a system built on disappearances, where people are held in places that officially do not exist, by agencies that deny knowing them.

According to The Miami Herald, human rights organizations had already classified Víctor’s case as a possible forced disappearance. Similarly, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in April, the commission had granted precautionary measures in favor of both Carmen and Víctor, determining they faced a “serious and urgent situation” that placed their “right to life, personal integrity and health at risk.”

But protective measures on paper meant little against a state system that operated in silence.

The Hidden Death

On July 15, 2025, according to the Ministry of Penitentiary Services statement, Víctor was transferred from Rodeo I to the Dr. Carlos Arvelo Military Hospital. The reason given: he was suffering from “upper gastrointestinal bleeding and acute febrile syndrome.”

Nine days later, on July 24, 2025, he died. The stated cause: “acute respiratory failure secondary to pulmonary thromboembolism”—a blood clot that had blocked his lungs.

After that, there was silence. The Miami Herald reports that authorities said they buried him on July 30 following “legal protocols,” because “no relatives formally requested visitation rights” and because Víctor had allegedly “failed to provide information about family contacts while incarcerated.”

This account could not be true. Carmen had been searching, visiting Rodeo I many times, and going to courts, security agencies, and the Ombudsman’s office. Foro Penal said the government’s explanation was not just wrong but cruel. “Víctor Quero died while he was disappeared!” Alfredo Romero, the organization’s president, wrote on social media. “The Penitentiary Ministry says he provided no family information, but his mother went many times to Rodeo I and authorities denied he was there.”

Nearly ten months went by as Carmen kept searching, not knowing her son had already been buried. The Miami Herald reports that just days before the government admitted Víctor was dead, attorneys with the Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy were still publicly demanding information about his whereabouts, unaware that officials had buried him in secret.

The Exhumation

On May 7, 2026, Carmen was called to the Ombudsman’s office. There, she learned the truth: her son had died almost a year earlier.

Carmen asked for the body to be exhumed so she could identify it herself.

On May 8, the grave was opened. According to the BBC, when Carmen saw her son’s body, she said: “How is it possible they killed him like a dog?”

According to Maryorin Méndez, the journalist who had documented Carmen’s entire search and remained by her side, Carmen was devastated by one detail in the government’s official statement: the claim that no one had searched for her son. “Of course Víctor had family,” Carmen insisted to Méndez.

Carmen wanted to give her son a proper funeral. She arranged a mass at La Candelaria Church in Caracas, a large, crowded church where she could finally honor him in public. Dozens of relatives of political prisoners gathered there to acknowledge what the government had tried to hide. Carmen seemed to find a moment of peace. “She said she felt very well, calm despite everything,” Méndez noted.

But something changed after the service ended. Telemundo reports that Carmen tried to speak for her son. “She said it was very hard, that she only asked God for strength,” Méndez recalled. “And after those hours, she faded little by little.”

That night and into Saturday, Carmen felt unwell. She said she couldn’t breathe properly. She was taken to a medical facility, but according to all reports, every test came back normal. The doctors found nothing physically wrong.

On Sunday, May 17, 2026, just 10 days after learning her son was dead, Carmen Teresa Navas died. The cause was never officially released.

Carmen had been waiting for answers about the exact date her son died and the true circumstances of his death. “She said she didn’t believe that date,” Méndez said. Carmen died still waiting for the truth.

The Weight of a Mother’s Loss

Carmen’s death ignited immediate and widespread condemnation across Venezuelan society. María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader and the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was among the first to respond.

“Not only did a mother die; a woman who turned pain into courage and despair into protest was silenced,” Machado said. “Carmen leaves us with an immense lesson in perseverance and dignity. An 80-year-old woman faced, alone and without fear, an entire apparatus of terror that wanted to erase her son and break her family.”

According to UPI, Carmen became known as the “grandmother of Venezuela,” a symbol of the suffering faced by families of political prisoners under the state’s repressive system.

But she was not alone in her grief. According to the BBC, four other mothers whose sons were detained under similar circumstances had died in the previous six months in Venezuela without ever seeing their children freed.

Global Outcry

According to the human rights organization Provea, the cruelty for these families was even greater: “Many times, mothers don’t just have to deal with the vital needs of their sons in prison, where there isn’t even clean water to drink, and a national economy that destroys citizens’ pockets. They also face the pain of not knowing where their son or daughter is—a victim of forced disappearance, a perverse practice increasingly common among state security forces.”

On May 18, the political party Vente Venezuela, led by Machado, released a statement condemning both deaths as inseparable from state cruelty. “Not only did they kill her son, Víctor Hugo Quero, but they forced her to search for him for months, knowing he was already dead.”

According to Venezuelan government sources quoted by The Miami Herald, authorities announced a criminal investigation into the circumstances of Víctor’s death. However, human rights organizations cited in the UPI report warned that any investigation must be independent and have international oversight, not be handled by the same system that had hidden his death.

The NGO Foro Penal, which had accompanied Carmen throughout her search, released a statement to CNN emphasizing her legacy: “Her strength, dignity, and perseverance in the face of silence and uncertainty were an example of the strength of mothers and relatives of victims in Venezuela.”

Carmen had wanted one simple thing: to see her son alive, to know where he was, to be acknowledged as his mother. The government had denied her that. And in the end, it denied her even the time to grieve him properly.

All it left her was 10 days.

By Reyna Grande.

Reyna is an award-winning Mexican-American author best known for her landmark memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home. This time, she turns her gaze inward to explore the scars left by migration and the ongoing work of stitching herself back together. MIGRANT HEART interrogates how living between two nations, two languages, and two identities has shaped Reyna as a woman, mother, and writer. Moving from the legacy of violence in her hometown of Iguala, Mexico, to a bittersweet family vacation in Europe spent reconciling her own impoverished past with her children’s world of abundance, she uncovers startling truths about the nature of survival. It is an essential read for the seekers, the dreamers, and anyone who believes in the enduring, transformative power of finding one’s voice.

Two years after my father left for the US, my mother followed him north, leaving her three children in Mexico. I was four years old when she immigrated to California. In January 1980, a few weeks before her thirtieth birthday, my mother arrived in Los Angeles and found a job trimming threads off freshly sewn garments in LA’s Fashion District. She was one of the thousands of undocumented immigrant women working long hours for less than minimum wage, in unsafe conditions, and with no health insurance. She made fifteen cents per piece, the threads she snipped clinging to her clothes like spiderwebs. All day she stood, with scissors in hand, in an airless room full of industrial-sized sewing machines and steam presses, rushing from one garment to the next, trying not to cut her own fingers. She hated this job. She felt trapped in this LA sweatshop.

In Mexico, she’d been an Avon lady and loved la chamba, the hustle of working in sales as an entrepreneur. She enjoyed walking from house to house around the neighborhood, displaying her merchandise and catalogs, chatting with her clients. In Los Angeles, she missed the freedom of working outdoors, setting her own hours, being her own boss. Two years after she arrived, she and my father split up. My siblings and I were still waiting in Mexico to be reunited with them. When we finally crossed the border three years later to begin our new life in Los Angeles, the family we had known in Mexico was gone. My father had left my mother for another woman, and my mother, in turn, left her children for another man. She gave my father sole physical and legal custody of my two older siblings and me, keeping only the youngest, my sister Betty, who was born in the US. We never shared the same address again. I saw my mother only once or twice a month. Stepping back from our lives, she allowed my father and stepmother to raise us as they saw fit.

My siblings and I grew up in Highland Park in northeast LA, which at that time was a working-class Latino neighborhood with a serious gang problem. But we came from the poverty-stricken state of Guerrero—the second-poorest state in Mexico—so Highland Park was a huge upgrade. The dirt roads of my childhood were replaced by wide, paved streets that seemed to go on forever. Instead of shacks made of sticks and cardboard, like the one we called home in Mexico, the streets were lined with real houses made of thick stucco walls and shingled roofs. Although we were still poor by American standards—my siblings and I slept in the living room on a sofa bed, our sleep punctuated by gunshots, sirens, and the whirring of police helicopters in the distance—the solid walls of our one-bedroom duplex on Avenue 50 provided a protection we’d never known in Mexico.

My father, a maintenance worker with a third-grade education, spoke little English. We were still undocumented then, but he’d hold up our report cards and say, “I brought you here to this country so you could get an education, have careers one day, be homeowners, have money for retirement.” These were his hopes, and he demanded excellent grades and perfect attendance, threatening to send us back to Mexico otherwise. He wanted us to achieve the American Dream in all its glory and for our lives to be completely different from those we’d left behind. “We are in California now,” he’d say, “and we need to look forward, not back.”

My mother was the opposite of my father. She had humble aspirations, not lofty dreams. She was content with what little she had, as no poverty in Los Angeles could ever compare to the poverty she’d left behind. “Sometimes, we had nothing to eat but a tortilla sprinkled with salt and a jalapeño pepper to warm our bellies,” she’d say. As long as she wasn’t that poor, she was happy. For her, survival was enough. She’d never been taught to reach for more. Where did my father get his ambition? Who taught him to dream bigger? I do not know. What I do know is that he passed it on to his children. “I didn’t bring you here to be nobodies,” he often said. “We didn’t risk our lives crossing the border for you to end up as failures.”

A few years later, my mother left her factory job to become her own boss—a vendor at local open-air swap meets, like the tianguis in Mexico. Because she didn’t drive, her husband quit his ironing job, and they both worked the swap meets: in South El Monte on weekends, in San Fernando on Tuesdays, in Santa Fe Springs on Wednesdays and Fridays. Thursdays, they restocked merchandise at the wholesale shops in Downtown LA. They traded their stable, if low-paying, jobs in the garment industry for the risky business of selling Avon, Jafra, and Mary Kay products, as well as seasonal items like silk roses and teddy bears for Valentine’s Day, cheap plastic sandals in the summer, and toys at Christmastime. “Look at your mother,” my father would say with a grimace. “That’s no way to live. Peddling goods at the swap meet. No stability, no retirement, no benefits. That’s why she’s on welfare.” The more he denigrated her, the more we did, too. We worked harder at school, vowing not to follow her path. We were determined to be different, to achieve the life our father craved.

My father’s dreams, while well-intentioned, burdened his children immensely. I carried the weight of his expectations, pressured to succeed and validate his sacrifices. But the more I tried to live up to them, the more distant I grew from him and from my mother. When our mother’s (and little sister’s) absence overwhelmed us, my siblings and I would go see her. We entered another world when we visited her in Downtown LA. My mother’s neighborhood near Skid Row made us wonder if we were still in California, and not in a poverty-stricken country like the one we’d left. Walking from the bus stop on Spring Street to her house on San Pedro Street, my sister, brother, and I navigated through the unhoused people spread out on the sidewalks and avoided the sex workers standing on corners. The streets reeked of urine and marijuana. Piles of trash crunched under our feet. Plastic bags of all colors floated around us in the wind like miniature parachutes. We hurried to our mother’s one-room studio, squeezing amid the chaotic jumble of furniture and stacks of boxes where she stored her belongings. Her home, with a shared bathroom and kitchen on that floor, was infested with roaches and mice and smelled like skunk.

My mother supplemented her earnings by recycling cans and bottles. She would dig into trash with bare hands, leaving bags of her haul in the corner of her studio apartment—feeding roaches and stinking up the place—until she had enough to make a trip to the recycling center. Our visits to her home were awkward. Our history of separations, of her abandonment, hung over us. She treated us as visitors, not her children, and seemed incapable of giving us the motherly love and warmth we craved. We were always the ones to visit her, and if she ever missed us, she never said so. It was as if we didn’t exist, unless we came knocking on her door. When she complained about the pitiful sales at the swap meet, we would suggest that she learn to drive. “That way you can drive yourself, and your husband can get a stable job. Then at least one of you could have a steady income.” The suggestion terrified her. “¿Y si me mato?” And if I kill myself? She insisted that her husband keep driving her to the swap meet.

As my siblings and I came of age in California, we assimilated more and more into US American culture. We spoke English fluently. We listened to Madonna and Depeche Mode; dressed up as superheroes, ghosts, and Greek goddesses on Halloween. We began to replace telenovelas with shows like Small Wonder and Married . . .with Children. My sister did modern dance. I joined the marching band, performing multiple times in Disneyland’s Christmas Fantasy Parade and the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade. The more education we received in US schools, the less we understood our mother. We internalized the disdain US American society feels for immigrants like her—the undereducated, non-English-speaking, low-skilled immigrant worker living on the margins of society. We began to reject her and all she represented. Our US Americanized eyes saw her as a symbol of everything we desperately wanted to escape. So, consciously and unconsciously, through the years, we excluded our mother from our conversations and, eventually, our US American lives.

