Editor's note: This column contains references to sexual harassment and disordered eating.
For my entire life, men have defined me.
When I was little, I watched. I saw movies, listened to music and tuned into the television to learn how to be loved. I learned how consciously and subconsciously.
When I was in kindergarten, I held hands with a boy and we placed our name stickers on two cubbies next to each other before recess. During naptime, we held hands.
In fifth grade, a boy brought his diary to school. The pages were empty except for one, where he wrote that he had a crush on me. I spent the day running from him and his friends, wrapped up in the drama and anxiety of the misspelled message scrawled on the page.
Later that year, a boy texted me—he told me he liked me. In fifth grade, he wanted to date me—he told me that I was pretty and that he wanted to spend time with me. When I didn’t like him back, he continued to text me, and I got scared. My parents blocked the number from my ten-year-old phone.
By the time I was in middle school, I was going to be pretty. I was thin and I grew breasts. I saw boys look at them.
In high school, I had it down. After a lifetime of careful observation, of watching men online define the perfect woman, of watching them argue over their tastes and preferences like an item on a menu, I figured it out. The only problem was that I had to be everything at once.
I learned how to change myself to get men to love me—or maybe just want to have sex with me. Whatever it was, I learned how to play the role—when I acted a certain way, men knew how to act. It played out like a script in my head: I knew what their reaction would be to each word I said and every move I made.
I twisted and turned my body in the mirror to find the right angles. I ripped hair out of the flesh in my armpits. I put gloss on my lips to make them shiny and wet. I had men scream “nice tits!” at me out of cars speeding by while I walked down the street with my Dad. I bent over to pick up pencils and looked up at them. I dressed in clothes modest enough to avoid labelling myself a slut and I showed enough cleavage to make them think. I played dumb and I played smart. I am smart. I was shy and I was outgoing—depending on the guy. A man put his hand up my skirt in a train station in Florence. A man put his hand down my pants in a dark room at a party during his apology for kissing me against my will earlier in the evening.
I trampled women around me. I hate that I did it. I know every woman has done it and I hate myself less. I distanced myself from the “girly” things. I killed the memory of myself which played dress up and loved pink as a little girl. I said bye to her in exchange for sex appeal and the hollow attention of men. It doesn’t always feel hollow, but I know it is.
I hated my body and cried in the mirror looking at it. I googled the calories in a grape. Men complimented my body. People were nice to me because they wanted to have sex with me.
I stole boys from my friends and I made them like me and it worked. I became a girl that boys had crushes on—that cool boys had crushes on. And that came with more. I heard them talk and I learned more when I listened. I learned to stay quiet when they spoke rudely about other girls, and I learned to always be down. I flirted with boys that my friends liked. I knew that other girls would trample me in order to appear even cooler and even more nonchalant than I was.
In my early twenties, I began to grapple with these things. I felt bad that I was a bad friend. I liked being the friend that boys liked. I liked being liked by boys. I hated being stared at by men. I liked being looked at. I hated walking down the street. I wore clothes that covered my body because I was scared of men. I wore clothes that displayed my body for men. I was and am confused. I lied to myself.
My relationship with men scared me. When I started dating a boyfriend, I felt lost—who was I without men to impress? What was my value if it was not getting men to want to kiss me? And if that was the truth, how sad and hollow was that—why did I get here? Was I a bad person?
So who am I if not for a man to look at?
I realized sometimes, I don’t know. For my entire life, men have defined me. Men have given me meaning—and they’ve defined my boundaries. I was allowed to be cool—but only as cool as the men around me. I needed to radiate sex appeal, but I hated when men leered at me out of the windows of cars, hated being talked about, hated being grabbed at and slid by at parties and imaginary-fucked.
Maybe this act of honesty is the first step in divorcing the man within me and coming back to the self that little me would have wanted. Maybe that can’t exist anymore. If it does, I want to find it.
I’ll free myself.
Miranda Corral is a Trinity senior.
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