At twenty, I was accepted to UC Santa Cruz. Though it was only six hours from Los Angeles, my move north deepened the gulf between my mother’s world and mine. Arriving in Santa Cruz, I felt I had gained access to a better version of California—a fairy-tale version. Santa Cruz was an idyllic place, the campus nestled in a towering redwood forest overlooking Monterey Bay. Every morning, the world’s tallest trees were the first thing I saw. Walking to classes, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and pine needles, I’d pass deer foraging for breakfast and banana slugs crawling on the forest floor carpeted with layers of fallen leaves and moss. Standing in the dappled sunlight filtering through the redwoods, I’d gaze at the sparkling blue waters of Monterey Bay, stretching before me like a shimmering dream, the cool, salty breeze kissing my face, and feel incredibly lucky. My world was expanding, and my place in it changed. In Santa Cruz, I made my first vegetarian and vegan friends. I’d never heard words like tofu, soy, and wheat germ, nor eaten alfalfa sprouts and split pea soup. There, I also made my first openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual friends.

For the first time, I found myself a minority student in my classes. When I shared these experiences with my siblings, they thought I had moved to another country, not just another part of the state. To my mother, Santa Cruz sounded like another planet. Everyone in Santa Cruz was into environmental protection. When it rained, students danced naked in the forest, pretending to be fairies worshiping the redwoods. They tied themselves to trees and protested when the campus administrators announced the construction of new buildings. We were all supposed to protect the environment, and recycling was a must. Even our food waste was recyclable—destined for something called compost. It was then I discovered my mother was engaged in environmentalism without knowing it, rescuing cans and bottles destined for landfills to pay her rent.

I dreaded anyone asking about my parents’ occupations. “My dad is a maintenance and construction worker. He’s good with his hands.” But when it came to my mother, the words shamefully spilled. “She recycles cans and sells stuff at the swap meet,” I’d mumble. Thinking I could hear people’s unspoken judgment, I would quickly add, “I don’t know why she can’t get a real job.” Her poverty embarrassed me. Even in the “richest country in the world,” poverty clung to my mother like the threads from those factory garments.

My double major in creative writing and film & video exposed me to different kinds of storytelling. In one film class, we were assigned to create a five-minute documentary on a subject we wanted to explore. The biggest enigma of my life was my absent mother. So I chose to tell her story. I returned to my mother’s California with a borrowed camera to spend a weekend documenting her life as a swap meet vendor. We woke up before dawn and loaded the minivan. The rear seats had been removed to make room for the merchandise. In the early morning stillness, as my stepfather drove us to the swap meet, I sat on the floor, the worn carpet scratchy beneath me, wedged between crates of Avon deodorant and boxes of hair polish, the camera pointed at my mother while I prayed we didn’t get into an accident.

The sun had yet to rise, but the Starlite Swap Meet was bustling, the crisp morning breeze reeking of exhaust from all the vendors driving in. The air vibrated with the sounds of heavy metal pipes as they assembled their booths, thick plastic tarps thrown over with a whoosh and tied down with bungee cords and straps. As the sun rose over the vendors’ canopies, I watched, through the camera lens, as my mother arranged her merchandise, finding just the right way to display it. I saw how much she enjoyed talking to the customers, getting their attention with small talk, having them smell a perfume or sample the silkiness of a hand lotion.

With the camera aimed at her, I witnessed my mother’s love of selling. It didn’t matter that she was on her feet all day, skipping meals or forgoing a trip to the restroom to avoid missing a sale. I felt bad for her when people walked away without purchasing anything. I watched her face beam with pride and joy when she made a sale, and, the bills clutched in her hand, she’d make the sign of the cross and thank God for helping her. After a long day, with little energy left, we took down the canopy, folded the tarps, disassembled the frame, packed the unsold merchandise back into the van, and left the now-empty lot. As dusk settled over Los Angeles, with the silhouettes of palm trees in the distance, we drove back to her tiny apartment, the van a little less full of boxes, me a little less suffocated, a little less ignorant. For the first time in a long time, my disconnect with my mother eased a bit. After dinner that night, she put on her favorite music, and I filmed her dancing to “Juana La Cubana,” a cumbia she loved because, though not Cuban, her name is Juana. The song spoke to her Mexican heart. She felt it was written just for her.

In the editing room at UCSC, I watched my mother’s face flash across the computer screen again and again, radiant with the fervent prayer of thanks after a sale. I felt closer to her than I ever had. An invisible thread stretched between us, a silent connection despite the distance. A reminder of the bond we’d once shared, before a border separated us. I had to screen my film in class. I was nervous, ashamed even, to show such an intimate portrait of my mother. What would the students and teacher say? What would they think of her? Of me? As they watched my mother dancing in her tiny apartment, I wondered if they saw what I had seen for the first time through the camera—not a woman beaten down by poverty, but one whose humble aspirations filled her with gratitude for a life that was a tiny bit better than the one she’d left behind. I realized then that through my film, I had brought my mother, with all her resilience and humildad, into my California. This five-minute film wasn’t enough to halt the widening cultural divide between us, between my US Americanized self and the woman who still carried Mexico in her heart, but for that one moment, it had.

When I graduated from UCSC, I returned to Los Angeles because, to my dismay, I couldn’t afford to live in this better California. Santa Cruz was home to wealthy retirees and workers from Silicon Valley. Few good jobs were available. To supplement my student grants and loans, I had painted dorms as part of the student paint crew on campus and sold hot dogs and ice cream cones on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Even though I had enjoyed those jobs, I didn’t want to continue working there after graduation. I didn’t cross the border to end up selling hot dogs for a living, I told myself, channeling my father. No way. I thought of my father’s dreams for us—“Education, careers, houses, retirement, that’s what I want for you!” Someday, somehow, I was determined to have those things, to make him proud. Someday, somehow, I was determined to fit into a narrative of success that, even if it didn’t always align with my own desires or identity, would be better than the life I’d had as a child. So I said goodbye to the redwoods and deer, the wharf and boardwalk, the surfers and hippies, to try my luck in the city where I had come of age.

Though difficult, I eventually accomplished all my father had dreamed for me. I had a college degree and a promising writing career. I became a homeowner at twenty-six and began putting away money for retirement. All these things have given me access to yet a different California. My writing opened the door to the literary community of Los Angeles and beyond. I read from my work at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books—the country’s largest book festival—which I’d never even heard of until I was in my mid-twenties. I read at the Mark Taper Auditorium at the beautiful Los Angeles Central Library, a mere ten minutes from my mother’s home but in the nice part of downtown, which I hadn’t known existed. I read at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena; Skylight Books in Los Feliz; Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica. I presented my work in California cities I’d never heard of: Mission Viejo, Santa Barbara, Delano, Blythe, Camarillo, Idyllwild, Point Reyes, Santa Maria, Arcata, Carlsbad, Merced, Chico, Half Moon Bay, Red Bluff, San Jacinto, Calexico, Manteca, Taft.

While I crisscrossed the state reading from my books, my mother moved to Pico Union, one of the last remaining low-income communities adjacent to a gentrified Downtown LA. She lived less than a mile from a four-star hotel, L.A. Live, and the convention center. The house where she rented a room was across from a freeway rampart, the air thick with exhaust fumes and the endless drone of passing vehicles. Underneath the concrete overpass was a houseless encampment. Makeshift tents huddled together, their occupants shuffling among piles of discarded belongings, filling gallons of water from the fire hydrant on the corner.

Due to declining sales during the recession, my mother gave up the swap meets and began recycling cardboard full-time in addition to cans and bottles. Downtown businesses called her to pick up their cardboard at the end of the day. With a knife in hand, she’d slit the packing tape, carefully flatten boxes, then heave box after box into the back of the van. When it was full, with the metallic smell of processed cardboard clinging to her, she and her husband would drive to a recycling center on Slauson Avenue in South Central to sell the cardboard, getting forty to fifty dollars for their effort. “That’s not even minimum wage,” I once pointed out. She shrugged, answering, “In Mexico, I would be making five dollars a day.” I’d shake my head in disapproval and, as I did every month, give her money for rent. Even after all these years, though I understood her to an extent, I still struggled to accept my mother’s out-of-touch relationship with the standards of US society. I still couldn’t grasp how she found solace in merely making do. It has been hard for me to stop seeing her approach to life solely through the lens of US American ambition, always striving for more.

Whenever I found the time to visit my mother, she’d tell me stories about her world. She told me about a restaurant parking lot in Pico-Union where buses take locals to a casino on the way to Palm Springs for as little as twenty dollars round-trip. She’d go whenever she could afford a day off. She told me about the friends she’d made—like a housewife who snuck out when her husband left for work, took the bus to gamble the grocery money, and made it back before he returned. She told me about her friend’s son, a drag queen who danced at the local nightclubs doing tributes to Selena. How one night, his friend, another drag queen, had been lured into a restroom, doused in gasoline, and set on fire.

She told me about the time she and her husband gave her brother-in-law a ride to LAX, leaving their rickety truck on the curb. They went inside to help him with his luggage and use the restroom, and when they came out fifteen minutes later, their truck was surrounded by six police vehicles. They arrested her husband for driving without a license, towed the truck, and left her stranded at the airport. “I didn’t know you couldn’t leave your car at the curb,” she said. There was no point in my mentioning the repeated announcements outside the terminal telling you not to leave unattended vehicles. The announcements were in English.

When asked to be the keynote speaker at an annual education conference in San Jose with over seven thousand educators, I asked my mother to come with me to help with my daughter, who was a toddler at the time. The conference provided a booth at the exhibit hall where I spent all day hustling to sell and sign my books and talking to educators about my writing and experiences as an immigrant child in California public schools. I introduced my mother to every teacher who came to my booth. “Mucho gusto, Señora Juana, you must be so proud of your daughter,” they’d say, shaking her hand. At one point, my daughter got antsy, and I asked my mother to take her around the exhibit hall, where vendors sold teacher supplies and materials. Half an hour later, I saw my mother walking down the aisle toward me, a bulging plastic bag in one hand and my daughter’s hand in the other. “What do you have there?” I asked her, wondering if vendors had given her samples. She opened the bag, revealing the many cans and bottles. Her face beamed with joy when she said, “The trash bins are full of these! I couldn’t fit them all in. I need another bag!” I thought of all those teachers I had introduced her to, mortified at what they must have thought seeing their keynote speaker’s mother digging through the trash. Would they be judging me when I delivered my keynote later that evening? I wanted to run out of the convention center in shame, but then I realized that while I had wanted to bring my mother into my world, she had also brought her world into mine. I told myself that if I wanted to have any kind of relationship with her, I needed to accept her as she was, to respect her ability to find contentment in a life that had offered her so little, and to live by her own standards. To not ask for more.

My ambition and determination have given me upward mobility and material success but have also led me to feel ashamed of my mother for not achieving enough. I have struggled to do what Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez encourages us Brown girls to do: “. . . you must hold your parents in your heart as you dismantle the systems that have kept people like them down.” My mother is in her seventies now, her life reduced to a one-room studio in Pico-Union. She still doesn’t speak English or drive. After a stroke left her partially paralyzed, she can no longer rummage through trash cans or go around town picking up cardboard. On Mother’s Day 2025, on her way back from gambling at the casino, her bus crashed into a stalled SUV on the freeway. The driver of the SUV died. My mother, along with thirty-one passengers, was injured. She needed major knee surgery and months of physical therapy. She will likely be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. My siblings and I have given her thirteen grandchildren—all born in California. Unlike us, our US-born children are all native English speakers. Most of them can’t even speak Spanish, can’t speak to their Abuela Juana without the help of Google Translate. Sadly, the distance isn’t just about language. The emotional distance she kept from us in childhood is even wider with her grandchildren. They’ve missed out on the warmth of a close grandmother-grandchild bond with her. Through the years, the threads of our relationship have continued to fray, and though my siblings and I do our best to help our mother, whatever bond still connects us always feels fragile. I’ve struggled to be grateful for the little she gave me, to accept that her own unresolved traumas limited her, and to stop resenting being left to do some of her emotional work for her. It’s a jumble of conflicting emotions: anger I was given so little, sadness for the mother I never had, and guilt from knowing she was also a victim of her own past; yet I continue to judge her.

When I feel the distance between us is insurmountable, I think of the time I followed her around with a camera, filming a day in the life of Juana, my mother, the stranger. I look at her in her wheelchair, and in my mind she’s dancing to “Juana La Cubana,” twirling around and around. I will always be on the outside looking in, seeing her through a camera lens in a way I never will with my naked eye.

Mercedes Sánchez did not set out to become a spokesperson for late motherhood in the Latino community. She became one despite the silence and taboo around it.

For years, late motherhood has been framed in mainstream culture as either a glamorous lifestyle choice or a cautionary tale. Inside many Latino families, however, it still lives somewhere far less comfortable. It gets whispered about, judged. It gets turned into a side-eye at a baby shower, a raised eyebrow in conversation, and the eternal warning from las tías.

Mercedes knows that first-hand.

After years of pain, endometriosis, IVF, miscarriage, and being repeatedly dismissed by doctors, she became a first-time mother at 41. And instead of keeping that experience tucked away as a private triumph, she decided to build what she had not been able to find herself: a space where Latinas could talk openly about “delayed” motherhood, fertility struggles, grief, and the complicated reality of arriving at motherhood later than the culture expected.

That space is “Soy Nueva Mamá.”

The damage of silence.

Mercedes says the taboo around late motherhood brews like a rotten concoction. It is even more painful in our community.

“It hit me when a señora or two responded ¿a esa edad? after I proudly told them I’d had my first baby at 41,” she says. “For anyone unfamiliar, ¿a esa edad? translates literally to ‘ at that age?’ In our culture, it carries a whole world of meaning. It’s the raised eyebrow, the slight pause, the tone that says: “ Shouldn’t you have done this sooner?”

That is such a specific kind of Latino shorthand. It feels like an affection trap, often from elders, and can sound almost harmless. Yet what it carries is unmistakable.

“It’s not always mean-spirited. Sometimes it comes from people who love you. But it lands like a judgment every single time.”

Most people, she says, were genuinely happy for her. But the few comments that were not still mattered. They told her something was missing from the conversation.

“Those two reactions were enough to make me think: Oh snap. We need to talk about this.”

The deeper wound, though, came earlier.

Mercedes remembers being at her sister’s baby shower, dancing, celebrating, living fully inside someone else’s joy, when an aunt suddenly pulled her aside and asked, “Mercedes, ¿pero cuándo va a ser tu turno?”

The question became a trigger.

“I wasn’t even thinking about me that day,” she says. “But in that one second her question sent me flashing back through everything, the IVF from 2016, the miscarriage that came years later, like a ten-year highlight reel in three seconds flat.”

Her response was immediate. “Tía, when it happens, you’ll be the first to know. Pero jamás me preguntes eso.”

But, for a Latina, behind boundaries, there is always guilt.

Not because she had been wrong, but because so many Latinas are raised inside a cultural structure where defending your own pain against an elder can still feel like a violation. She describes walking a full circle around the venue, then coming back, sitting next to her aunt, and asking about wedding plans as if nothing had happened.

“That’s how deep it runs in our culture,” she says. “You don’t talk back to your elders, even when they’ve just cracked your heart open in the middle of a dance floor.”

What’s more, Mercedes is clear about what sits underneath moments like those.

“What they’re really policing is the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to when and how she becomes a mother.”

For fifteen years, medicine kept treating the pain and missing Mercedes, the woman.

For Mercedes, long before motherhood, the journey began in her own body. Or rather, the body in pain, and the long years of being told that pain was “normal.”

Mercedes was 16 the first time the cramps hit hard enough to upend everything.

“I was on the subway coming home early from school when the cramps hit me so hard I could barely move. Vomiting, nausea, the kind of pain that makes you question everything.”

For years, she missed class. Later, she missed work. And like many girls and women are taught to do, she interpreted that suffering through the cultural frame she had been given.

“Through most of my teens and twenties, I thought this was just what periods were. Nobody told me otherwise.”

Doctors prescribed naproxen, Aleve, and anything else to quiet the pain after twenty or thirty minutes. But the relief came with a cost: it ended the inquiry.

“That was the whole conversation. No curiosity. No follow-up questions. Just: take this.”

It was not until she and her husband began trying to conceive when she was 33 that she started pushing harder for answers. A laparoscopy in 2016 finally confirmed endometriosis. The specialist’s answer was birth control, which made no sense given that she had been referred there because she wanted to get pregnant.

“I asked, but what causes this? Can we get to the root of it? The doctors had no answers.”

“I learned to push through pain in a way that built a certain resilience,” she says. “But I also spent nearly two decades being told that what I was feeling was normal, manageable, controllable with a pill. Nobody was curious about why. I had to become my own advocate.”

If she could speak to her younger self now, the girl on the subway, the one who still thought agony might be part of the deal, she knows exactly what she would say.

“Your pain is not normal. Ask the hard questions early. Find someone willing to look for the root, not just treat the surface. And trust yourself, because if something feels wrong, it probably is.”

Miscarriage, and a long relationship with grief.

In social discourse, miscarriage carries a violent baggage. People either do not speak about it at all, or they rush to turn it into resilience and speed past grief.

For her part, Mercedes wanted neither performance nor premature redemption. She and her husband chose privacy.

“The miscarriage had begun about a week before we hosted a small New Year’s Eve party at our place,” she says. Immediate family was there, and an aunt and her family were visiting from out of town.

“Before I got dressed, I put on a pad, just in case. I wore a cute, short, shiny purple romper. Nobody knew what we were carrying. We were smiling and hosting and being present, and underneath all of it, there was this thing we hadn’t told anyone about yet.”

Eventually, she told a small number of people, much later. But at the time, and for a long while after, the grief remained between the couple.

“After the miscarriage, I was devastated. I stopped thinking about having kids entirely. I told myself that was it for me, closed that chapter in my mind, and refused to go back there for a long time.”

“Miscarriage is one of those things our community doesn’t talk about. There’s no script for it. No one brings it up at the dinner table. You grieve privately while showing up fully everywhere else. And somehow that becomes normal.”

Years later, however, something shifted. Mercedes let herself reopen the question of motherhood. And she is grateful she did.

“The loss is real. Give yourself the space to feel it, however that looks for you. And when you’re ready, you’ll know.”

Holistic medicine as contention.

Where most people would be cautious, Mercedes is practical. She talks about holistic medicine as the first place someone actually asked a question.

A fellow blogger mentioned acupuncture after becoming pregnant with twins following IVF. Mercedes researched it, found an acupuncturist named Deb who specializes in reproductive health, and booked a consultation.

“That first consultation changed everything,” she says. “It was about an hour long. She wasn’t a therapist, but she asked about my sleep, stress, relationships, and work. She wanted to understand my whole life, not just my symptoms. I remember thinking: finally. Someone is actually listening.”

With Deb, she says, the conversation turned. They talked about stagnant blood and inflammation. About the role of diet, Chinese herbs that could support specific issues, from cysts to fibroids. She began adding more leafy greens and moving toward a Mediterranean diet.

“Look. I love my pizza, tacos, and fried food,” she says. “Deb never told me to give those up entirely. But she helped me understand that some of my favorites cause inflammation and that adding the good stuff matters as much as cutting things out.”

Prayer became part of it, too. So did silence, boundaries around noise, and anxiety during pregnancy. And the sudden awareness of the healthcare system.

“We need healthcare providers and insurance companies to cover acupuncture and holistic medicine the same way they’re now starting to cover IVF and egg freezing.”

Her husband’s insurance covered acupuncture for a while. Then they changed plans, and she began paying out of pocket. That, she says, needs to change.

“Conventional medicine is necessary. We need it for labs, imaging, and testing. But its information is often limited. Chinese medicine tries to find the root of the problem, not just manage the symptom. Both should be accessible.”

Her Latino family, she says, did not fully understand the holistic route at first. But they supported it anyway. And eventually the results spoke for themselves.

“Now, most of my immediate family and even some cousins have gone to see Deb for various things. That says everything.”

Soy Nueva Mamá was the natural next step.

Mercedes says she looked around and realized that, while English-language spaces had begun making room for conversations about fertility, miscarriage, delayed motherhood, and reproductive health, there was very little in Spanish that spoke directly to Latinas navigating these same realities.

“The need feels more urgent in Spanish-speaking communities,” she says. “The silence runs deeper there.”

That silence is exactly what she wanted to interrupt.

“Because I looked around and realized there was no space in Spanish where a Latina could talk openly about having a baby later in life. Not about the fertility challenges, not about the endometriosis, not about the miscarriage, not about the holistic healing. None of it.”

The response has confirmed what she already suspected.

Women comment that their daughters are going through the same thing. Others say they lived it themselves. They ask about acupuncture, about natural conception, about what helped and what did not.

“I couldn’t be the only one going through this. I knew I wasn’t.”

She points to a recent New York Times report noting that nearly half of American women at 30 have never had a child, while by 45, 88 percent are mothers. The headline, she notes, has often been framed around women intentionally delaying motherhood. But her own story points to another truth that doesn’t have the lobby system behind it.

“For a large percentage of us, this wasn’t a choice. We didn’t wait by design. Life, health, and circumstances brought us here.”

That is part of what makes Soy Nueva Mamá feel so necessary. It widens the frame beyond the neat empowerment language that often dominates late motherhood discourse. It makes room for grief, delay, pain, confusion, ambivalence, and the long detours that shape women’s lives, whether they asked for them or not.

What she wants is simple and radical at once.

“I want women to feel less alone.”

Emotionally, she wants women to have a space where they do not have to perform strength before they are ready. Medically, she wants them to know they have options, that asking better questions can change everything, that a whole-person approach is not a fantasy. Culturally, she wants to give Latinas permission to arrive at motherhood on their own timeline without needing to defend it to the family, the community, or the culture.

And she is clear that this conversation is not only for younger women.

“I also want to reach the older generation. Not to shame them but to open the conversation.”

This way, Mercedes is not writing a revenge story against the aunties and señoras who asked the wrong questions. She is trying to widen the script they were handed, too.

Disruption and a new language.

What makes Mercedes’s story resonate is that she is not simply offering inspiration. She is naming a cultural tension many Latinas know by instinct but rarely hear articulated.

Motherhood in our communities still carries an imagined timeline. There is the right man, the right age—a perfectly knitted script. When a woman falls outside it, by choice or by circumstance, the culture still offers very few generous ways to understand her.

Mercedes is trying to change that, publicly and in Spanish. Without pretending the road was simple or the pain was noble, like an Instagram grid.

And maybe that is the best gift of Soy Nueva Mamá. It does not ask women to become symbols. It lets them remain human, an individual whose body hurts, who carries grief in secret while hosting dinner. People who found answers outside the institutions that failed them.

“You are not behind. You are not broken,” Mercedes concludes. “Your body is not a clock that someone else gets to set.”

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from online trends, it’s that they always point to something bigger brewing beneath the surface. And the Manosphere is the perfect example of this. The digital misogyny movement is seeping into every sphere—from schoolyards and workplaces to relationships.

We were warned through documentaries; women who were victims of intimate partner violence were screaming it from the rooftops, and yet we turned a blind eye.

Now there are rape academies and a black market selling software to create revenge porn against girlfriends, sisters, and family members. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the new trend targeting the female orgasm.

You only need to do a search on Twitter to realize what the campaign is about: “Female orgasm doesn’t exist,” says one user. “It’s just a lie made up by big penises.” “Female orgasm isn’t even necessary for reproduction,” says another. “If God doesn’t care about you, what makes you think I do?”

The common thread among all the men in the conversation seems to be precisely that: the supposed “biological uselessness” of female pleasure.

It seems the manosphere has quickly moved from “recreational misogyny” to the construction of an increasingly dangerous system of thought.

“In hindsight, it is startling that all of this was normalized for so long,” wrote Laurie Penny in her column for The Guardian. “It was apparently inconceivable that violence against women could constitute a crisis—unless, of course, the violence was blamed on immigrants or on transgender people, at which point women’s safety suddenly shot to the top of the political agenda.”

“When feminists and others in the eye of the storm tried to raise the alarm, we were told we were exaggerating for attention, or that we couldn’t take a joke,” Penny adds. “Beneath the posturing, cartoon frogs, and meme-speak, these were lost young men who deserved patience and understanding, and if we didn’t offer it, we were heartless, humorless killjoys.”

Attacking the female orgasm has always been part of the misogyny playbook.

Decades ago, the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) was denounced by global organizations defending the rights of 230 million girls and women who were victims of this perverse practice in regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Today, it is considered a violation of human rights. However, the argument behind it seems to be the same one being revived by members of the manosphere.

The argument is often that it protects a girl’s virginity before marriage and ensures fidelity afterward. It is wrongly believed that FGM reduces a woman’s libido, thereby preventing “sexual misconduct” and ensuring the family’s honor. However, members of these communities insist on the same thing: it is not biologically “necessary.”

But this did not only happen in communities of color.

The institution of psychology itself stigmatized female pleasure from the very beginning. As Reina Gattuso explained, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, many psychologists, inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, argued that women should only achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration by a man. Any other form of female sexual pleasure—including masturbation, queer sexuality, and any stimulation of the clitoris—was considered a sign of “masculinity,” imbalance, or even insanity.

It is no wonder, then, that women themselves still feel ashamed when talking about pleasure. Nor is it surprising that this is one of the main targets of the manosphere, a community built by men that, as UN Women explained, has become an umbrella for “online communities that have increasingly promoted narrow and aggressive definitions of what it means to be a man—and the false narrative that feminism and gender equality have come at the cost of men’s rights.”

“These communities promote the idea that emotional control, material wealth, physical appearance, and dominance—especially over women—are markers of male worth,” the organization explains.

In this context, the female orgasm becomes a trigger for the already problematic insecurities of masculinity.

In the male worldview, the female orgasm has been attached to some unfounded sense of masculine achievement, partly fueled by the distortion of pornography and a lack of education. All of this makes it fertile ground for the advance of the manosphere.

In short, this is yet another example of how machismo has failed men, leading them to believe that there is a role to fulfill that involves distancing themselves from emotional intelligence and sensitivity in all aspects of interpersonal relationships.

Now, the risk once again lies in the escalation of violence as the sole solution for a handful of men incapable of taking responsibility for their own failure.

In just a matter of weeks, we’ve seen the unveiling of a “Rape Academy,” a black market for hacking tools to use against wives and friends, the epidemic of deepfake nudes in schools, and now a conference to “save masculinity” in Mexico. What the hell is going on?

It is impossible to turn a deaf ear to the expanding epidemic of domestic violence and its “creative” new outlets anymore. It is not that gender based violence was ignorable before—quite the opposite. But international institutions built a framework, however imperfect, that offered a glimmer of hope that we were making progress.

Recent weeks suggest something else. Instead of healing gender based violence at its root, we have watched the genesis of a medusa of violence, a sort of thousand-headed monster that “adapts” to new circumstances with terrifying creativity.

A “Rape Academy”? What do you even do with that

The first and most shocking news story of recent weeks was a CNN investigation that uncovered how, in disturbing group chats, a significant number of men “encourage one another to drug and assault their wives,” and swap tips on getting away with it.

In a report from CNN’s As Equals series, the investigation places this phenomenon in context: men organizing privately through platforms to unleash the worst of their monstrosity. Since the case of Gisèle Pelicot, who her husband had drugged so he could charge men to rape her over 200 times, became public, the nature of these platforms has also come to light. Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle’s ex-husband, used a chatroom called “Without Her Knowledge.”

Today, one year after the trial, CNN found “a hidden, online world where the commodification and amplification of sexual violence against women is flourishing.”

One porn site, Motherless.com, hosts more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content uploaded by users, with hundreds of thousands of views.

The website, which had around 62 million visits in February alone and whose core audience is in the United States, describes itself as a “morally free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.”

The legality of some material posted is in serious doubt.

So-called “sleep” content is categorized using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck.

In these videos, men film themselves lifting women’s closed eyelids to prove they are sleeping or sedated, and some “eyecheck” videos have over 50,000 views. Within Motherless’s “sleep” community, first reported on by German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, members exchange tips on how to drug their partners.

In the “Zzz” chat group, which a Motherless user had linked to and where CNN first met Piotr, members do the same. CNN does not disclose the names or dosages of the specific medications users claim to use.

A Motherless user claimed he ran a business selling and shipping “sleep liquids” to any address worldwide. The man, who said he was based in Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave on the North African coast, stated on his Telegram account that a bottle of the liquid, which he claimed was tasteless and odorless, would cost 150 euros (approximately $175). “Your wife won’t notice a thing and won’t remember a thing,” he said.

Misogyny as infrastructure

As if a “rape academy” wasn’t enough, Wired reported that men around the world are buying hacking tools to use against their wives and girlfriends. An investigation by a European nonprofit organization found that thousands of men are members of Telegram groups and channels that advertise and sell hacking and surveillance services that can be used to harass friends, wives, and girlfriends, as well as ex-partners.

The investigation found that these communities engage in “the widespread trade, sale, and promotion of a wide variety of abusive content,” including non-consensual intimate images of women, so-called “nudification” services, as well as image folders that, according to the sellers, include child sexual abuse material and depictions of incest and rape.

Over six weeks earlier this year, researchers from the algorithmic auditing group AI Forensics analyzed nearly 2.8 million messages sent through 16 Italian and Spanish Telegram communities that regularly post abusive content targeting women and girls, Wired reported.

More than 24,000 members of Telegram groups and channels contributed 82,723 images, videos, and audio files during the study, according to the analysis. Many posts target celebrities and influencers, but men in the groups also frequently victimize women they know.

Among the extensive types of abusive content and services observed by the AI Forensics researchers were frequent references to “accessing, publishing, and doxing women’s private information,” sharing their Instagram or TikTok content, as well as references to spying or hacking. “Victims are often named, tagged, and locatable via shared profile links,” the group’s report states.

One translated post on Telegram titled “Professional hacking on commission” claimed to be able to give customers “access to phone gallery and extraction of photos and videos,” as well as “anonymous social media hacking.” Another message says: “I hack and recover any type of social media service. I can spy on your partner’s account. Send me a private message.”

Across the dataset, there were more than 18,000 references to spying or spy-related content. One post reads: “Hi, do you want to spy on a girl’s gallery? We sell a bot that does it, DM for info.” Meanwhile, users were observed asking if people could find phone numbers linked to Instagram accounts and making other requests, such as “who exchanges spy photos and videos?”

Schools are the new front line of the deepfake nude crisis

And the bad news keep coming. Wired also reported how these trends are seeping into the lives of young people and becoming the new normal.

According to the outlet’s reporting, teenagers are saving images of girls they know from school on Instagram and Snapchat and using harmful “nude” apps to create fake photos or videos of them naked. These deepfakes can spread rapidly throughout the school, leaving victims feeling humiliated, violated, desperate, and afraid that the images will haunt them forever.

The deepfake crisis affecting schools began slowly a couple of years ago, Wired reported, but has since grown significantly as the technology used to create explicit images has become more accessible. Incidents of sexual abuse involving deepfakes have affected “some 90 schools worldwide and impacted more than 600 students,” according to an analysis of publicly reported incidents conducted by WIRED and Indicator, a publication focused on digital deception and misinformation.

The findings show that, since 2023, students, mostly middle schoolers, from at least 28 countries have been accused of using generative AI to send sexualized deepfakes to their classmates. The explicit images, which feature minors, are considered child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This analysis is believed to be the first to examine real-world cases of abuse involving AI-generated deepfakes occurring in schools around the world.

The true extent of sexual abuse involving deepfakes in schools is likely much greater. A survey by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, estimates that sexual deepfakes of 1.2 million children were created last year. One in five young people in Spain told Save the Children researchers that deepfake nudes of them had been created. The child protection organization Thorn found that one in eight teenagers knows someone who has been a victim of this. In 2024, 15% of students surveyed by the Center for Democracy and Technology reported being aware of AI-generated deepfakes related to their school.

“I think you’d be hard pressed to find a school that has not been affected by this,” says Lloyd Richardson, director of technology at the Canadian Center for Child Protection. “The most important thing is how we’re able to help the victims when this happens, because the effects of this can be massive.”

So, why is Mexico hosting a summit to “save masculinity”?

And massive they already seem. Because instead of causing an uproar and an urgent call to action, in places like Mexico, where gender based violence is endemic, the so-called “Fearless Masculinity” summit was held. And no, we are not making this up.

According to Forbes, the event took place last weekend at the Santuario de los Mártires in Guadalajara and featured misogynistic figures such as Jordan Peterson and Eduardo Verástegui. Worse still, given that Jalisco is one of the most violent places for women, the event received state funding.

In just the first two months of this year, 756 Mexican women were violently murdered, most in accidental cases, some 2,812 were raped, and more than 162,000 calls were received by emergency services related to gender based and domestic violence, according to government data.

The event targets men who are “confused, empty, and disconnected.” The website claims it all began “From an attack on masculinity and the need for virtuous men… with our personal needs, life stories, and wounds, we sought a path of healing that we shared with our friends through retreats, workshops, boot camps, and now… a congress!”

The group features “spiritual guests,” including priests, bishops, and even an archbishop, all Catholics who promise to “save” masculinity. Their argument: “We are living through a silent crisis: men who are confused, empty, and disconnected from their purpose. Masculine identity has been weakened, leaving profound questions: Am I enough? Do I have what it takes?”

The event promotes a return to “traditional values” and even invites women “who wish to understand the heart of a man and better accompany him.” Other audiences they aim to reach include married couples “who want to strengthen their bond as a couple,” families “who want to reconcile, strengthen ties, and reinforce their mission as a family, and young people “who need guidance, identity, direction, and brotherhood.” It also targets priests, consecrated persons, and educators who accompany men, young people, and families on their spiritual journey.

Misogyny in 2026 wants therapy language and state funding

Put those pieces together, and a pattern emerges. Private platforms market assault as a technique. Telegram groups sell coercion as a service. Schools become laboratories for violation through deepfakes. Meanwhile, public life offers “healing” narratives for masculinity that funnel resentment back into “traditional values,” backed by institutions that still command legitimacy for millions of people.

This is how misogyny survives. It borrows the language of self-help, the aura of religion. It borrows technology's scalability and frames women as the problem.

The monster keeps adapting, and the cost is always women

However, it seems we are doing something right, because the feminist movement has exposed the failure of patriarchy and machismo to such an extent that the monster now retreats into private sites, hides in the deepest corners of the web, or relies on institutionalized Catholic propaganda to throw a last-ditch tantrum.

That is a bleak kind of proof. Yet it is proof all the same.

Because when violence has to keep reinventing itself to maintain control, it tells you the old story no longer holds on its own.

By Latesha Byrd

Black women in the public eye live by an unspoken rule: feel everything, show nothing.

If you’ve been watching Summer House, you know that in late March, Ciara Miller — nurse, model, and Bravo fan favorite — found out through a joint Instagram post that her ex, West Wilson, and her best friend Amanda Batula were officially an item. Not a quiet rumor she could sit with—a coordinated announcement sent to millions of followers.

What did Ciara do? She showed up on a red carpet a few days later and said, with a smile, that she was “thriving.” Then she posted a photo of herself in a blue tracksuit outside Sephora, with the caption: “@sephora actually rewards loyalty.”

The internet erupted. Her castmates praised her. The consensus was: she handled it perfectly. And she did.

Somewhere between the betrayal and that red carpet, Ciara Miller had to make a decision that Black women in the public eye make every single day. She had to choose between what she felt and what she could afford to show.

The double standard hiding in plain sight

Let’s be honest about what the reality TV landscape rewards. White women who flip tables, throw drinks, scream, cry, and spiral get GIFs, tribute videos, and Halloween costumes made in their honor. Their worst moments become their most iconic ones.

The mess is their brand.

Black women on the same shows operate under an entirely different set of rules. When we express pain loudly, we’re called aggressive. When we cry, it’s called dramatic. When we set a boundary, it’s called difficult.

The same fire that makes a white cast member a fan favorite makes a Black cast member a liability to producers, to brands, and to the algorithm.

This isn’t a perception problem or a sensitivity issue. It’s a structural one. And Ciara Miller, whether she thought about it in these terms or not, navigated it flawlessly. She gave the world just enough to know she’s okay and not a syllable more.

How composure turns into pressure

There’s a culture that made her choices necessary. Composure is a tool. But when composure is the only tool available to you, when expressing pain publicly puts your livelihood at risk, what you’re left with isn’t strength. It’s pressure with nowhere to go.

And pressure with nowhere to go becomes something else over time. It becomes anxiety that wakes you up at 3 am. It becomes an exhaustion that has nothing to do with your schedule. It becomes the slow erosion of trust in people, because the last time you trusted someone, they announced their relationship on a Sunday, and you found out with the rest of the internet.

This is why the most important thing women of color can do is build a private space where the performance stops entirely.

The spaces we need to build

I’m grateful to have a community of women around me, professionally and personally, who know the full version of me. Not the LinkedIn version. Not the brand-safe version. The one who ugly cries, who says exactly the wrong thing when she’s hurt, who sometimes needs to be told she’s not crazy before she can think clearly again.

A huge component of being in community with others is that it’s important to build it deliberately, protect it fiercely, and show up honestly in it.

Of course, there are nuances to this experience. I know what some of you are thinking: not every Black woman in the public eye is penalized for expressing emotion. And you’re right. There are exceptions, and representation is improving. I also know that poise is genuinely a value for many Black women, not just a survival mechanism.

Ciara Miller’s Sephora post was brilliant. Her red carpet appearance was powerful. But the version of her that matters most is the one no one saw that weekend. The one who got to be a full human being somewhere safe, with people who loved her, away from the cameras.

That’s what I want for every woman reading this.

Some trends have nothing to do with jokes or dances. They are terrifying rehearsals.

In Brazil, videos have been circulating across TikTok showing men simulating violence against women who reject them. The caption repeats: “training in case she says no.” And before it was considered just performative violence, a case in São Gonçalo sounded all the alarms.

A 20-year-old woman said no, and a month later, she was stabbed around 50 times.

The “training” trend is already attached to a real attack

According to Brut, Helena Anizio Rosak, 20, had turned down a man who sent her flowers and chocolates. Weeks later, he broke into her home in São Gonçalo, near Rio de Janeiro, and stabbed her around 50 times, stopping when her mother intervened.

Helena was placed in a medically induced coma and underwent multiple surgeries before recovering.

Meanwhile, the videos were spreading.

Brut reported that men in Brazil posted clips of themselves attacking mannequins or imaginary targets, repeating: “I’m practicing in case she says no.” Helena’s mother said the attacker followed similar content online.

@brutamericaMen are “training” to attack women in case she says “no”: this misogynistic trend is sparking outrage in Brazil following a knife attack on a woman. #news #brazil #misogyny

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What the videos show is horrifying

Reporting from The International Business Times describes a pattern across TikTok. Men stage punches and simulate stabbings just out of frame. Some point firearms at the camera. They all set the situation as a hypothetical woman rejects them.

The trend, often labeled “if she says no,” went viral around International Women’s Day.

In Brazil, authorities responded quickly. The Federal Police cybercrime division opened an investigation after complaints that the videos could encourage violence against women. Similarly, officials requested that TikTok remove the content and preserve data linked to the accounts.

TikTok stated it had removed violating content and continued monitoring. Still, similar videos continued circulating, according to authorities.

The pattern fits what researchers already call radicalization

Experts have been describing this trajectory for years and are now arguing that the videos do not exist in isolation. They sit inside a broader phenomenon of misogynistic content often referred to as “Red Pill” or “manosphere” culture.

Daniel Cara, a professor at the University of São Paulo, said this culture “legitimizes and encourages” violence against women. Flavio Rolim, head of Brazil’s Federal Police cyber hate crimes unit, warned of a gradual “process of radicalization” among some men exposed to this material.

That process rarely begins with explicit threats.

Researchers describe an entry point through what they call “veiled violence,” content that reinforces male dominance while framing women as adversaries. Over time, some users move toward more extreme communities where violence becomes normalized, then performed.

A study from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that 123 Brazilian YouTube channels promoting misogynistic rhetoric had reached a combined total of 23 million subscribers by 2024, representing an 18 percent increase in subscriber numbers over two years.

The scale of violence is global

According to statistics from UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, around 50,000 women and girls worldwide were killed in 2024 by intimate partners or family members. This amounts to approximately 137 victims every day, or one every ten minutes, underscoring the scale of the problem.

The UN defines femicide as the intentional killing of women driven by gender-related motives, rooted in discrimination, unequal power relations, and harmful social norms.

For her part, Sarah Hendriks, Director of UN Women’s Policy Division, stated that “femicides don’t happen in isolation. They often sit on a continuum of violence that can start with controlling behavior, threats, and harassment, including online.” She added that digital violence “often doesn’t stay online” and can escalate into real-world harm.

Brazil is already confronting the consequences

The reaction inside Brazil has moved beyond outrage.

According to Brut, some users have recreated the trend to show what they believe is the appropriate response to rejection, pushing back against the original framing.

At the institutional level, lawmakers are advancing proposals to address the spread of misogynistic content. One proposal seeks to criminalize content that, in the words of a lawmaker, “leads to the death of women every day.” Another bill, already passed by the Senate, aims to classify misogyny as a crime similar to racism, punishable by prison time.

Similarly, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has also addressed the issue, stating that men are becoming increasingly inhumane and violent.

(This article contains descriptions of sexual violence. Viewer discretion is advised for those who may be triggered.)

When discussing sexual violence, the focus is often on male perpetrators and child abuse, including incest. Female perpetrators are seldom considered. Statistics reflect this trend. According to global data, an estimated 91% of rape and sexual assault victims are female, and 9% are male. Nearly 99% of perpetrators are male.

This does not mean there are no cases of sexual violence involving women as perpetrators and other women as victims. For lesbian women, such incidents do occur, but remain infrequently discussed in public discourse.

This may contribute to skepticism regarding actress Ruby Rose’s allegations against singer Katy Perry.

In a Threads post, the “Orange Is the New Black” actress claimed that Katy Perry “sexually assaulted” her at a Melbourne nightclub. Rose responded to a Complex post referencing Katy Perry’s reaction to Justin Bieber’s Coachella set.

“Katy Perry sexually assaulted me at Spice Market nightclub in Melbourne. Who gives a shit what she thinks,” Rose wrote.

According to Rose, the alleged incident occurred when she was in her twenties. She responded to one fan who asked for details by writing: “She didn’t kiss me. She saw me ‘resting’ on my best friend’s lap to avoid her and bent down, pulled her underwear to the side, and rubbed her disgusting vagina on my face until my eyes snapped open, and I projectile-vomited on her.”

For her part, a representative for Perry responded to the claim in a statement to Variety that reads: “The allegations being circulated on social media by Ruby Rose about Katy Perry are not only categorically false, but they are also dangerous, reckless lies. Ms. Rose has a well-documented history of making serious public allegations on social media against various individuals, claims that have repeatedly been denied by those named.”

The allegations described by Ruby Rose are characterized as an act of sexual assault. “I was only in my early 20s,” Rose stated. “I’m now 40. It has taken almost two decades to say this publicly. Though I am so grateful to have made it long enough to find my voice, it just shows how much of an impact trauma and sexual assault have.”

Immediately, several people jumped in to share their experiences and connect the dots.

A user on Threads shared: When Katy Perry arrived at my queer party (Grouse) in 2010, I posed for a photo with her. I was a bit taken aback when she rested her hand on the top of my pubic bone during the photo. Later that night, a friend came over and complained about being groped… guess who?! Ruby Rose, I was told, was outside, sick, and never came inside. I stand with Ruby.”

Another user shared her experience: after meeting Katy Perry and telling her she did drag, Perry dragged her into her dressing room. “Here’s where it gets even weirder,” the user wrote. “Katy opens a giant road case full of her costumes. She pulls out the banana skirt costume and hands it to me, ordering me to ‘Put this on!’ I’m like, ‘Um, this won’t fit.’ That’s when she starts pulling my shirt off, and I’m starting to feel super uncomfortable. I’m like, ‘STOP,’ but she’s not stopping.”

She looked at Perry’s costume guy, who looked back as if this happened every night. “WTF is even happening right now?” she thought. At that point, Perry’s manager came in and shut it down as Perry began pulling at her jeans.

Although the matter did not escalate, the report suggests a pattern of concerning behavior on Perry’s part regarding consent.

This is another aspect of sexual abuse.

For lesbian women, the discussion around Katy Perry—who has faced criticism for her song “I Kissed A Girl”—is not uncommon.

“This is a familiar story and victim response for lesbians,” a columnist wrote for Lesbian Herstory. “I’ve been flashed, grabbed, humped—you name it—by women attracted to men who assume I would love the attention. I’ve been assaulted by more non-lesbian women than men. In my experience, men say gross things, but women attracted to men are more likely to touch me.”

In a 2024 post, the author discusses the violence behind “lesbian fetishism,” which is what appears to be happening with Ruby Rose.

“Fetishism isn’t always sexual,” the author writes, citing The Cambridge Dictionary, which defines the act of being fetishistic as including “having so much interest in an activity or object that you spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about it or doing it.”

“Lesbian fetishism involves spiritual fetishism,” the columnist adds. “Worshipping an object believed to possess a spirit or special magical powers; relating to this kind of worship. Instead of accepting lesbians as ordinary people who are a natural part of one’s surroundings, the lesbian fetishist conceals their homophobia by appearing fanatical—dehumanizing lesbians in the process.”

Although Ruby Rose’s case has received increased attention, sexual violence involving women persists as an issue.

For example, studies indicate that lesbian women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) at rates similar to or higher than those reported by heterosexual women. Some research notes that approximately 44% of lesbians report experiencing rape, physical violence, or stalking by a partner in their lifetime. Additionally, 36%–44% of lesbian women report physical violence from a partner, though many cases may go unreported due to stigma or fear of discrimination.

Similarly, studies suggest that between one in three and one in four lesbians have experienced sexual assault by a woman. Additionally, up to 60% of lesbian women report sexual violence involving physical contact. These rates are similar to or higher than those reported by heterosexual women.

Why are these numbers not widely recognized?

The simplest answer: people believe abuse among women isn’t as serious. A more comprehensive answer involves social stigma. Lesbian women often face discrimination by law enforcement, fear of coming out, internalized homophobia, and other factors.

In fact, there are higher health risks among lesbian women due to mistrust of healthcare providers.

In the end, it’s the same pattern.

Whether discussing Ruby Rose or other individuals, narratives involving sexual violence often reflect complex interpersonal power dynamics and perceptions of control. These narratives can also challenge how individuals recognize the rights and humanity of others.

It is also the appropriation of masculine codes of violence, to which many women—whether they are Katy Perry or not—adhere as a form of complicity with the aggressor.

Finally, to speak of sexual violence without addressing all the spheres in which it manifests is to fall into complacent omission. And in doing so, to collaborate with the erasure of patterns that continue to repeat themselves over and over again.

In many Latino families, discussions about sex and relationships are still taboo. Young people often grow up discovering their sexuality on their own, with very little access to sexual education beyond the internet. Even more, when parents do talk about sex, it’s often related to potential negative consequences rather than establishing healthy relationships, developing communication skills, and understanding pleasure.

This lack of communication between Latino parents and their kids may have established a greater gap than we can imagine. Having open conversations about sex not only provides children with knowledge but also helps them make better partner choices, establish boundaries, and even feel safe when speaking about sexual or intimate partner violence.

However, a study indicates that Latinas still experience higher levels of psychological and physical abuse and violence than other demographics. The report showed that 23.4% of Latinas will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, with 48% reporting that intimate partner violence (IPV) increased after immigrating to the United States.

So, where does it all start? How do we change it?

A good place to start would be en la casa.

The first step Latino parents can take is to eliminate marianismo

You’ve surely heard of machismo, but are you familiar with marianismo? This cultural framework has long shaped expectations of Latina womanhood and femininity. Within this ideology, the “ideal” woman is nurturing, family-oriented, religious, submissive, and, most importantly, sexually modest. Under this idea, desire is not something that a woman should explore openly. On the contrary, it should be regulated, contained, and silenced.

While marianismo primarily affects women, it also affects men, generating the idea that the “right” woman must adhere to these principles, and anyone who steps outside of them is considered “impure.” Research shows that marianismo “influences attitudes about, experiences of, and responses to intimate partner violence” among Latinas, showing that those who were raised under these ideals often faced higher rates of IPV and experienced greater psychological distress.

By eliminating marianismo from the equation and establishing households where children, regardless of their gender, can feel comfortable speaking about sex and desire without retaliation, we take a first step toward helping them shape healthy relationships in their future.

Establishing positive communication patterns

It’s time to open communication channels when it comes to relationships and sex. Yes, we understand that communication isn’t going to suddenly make all relationships healthier, and there are bigger generational fish to fry. Still, it’s the first step to breaking a pattern that isn’t serving our community.

When young people are given the space to talk openly about sex and relationships, they’re not just receiving information; they’re learning their voice matters. They are also learning that communication can help them establish boundaries, solve problems, and resolve disagreements with words rather than violence.

Starting is the hardest part, but it can be done progressively. Latina sexologist Rebecca Alvarez-Story, founder of Bloomi, shared some tips with mitú on how to speak to conservative parents about sexual wellness.

“The best way to become more comfortable with sex conversations in general is to have lots of small, casual discussions over time instead of one big awkward talk (the way that many of us assume it has to be),” she says. “Second, is to start finding/building a community of like-minded and/or open-minded people (who are supportive of you) over time. This type of network is especially helpful as you navigate new relationship structures and sexual experiences.”

Identifying the red flags

Many Latino parents, particularly mothers, may find it difficult to discuss relationships and sexual wellness due to their own experiences. As we mentioned above, Latinas face some of the highest rates of IPV and often the greatest barriers to leaving abusive partners, which can include socio-economic and mental health barriers.

In Inter-Generational Transmission of Violence in Latino Families: The Role of Mothers in Navigating the Cycle of Abuse, Zarah Zurita Quiroga states that “Mothers and children love and fear their abusers simultaneously, therefore, leaving can be healthy and painful. Children become a predominant source of resilience for mothers to heal from intimate partner violence.”

While these experiences may be painful to share or discuss, they can also become the foundation for helping future generations of Latinos identify red flags in their relationships and create positive, healthy bonds.

Some ways to help teens identify red flags and establish healthier relationships include:

• Giving direct rather than indirect advice. Instead of saying things like “be careful” or “respect yourself,” explicitly define healthy vs. unhealthy behaviors. Name things to avoid, like controlling behaviors, jealousy, and pressure.

• Invite open conversations about unacceptable behaviors from peers, friends, and even family members.

• Encourage your child, regardless of gender, to prioritize mental peace over the idea of “fixing” a partner or suffering in silence.

• Build trust through open dialogue, and ask them how they would like to feel in a relationship or what they would like their relationships to look like.

Transforming shame into strength

A new wave of healthy relationships in our community is possible—we just have to start from the root. While there is much more to relationships than upbringing, Latino parents can start early in teaching their children what they should strive for in the future, and most of all, that no matter what happens, their support system will be there.

It’s time to transform shame into strength and empowerment on these topics, and now more than ever, we have the tools to make it happen.

When Marilyn Monroe “appeared” on the cover of Playboy magazine, the publication still carried the subtitle “entertainment for men.” It was 1953, and the archetype of the sex symbol finally made the “readers’” dreams come true: her nude “Golden Dreams” photos were inside. Hugh Hefner purchased the images for $500 from a calendar company without Monroe’s direct consent, as she had posed for them in 1949 while struggling financially.

Ironically, it was Marilyn’s cover that gave Playboy its legitimacy. It was that precise cover that launched Hefner’s media empire, but it also solidified Monroe’s iconic status, despite the savage exploitation of her image.

Since then, Pamela Anderson, Anna Nicole Smith, Carmen Electra, Darine Stern, Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Farrah Fawcett, Kim Kardashian, and Lindsay Lohan, to mention a few, have transformed appearing on a Playboy cover into a rite of passage: from stars to icons, from women to crowned sex symbols.

Where Latinas Fit in the Playboy Mythology

Latinas, for their part — and while they have always been the token of sexualization — were not invited to the party until recently. While Playboy México and other Latin editions have always featured Latinas on their covers, the American Playboy has only featured a few. Stacy Sanchez was Playmate of the Year in 1996. Ten years later, Jessica Alba appeared on the cover of the March 2006 issue. The first Latina Playmate of the Year was Raquel Pomplun in 2013.

And now, Karol G.

Karol G, Playboy, and the New Paradox of Legitimacy

However, Playboy is not the same magazine it was over 70 years ago. The uncomfortable paradox of legitimacy has transformed the publication into a Variety of sorts, with texts people actually read. And Karol G’s is one you shouldn’t miss.

Just days before making history at Coachella, the Colombian star told Paola Ramos she’s no longer interested in playing it safe. “Last year… life threw me to the floor, kicked me, pushed me, stood on me, spun me around,” she confessed. Now, she decided to do the cover because “I grew up inspired by how beautiful the women in the magazine looked and now I have the opportunity to be that beautiful,” or sexy, mamasota, as she said in Spanish.

And yes. This statement might be an impossible tautology for anyone who didn’t grow up inside the Latino community. A badass woman feels empowered by what began 70 years ago as a system of oppression for half the population. However, Latinas know there’s a unique power in owning your sexuality and your beauty. That, my friends, is a force that can build or bring down empires.

The Part Karol G Refuses to Apologize For

And this is precisely the sort of empowerment Karol G has spearheaded for years now, while struggling with heartbreak, impossible expectations, and coming to terms with her own history. From sold-out world tours to a heart-wrenching yet inspiring documentary, we knew she was ready to leave the apologies behind. Moreover, we intuitively knew she was ready to cut the generational curses imposed by the Latino mindset, including emotional dependence in relationships and the fear of el qué dirán.

“I’m letting go of everything,” she said, while adding that her newly single status is particular fuel on its own. “I’ve always thought that my most evolutionary moments come when I’m alone. As a good Latina from a traditional family, you're taught to give yourself fully to relationships, to the point where you can even lose yourself… I think you have to work a lot on yourself so the relationship can work. You also have to do the work so that you can walk away when you recognize it’s not going to work. When I finished my last relationship, I initially felt like, ‘Wow, I’m here again.’ But then I saw it as, ‘Wow, how beautiful that I had the courage to say that I no longer wanted to be there.’”

That mindset helped her let go of the pressure to “feel behind” for not having kids and allowed her to “be curious.” She’s now ready to receive what the world has in store.

Coachella, Consecration, and the Beginning

And that precise world seems to agree. She was expecting Coachella to be her consecration, but now that she holds the reins, she actually feels “like it’s the beginning.” “This is the first time in my life that I feel I’m going to see myself as the artist in the same caliber as the stage that I’m stepping on,” she says in her interview with Playboy.

“When I received the call, I felt like a huge weight fell on me… I feel very blessed to be part of a generation that is trying to change the narrative and raise our voice for the community… I feel like it’s a show for my community, for the world, but it’s a show that’s very much for me.”

And it makes sense. After all, what is empowerment, true empowerment, but self-love? Many people, including she who writes these words, often thought the idealization of Playboy and its Playmates by women was complicit in the oppression of patriarchy; it was a passive way of feeding the machinery of sexual violence. And hey, it might well have been years ago. But you cannot even attempt to see Karol G’s Playboy cover and interview and not feel proud and inspired by a woman whose self-awareness and humility transform into a unique beauty and intimacy only a Latina could pull off.

We have spent years being taught to sweeten what is hurting us.

That is why the Black Coffee Rule resonates like a church’s bell with women of color. On the surface, it looks like another internet-born metaphor, the kind social media loves because it can fit inside a carousel, a Reel, or a caption that sounds wise at 11:11 p.m. But beneath the aesthetic, the rule is getting at something much older and bitter: how often women, and especially women of color, are trained to tolerate what should have sent us walking.

The phrase has been circulating in a few different versions. In one, black coffee means accepting people exactly as they are, without asking them to dilute themselves for comfort. In another, it means getting honest about what you actually want, instead of describing life through everything you are trying to avoid. But the version that keeps lingering for me is the simplest one: stop adding sugar to things that are inherently bitter.

That sounds almost obvious until you realize how much of girlhood depends on teaching us the opposite.

The Black Coffee Rule is really about the stories we tell ourselves

We wouldn’t dare call it self-betrayal at first. We call it patience, grace. Maybe even emotional intelligence. We call it being understanding, being strong, being ride-or-die, being the bigger person, being realistic, being committed, being mature. And sometimes, just “being the eldest daughter.”

We say the job is just stressful right now. We say the relationship is complicated, or our friend is going through a lot. We say the family dynamic is cultural, and silence is temporary. We say the disrespect is not that deep. We say we are being flexible when what we are really being is slowly rearranged around someone else’s comfort.

That is what the Black Coffee Rule exposes. Sugar does not transform the thing itself. It only helps you swallow it longer.

And that’s the thing.

Because bitterness is not always the problem, sometimes bitterness is the information. It is the body clocking what the mind is still trying to negotiate away. It is the part of you that already knows something is misaligned, draining, humiliating, deadening, or wrong.

Women of color get taught to sweeten reality for everybody else

For women of color, the pressure is rarely just personal. It is structural. We are raised inside systems that keep telling us our rawness is too much, our anger is dangerous, our clarity is harsh, our directness is ungrateful, our boundaries are rude, our standards are unrealistic, and our truth is disruptive.

So we learn how to translate ourselves into something more digestible.

We make ourselves easier to manage at work, despite the toll it takes on us. We force ourselves to be softer in relationships and less intense in rooms that were never built for us.

We learn how to coat reality so everyone else can keep consuming it comfortably.

That is why black coffee feels like such a useful metaphor here. Just as black coffee does not apologize for being strong, we should not show up pre-diluted. Black coffee does not ask if you prefer it sweeter before it tells you what it is.

Maybe that is exactly the lesson.

The Black Coffee Rule is not about becoming cold

There is a version of this conversation that always goes wrong in the same way. Women get tired of being accommodating, and suddenly the culture starts romanticizing hardness as the only alternative. “Be ruthless,” some say. “Be savage. Cut everyone off. Stop caring. Become untouchable.”

That is not what I think this rule is asking for. After all, black coffee is not cruel. It is clear.

The point is not to become emotionally unavailable or perform strength through detachment. The point is to stop lying to yourself about the taste of what you are consuming. The point is to stop calling poison “complicated,” and stop dressing up depletion as destiny. Maybe it is time to stop converting your own discomfort into proof that you are “spiritually evolved.”

That is different.

And honestly, it is harder. Because it requires discernment. It requires you to trust your own palate and admit that some things looked right on paper and still felt wrong in your body. It requires you to leave before the ending becomes catastrophic enough to finally justify your exit to everyone else.

There is a bodily cost to all that sweetening

Chronic stress has been linked to a range of health problems, including autoimmune disease, and women shoulder a disproportionate share of autoimmune illness. NIH says nearly 80 percent of people with autoimmune disease are women, and NCCIH notes that chronic stress has been linked to the development of diseases, including autoimmune conditions.

That does not mean every difficult relationship becomes a diagnosis, or that every compromise becomes a symptom. But it does mean the old fantasy that silence is harmless has never really held up. The body keeps score in ways culture likes to dismiss until the consequences become undeniable. Think of it as the dairy you insist on putting in a coffee that's best served black.

So yes, there are moments when optimism helps. Delusion has its place. Manifestation, if we want to call it that, can be a survival tool. But there is a difference between hope and self-abandonment; between believing in possibility and sweetening something that is steadily eroding you.

What the Black Coffee Rule asks us to do now

Maybe the point is not to make life bitter on purpose. Maybe the point is to stop interrupting the truth the moment it tastes strong.

If the relationship is wrong, let it register as wrong.

If the opportunity is misaligned, let it register as misaligned.

If the room requires you to shrink before it can tolerate you, let that information do its job.

If the life you are building keeps demanding that you betray yourself in small, elegant, socially acceptable ways, stop calling that ambition.

Because the right things may still challenge you, they may still demand work, discipline, humility, and sacrifice. But they will not require that constant chemical operation so many women know by heart, the one where you keep adding sweetness to make a harmful thing feel normal.

That is the real appeal of the Black Coffee Rule. It is not cute. It is not really about coffee. It is about deciding that clarity matters more than comfort.

And for women of color, especially, that may be one of the most radical decisions available to us.

To stop sweetening.

To stop translating our pain into something prettier.

To stop assuming truth needs softening before it can be spoken.

To trust that we can handle the taste.

On the morning of March 18, after reading the last word of Dolores Huerta’s statement, I felt my heart break and a heavy knot form in my throat. I rushed downstairs with my phone in my hand to tell my parents. My Colombian father’s face fell into disappointment. He lowered his eyes and admitted with sadness, “Machista men have held too much power. I’m not surprised.” I got ready for work, and I couldn’t hold back the tears that fell down my cheeks behind the wheel. Why did this feel so personal?

And then it hit me: I thought she was safe. I thought Dolores Huerta had been protected, even when she was the face of a movement considered dangerous by the establishment. I naively thought that my devotion, and that of millions of Latinas who know what she sacrificed and the power of her fight, would have protected her from what we have all experienced one way or another. And I see it every day. The days go on, and more women in my life share their experiences. It happened to me when I was a young girl, and I grew up to become the friend who had already been through it, so my close friends felt comfortable enough to tell me their stories.

It is as if being subjected to sexual misconduct has become a rite of passage for young women. Worse still, as much as we speak out, the more we realize this system is not designed to defend and protect us. Yet we persist, even while we are still healing.

Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia, and Debra Rojas are not victims. They are survivors, just like me, just like hundreds of millions of women. They kept their silence in the name of an entire movement, and it burdened them like stones in the pockets of a drowning man. No one should carry that weight. Not them, not the hundreds of girls trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, not me.

The farmworker movement was pivotal for my community. It humanized us and transformed labor rights, mobilizing thousands of people who joined with other communities in civil rights efforts. It secured better pay, safer conditions, and recognition for exploited agricultural workers. It empowered Mexican Americans and Filipinos to fight against poverty, discrimination, and powerlessness. It also gave us political identity and power. It started in 1962 through the cult of personality, one in particular: César Chávez.

Chávez became a beacon of hope for millions. While the uncomfortable silences that often arose when discussing César Chávez Day were familiar to all of us, we needed that figure. We all heard about his disdain for undocumented immigrants and Filipino workers. Latino outlets would remain silent. For God’s sake, people would compare him to Martin Luther King and Gandhi. We had “one of our own,” and we were proud. Maybe not of him, but of the force of the movement he had set in motion.

Because we have always known we are more than the stereotypes and the vilification of governments and media alike. We know the value of our community, and having someone in the public sphere who was “fighting the good fight” was a life raft in an ocean of desperation.

Now, that figure has crashed at our feet, this time with horrible accounts, stomping on our hearts and forcing Dolores Huerta to say out loud the horrors she suffered in silence to protect such an important movement for our community.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in her statement.

“I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.”

This is happening at a moment when many U.S. Latinos are so desperately grasping onto any source of home, inspiration, or haven. It is also happening at a moment when our own government is at the center of a whirlwind of sex trafficking allegations and millions of documents that are evident proof for everyone except those in power. And we are enraged. But we have a similar situation within our own community, so I wonder: is it time to face our history for its facts, not for what it could better serve in public discourse?

I can’t help but think about California’s Governor Gavin Newsom’s statement: “The farm workers movement and a labor movement are much bigger than one man — and we celebrate that, and that will be our focus as we process what the next steps are.” And that’s precisely it: it is much bigger than one man. In fact, it is much bigger than any man.

As survivors, we face the scrutiny of people in disbelief—people who are either uncomfortable with the truth or want to protect the perpetrators. More often than not, the United States court system fails to advocate for our stories. In other instances, it is even more traumatizing to proceed with a legal case and have your entire life opened up for interpretation and debate by a bunch of, again, men.

Dolores Huerta, for example, had to find out she was not the only survivor through The New York Times investigation, and that devastated her. That’s how the system works. Yet she spoke. She refused to remain “calladita,” and more than 60 years later, she still reminds us that “sí, se puede.”

A report from the UK is now giving language to what many women have been describing for years in less polite terms. According to The Independent, the Centre for Social Justice claims “hundreds of thousands of women are ‘missing out’ on having children,” partly because of a “delay” in young men “maturing into adulthood.” The report projects that around 3 million women aged 16 to 45 are on track not to have children under current trends, compared with around 2.4 million if patterns matched those of their grandparents’ generation. That gap translates to roughly 600,000 fewer women becoming mothers, according to the think tank.

What’s more, that trend is being perceived in every corner of the earth.

The “motherhood” gap they are finally naming

The Centre for Social Justice frames this as a “birth gap” and calls it a societal failure, arguing that demographers consistently find the two-child family remains an aspiration in Britain while the UK birth rate has dropped to 1.41, a record low, according to the CSJ. The think tank says this “baby bust” reflects “fewer mothers, not smaller families,” and that the tragedy sits with “missing mothers,” women who hoped to have children but did not become mothers due to social pressures.

And here is the finding that caught our attention: the CSJ points to a 2023 poll finding that nine in ten young British women hope to be mothers one day, with an average desired family size of 2.3 children, even as family formation slides further out of reach, according to its press release.

So no, the story is not that women suddenly stopped wanting kids. The story is the distance between what women say they hope for and what their lives allow.

The think tank is blaming men’s “delay,” and it is not subtle

The CSJ report argues that “male employment and education trends may play a role in falling birth rates.” It draws a stark comparison: “In the past,” a 24-year-old man would likely have been married, had a child, and been working for a decade. Now, the report says, men leave home at an average age of 25. In our experience, however, men oftentimes leave home when they’ve found a substitute for their mother or primary caregiver.

The Times described the claim in even blunter language: a “delay” in male maturity means men become “marriageable” later, which delays when couples feel ready for children, and that delay can push women closer to the end of their childbearing years.

Now, let’s stop there for a sec. Women should be able to choose whatever path suits them best--whether it’s marriage, motherhood, or the freedom and comfort of single life. However, what’s interesting here is that the think tank found many women actually want to be mothers, but not to their kids and husbands.

“Motherhood” keeps getting pushed later, until it becomes a cliff

This is not only about romance or personal preference. The CSJ links delayed family formation to pressure points that sound like daily life: housing costs, delayed financial independence, later marriage, and career uncertainty. It also points to the rise in the average age at which women have their first child, from 23 in the early 1970s to 29 in 2024, according to its press release.

And the Office for National Statistics has been tracking the same direction of travel. In the ONS projection cited in The Independent, fertility rates for women under 30 are projected to decrease, while rates for women over 30 are projected to increase between 2022 and 2047. The ONS panel also listed factors that could shape fertility, from the cost-of-living crisis to immigration patterns and international conflicts.

In other words, this is a society that tells women to “wait” and then acts shocked when waiting becomes permanent.

The policy solution they are selling feels like a throwback

Whenever we talk about women’s rights, we do so with receipts. We are the first on the chopping block when it comes to liberties. So, whenever the system feels it’s running out of workforce because of our choice to be free, they immediately blame us and find ways to “course correct” us.

The CSJ recommendations are not far from this hypothesis. As reported by The Independent and described in its own release, lean hard on traditional levers: encourage marriage at younger ages, help men “enter adulthood” earlier, explore “pro-natal” policies like tax cuts and benefit changes, and treat family formation as a national priority. This aligns with the rhetoric the U.S. government is pushing here at home.

The CSJ also argues that creating financial incentives for children without addressing the decline in relationships is “putting the cart before the horse,” citing an analysis published in the Financial Times that links falling birth rates to a “relationship recession” among adults.

The Times adds that the report proposes steps such as more in-work training and apprenticeships, and even reducing the school leaving age, as part of accelerating adulthood.

If you are hearing echoes of social engineering, you are hearing correctly.

“Motherhood” is becoming collateral damage in a wider economic math problem

The CSJ proves our argument to be correct. According to The Independent, the CSJ warns that falling fertility rates could affect the balance between pensioners and working-age people, and argues that to maintain the ratio, the state pension age would need to rise to 75 by 2039. The CSJ press release also points to the Old Age Dependency Ratio shifting from 4 working-age people per pensioner in 1970 to 3.5:1 by 2025, with projections toward 3:1 in the coming decades.

The CSJ also calls for a national conversation about how “having enough children is essential for the economic survival of the nation,” and argues that too much policy treats children as a burden rather than central to the future, according to its release.

The quiet detail hiding in plain sight

The report is trying to describe a fertility crisis. Many women will hear something else entirely: a partnership crisis.

Because when a think tank can publish a straight-faced argument that women are “missing out” on motherhood partly due to men delaying adulthood, it is accidentally admitting the thing women have been saying in private for years. The gap is not only biological: it is relational. It is structural. It is the daily grind of carrying emotional labor, domestic labor, and the consequences of someone else’s stalled development.

Frida Kahlo has been watched, rewritten, consumed, and explained to death. She has also been reduced, for decades, by the very people who claim to “canonize” her, often filtered through male art historians who positioned her as Diego Rivera’s companion who also happened to paint.

Time has corrected some of that. Yet it has also created a new problem: Frida as a Benjaminian object of consumption, endlessly reproduced and endlessly purchasable, a face on mass-market products. For anyone who has not read Claire Berest’s Rien n’est noir, Frida can still feel like an enigma, or a symbol, rather than a person with a historical body, a political mind, and a life shaped by events that never stop arriving.

So when I learned Berest’s book would guide the new Netflix adaptation, my expectations shifted. Berest has been one of the few who delves into the depths of Frida’s complex personality while contextualizing her within the historical moment that framed her life, even though Frida herself often lived out of sync with the era she inhabited. And when the new Netflix series is being developed by Patricia Riggen (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan), that detail alone raises the stakes. Riggen is one of the few directors of color in the industry and the first Latina director to helm action thrillers. If any life qualifies as an action thriller, at least emotionally, it is Frida’s relationship with pain and love.

Berest argues Frida Kahlo’s life revolved around two pivotal events: the car accident that left her with a broken spine and meeting Diego Rivera. Those events shaped everything that followed. They also risk becoming shorthand. So here is what I hope the Frida Kahlo series refuses to leave out.

The Frida Kahlo series has to start with her self-invention

Something has puzzled scholars of Frida’s life for decades: there are two versions of her birth date.

Frida said she was born on July 7, 1910, the same year the Mexican Revolution broke out. That date appears on the plaque at her famous Blue House in Coyoacán. “Frida said she was born with the Mexican Revolution. She used to take three years off her age,” explains art historian Julia Buenaventura. “It was her way of saying she was born with modern Mexico,” she explains.

According to her birth certificate, she was actually born on July 6, 1907. It was the first time Frida edited the history she wanted to live.

The facts that shaped the girl before the icon

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón.

Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was German and was her first great love, while her relationship with her mother was distant. Guillermo cared for her when she contracted polio, even though he suffered from constant epileptic seizures. She did not speak German but spoke very good English from a young age.

Even her name carries a political biography. Until the late 1930s, she spelled it the German way, Frieda, derived from Frieden, the German word for peace. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Frida stopped using the “e” in the middle of her name.

In her personal papers, she sometimes signs as Frida Kahlo, sometimes as Frida Kahlo de Rivera, sometimes as Frida Rivera, and even as Carmen Rivera.

Identity, in other words, was never stable.

The Frida Kahlo series should show her ambition before the tragedy

She was so intelligent and daring that she was one of the first women to enroll at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, aspiring to study medicine. At school, she met intellectuals who stimulated her ideas and her thirst for political and philosophical discussions.

While the common myth makes it sound as if painting was a romantic calling for Frida, it was not. She had a plan, but so did life.

Frida did not always dress like “Frida”

For many, the image of Frida is associated with her Tehuana outfits made of colorful fabrics, traditional to the Oaxaca region. But the artist did not always dress that way.

Historian Julia Buenaventura notes that, as seen in one of her 1926 self-portraits, where she wears a red velvet dress, the young Frida dressed in the French style, like the women of her time and class. There are also several photos showing her dressed in men’s suits during her youth.

Guadalupe Rivera, who was Diego’s wife when Frida met him, described her as a “flapper,” the term used for the modern women of the 1920s who wore short dresses and corsets.

The Tehuana dress came into fashion after the Revolution. It is a symbol of Mexican identity. “Wearing Tehuana dresses was part of Frida’s self-creation as a legendary figure,” wrote Hayden Herrera in her biography of the artist.

One of Kahlo’s paintings, “There My Dress Hangs,” depicts precisely one of her Tehuana dresses against the chaotic backdrop of Manhattan. “The Two Fridas” also uses the Tehuana dress to represent the intensely Mexican Frida she became, in contrast to the Frida with European roots from before she met Diego.

The first accident has to feel as deep as her broken bones

On September 17, 1925, Frida suffered a devastating crash on her way home from school. The bus she was riding in collided with a streetcar, and the impact wrecked it. She was with Alejandro Gómez Arias, her boyfriend at the time. The injuries were catastrophic: her spine was fractured in three places, she broke two ribs and her collarbone, and she fractured three pelvic bones. Her right leg was shattered in eleven places, and her right foot was dislocated.

Regarding this, Kahlo remarked that this must have been the brutal way in which she had lost her virginity.

The medical practices of her time subjected her to multiple surgical operations, at least 32 throughout her life, plaster and various types of corsets, as well as various stretching devices.

Shortly before, she had begun working as an apprentice in Fernando Fernández Domínguez’s engraving and printing workshop. Before her accident, she had shown no particular interest in painting. Nor did she follow the art class at school with much interest. The battle against the aftereffects of polio led her to lean toward sports activities. However, after the accident, she tried to move as little as possible to aid healing. Thus, painting took center stage in her life.

Early paintings, early circles, and the road to Diego

In 1927, she painted the Portrait of Miguel N. Lira, an oil on canvas measuring 99.2 x 67.5 cm, in which she depicts her partner wearing a cap against a distinctive, symbolic background filled with objects and symbols alluding to his name. A year later, she painted a portrait of her sister Cristina with very clean lines and soft tones.

By this time, Frida had already begun to frequent political, artistic, and intellectual circles. Through Germán de Campo, a student leader whom Frida greatly admired, she met the Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella, who lived in exile in Mexico with his Italian partner, the photographer Tina Modotti. Through them, Frida came into contact with the painter Diego Rivera, 21 years her senior, with whom she would begin a relationship.

Ergo, she was already a painter and a complete individual before meeting Diego.

Diego as a footnote

Many know about Frida and Diego’s love story. However, few people know she was 15, and he was 36 when they met in 1928 at the National Preparatory School, where Diego painted a mural. Two years later, they married for the first time, and love put Frida’s tenacity to the test. “It’s a marriage between an elephant and a dove,” Frida wrote, recalling what her mother told her upon hearing the news.

We all know the story of Diego’s affair with Frida’s half-sister. Fewer know of Frida’s affair with the exiled Russian politician Leon Trotsky.

Both Frida and Diego were members of the Mexican Communist Party, although Diego was expelled. Both declared themselves Trotskyists until the start of World War II.

The relationship was tumultuous because of their personalities. It was also due to the circumstances.

Pregnancy, Detroit, and the paintings that changed art history

A year after their marriage, Frida became pregnant for the first time, but her body could not carry the pregnancy to term, and it had to be terminated.

In 1932, Diego Rivera was commissioned to create the Detroit Industry Murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. In April, Frida painted “Sideboard on a Detroit Street,” heavily influenced by Giorgio de Chirico. She became critical of the American way of life, and this reflected in her paintings from that period. However, they were living in the U.S., not just visiting.

In August, she witnessed a solar eclipse, prompting her to incorporate the duality of night and day into some of her paintings, which became a recurring iconographic element in her work.

While in Detroit, she suffered a second miscarriage. During her recovery, she painted her self-portrait, Abortion in Detroit, executed in a more penetrating style, inspired by the small votive paintings of Mexican folk art known as retablos. What few people know is that, just as today, abortion was taboo, yet Frida spoke loudly about it, and about the pain behind.

Surrealism, refusal, and Frida’s own sentence

In 1938, the Surrealist poet and essayist André Breton described her work as Surrealist in an essay he wrote for her exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. However, she later stated: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted my dreams. I painted my own reality.”

However, few women were allowed to be part of the “boys club” in art history, no matter the genre or period. Women were often sidelined. Yet, Frida made it without even asking for it.

Politics as plot

In 1937, she and Diego met Leon Trotsky, an exiled Soviet revolutionary, and offered their home in Coyoacán for him to live there with his wife. Soon after, Frida began a brief affair with him.

Around this time, Diego Rivera adopted Trotskyist ideology. Within the Single Union of Construction Workers of Mexico City, the union led by Juan R. de la Cruz, whom Fernández Vilchis had trained and politically educated, discussions began regarding joining a faction of the Fourth International.

Faced with discord among the members, and because the movement was being sacrificed to Trotsky’s personal interests, Diego Rivera deemed it necessary to dissolve this Mexican section. Subsequently, Kahlo and Rivera changed their political views, becoming Stalinists, which caused a rift between them and Trotsky.

Nevertheless, Trotsky tried to rekindle his relationship with Frida, writing to her to ask her not to abandon him, but she never replied.

The divorce, the self-portraits, and the interior war

In 1939, Kahlo completed The Two Fridas, a self-portrait that reflected her two personalities. In this painting, she processed her marital crisis through the separation between the Frida in the Tehuana costume, Diego’s favorite, and the other Frida, of European roots, who existed before she met him. A vein connects the hearts of the two women. The rejected European part of Frida Kahlo threatens to bleed her dry.

After enduring a dysfunctional marriage marked by emotional abuse and infidelities on both sides, Rivera filed for divorce on November 6, 1939. Frida temporarily returned to her home in Coyoacán, where she suffered a period of depression during which she turned to alcohol as “a way to alleviate her physical and psychological suffering.” Their divorce was finalized in January 1940.

Trotsky’s assassination, her detention, and the remarriage contract

On May 24, 1940, David Alfaro Siqueiros attempted to assassinate Leon Trotsky, who was still residing at Frida’s home in Coyoacán. Following this attack, a raid was conducted at the residence, and the police detained her for several hours.

On August 21, Trotsky was assassinated at the age of 60, leading to accusations that she and Diego Rivera had killed him due to their close relationship with him. Both were arrested but were eventually released.

Unable to bear being apart from one another, they decided to remarry on December 8 of that same year. However, it was under certain conditions: Frida demanded financial independence and shared expenses. Many speculate that Frida refused to have sex with Diego, but there is no evidence to support this.

Teaching, recognition, and the U.S. institutions that framed her late career

Starting in 1943, she began teaching at La Esmeralda School in Mexico City.

In the late 1940s, her artistic work received increasing recognition, especially in the United States. She participated in major group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She also took part in The Exhibition by 31 Women, organized by the patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim.

Death, the missing autopsy, and the Communist flag

No autopsy followed her death, and that absence left room for a competing version of events: that she took her own life. The basis for that account, as it has circulated, comes from her nurse, who said she monitored Kahlo’s painkillers and claimed that on the night before she died, Kahlo overdosed. The nurse’s version hinges on a specific detail: Kahlo had been prescribed a maximum of seven pills, but she took eleven. That same night, she also gave Rivera a wedding anniversary gift more than a month early.

Afterward, her body was laid in state at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Her coffin was draped with the flag of the Mexican Communist Party, a decision that drew heavy criticism from the national press. Following the funeral ceremonies, she was cremated at the Panteón Civil de Dolores, and her ashes were returned to the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, where she was born and which later became a museum.

Rivera later called her death “the most tragic day of his life.” He died three years later, in 1957.

Few things feel as triggering as being called “hysterical” or getting hit with, “Are you on your period?” And with good reason.

For centuries, one of nature’s wonders, our menstrual cycle, has been weaponized against us by a patriarchal society that never tried to understand it nor had any interest in doing so. The spiritual and physical transformation that happens to us across a typical 28-day rhythm has been framed as weakness, impurity, inconvenience, comedy, or pathology. So, of course many of us grew up feeling like something was wrong with us.

So let’s start at the beginning.

What actually happens in your body

The day one of your period marks the beginning of the menstrual phase, when the uterine lining sheds, which causes bleeding. This phase is a time of lower estrogen levels and nutrient loss due to the shedding process.

Your body also moves through a normal range of cycle lengths. A normal menstrual cycle can last between 21 and 35 days. We often expect to bleed between three and seven days.

Meanwhile, mood and energy can change, but those shifts do not make you “crazy.” Lower energy and irritability can come with this phase, and it can be common to experience increased feelings of sadness and depression during the whole menstrual phase. Similarly, it is a moment when estrogen and progesterone sit at their lowest, which can help explain why energy tanks and moods dip.

What happens in the days leading up, and why everything feels louder

For many of us, the hardest stretch is not the bleeding. It’s the lead-up.

What’s known as the luteal phase follows ovulation and lasts about 12 to 14 days, as the body prepares for a potential pregnancy. During this phase, a ruptured follicle becomes the corpus luteum, and progesterone levels rise. If fertilisation does not occur, the corpus luteum atrophies, progesterone declines, and menstruation begins.

That hormonal change can show up as mood shifts, bloating, and fatigue. Common luteal symptoms include mood changes, bloating, and energy fluctuations.

Now, let’s talk about the cultural and religious stigma around the menstrual cycle

Many societies taught women to hide menstruation, treat it as unclean, or avoid even naming it. We are talking about centuries of indoctrination.

In Western industrial societies, many norms around conduct and communication rest on the belief that menstruation should remain hidden. In fact, many traditional religions consider menstruation ritually unclean, and menstrual taboo can involve menstruation being seen as embarrassing.

Even outside religious practice, that cultural hangover sticks. In Western industrial societies, menstruation is expected to remain hidden, both verbally and physically.

So when a woman tries to speak plainly about her cycle, she will probably face disgust, jokes, or silence, both from men and other women. What’s worse, she’s encountering a rulebook a lot of us never agreed to.

Hysteria, medicine, and how the menstrual cycle got tangled on purpose

Language tells on power.

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word “hysterical” to the 1610s and notes it originally meant “of the womb,” tied to hysteria, a nervous disease once defined solely by men as a condition “peculiar to women” and believed to be caused by dysfunction of the uterus.

That history bleeds straight into modern stigma. In a column for The Daily Texan, London Lack writes, “The word ‘hysteria’ comes from a misogynistic and overgeneralized female medical diagnosis,” and notes that what we now recognize as depression, anxiety, epilepsy, or menopause was once dismissed as “female hysteria.”

Historically, women were often dismissed as “hysterical,” and symptoms of anxiety and depression were attributed to fragility and “wandering wombs.”

So yes, when men call women “hysterical,” they echo a long tradition of medicine and culture labeling women’s reality as pathology.

The magic of hormones, without the mystification

Hormones run the show during your cycle, but they are not a moral verdict.

The menstrual cycle is the body’s monthly prep for pregnancy, driven largely by estrogen and progesterone, which rise and fall, affecting mood, energy, sleep, appetite, stress, and confidence. Estrogen often boosts mood through serotonin, while progesterone can contribute to mood swings and irritability, especially as it drops before menstruation.

At the same time, we should hold onto nuance. Hormones influence mood, but they do not single-handedly define your emotional life.

That being said, our cycle is more than medical terminology

It’s not surprising that men don’t understand how a person can, in fact, be 28 different people in a month. After all, what happens in our bodies is not simple. But there’s a big difference between that and stigma, or worse, teaching us to stigmatize ourselves.

This is to say that there is nothing to “control” during our menstrual cycle. There is no calendar to follow, as if we were afraid of turning into Mr. Hyde. While it is true that learning about our bodies and their rhythms helps us feel more comfortable—God knows how uncomfortable our periods can be—perhaps the first thing we should learn is to be kind to ourselves and stop repeating the echo that was forced into our heads.

Prioritizing sleep, dietary supplements, vitamins, exercise, and meditation are not recommendations only for women, but for any human being who wants to improve their lifestyle.

The problem has never been the menstrual cycle, but the story we were told

Here’s the truth that cuts through all of it:

We live in a culture that calls women hysterical for having feelings, then tells us our menstrual cycle “proves” we cannot be trusted with power. Just watch the current status of the world and see how that argument debunks itself.

This bias has created glass ceilings for women in leadership, despite a lack of evidence that menses alone drives mood instability in healthy young women.

Furthermore, the mental health system, like many institutions, was built by men in a time when women were considered the “weaker sex.” That dismissal still echoes in how women experience healthcare today.

So when you feel like a different person at different points in your cycle, you don’t need shame. You need context. You need language. You need care. And you need a world that stops treating the emotional complexity of women as a punchline.

Because the problem was never you, it was a patriarchal system based on emotional simplicity and fear of what it cannot control.