The New York Times recently issued a story about multiple allegations of sexual impropriety against civil rights icon Cesar Chavez — including rape and sexual abuse. To me, the most damning part is when one of the women included in the story, Esmeralda Lopez, recalls telling her mother after Chavez had behaved inappropriately with her, “Cesar Chavez is just a man.”
Who here hasn’t wanted to believe that we are a vital, integral part of something — a movement, a scene, a school, a church, a friendship — only for that disappointing realization to ruin it?
I have spent my whole life wishing for my body to be a neutral thing — just a fact about me, the same way me being left-handed or blue-eyed is. I wish that the way I experience this body, this female body, at home was how I could live in it out in the world. But the best thing I can say about this body is that it is the equivalent of wearing my own speed bumps. (Or I guess, speed cushions.)
I can think that I’m getting to the same place at the same time as everyone else, and I’m wrong. This body signals to a lot of people that I don’t get to go all the way there. I used to think that, if I could just lose weight or learn how to do my makeup or style my hair or — I mean, shit, if we’re being honest — solve this crime or unearth this history, I could just be a person in the world. The good thing and the sad thing about getting older and having so many female friends is that you come to learn that there is nothing to be done. No woman has figured out the Goldilocks zone of not too this, but not too that, that lets us just be a person in the world.
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The most conventionally attractive women I know find out all the time that they were supposed to understand that, whatever the goal they were working toward was, they weren’t an equal part of the movement — they were part of the prize for doing it.
You can have a Ph.D. in astrophysics and be the smartest person in the room, and yet when men look around for someone to take notes or grab coffee, their eyes are going to land on you. They’ve made it to the big table. That means someone takes care of the “minor” details now. You’ve also made it to the big table, but that someone is you.
You can be the child of a dear friend of, say, Cesar Chavez, and come to realize that — in spite of all of the talk of freedom and empowerment and your hope that here is a leader who is going to make things better for all of you — you’re not an equal part of the “all of you.” You’re a treat.
It’s enraging, of course. But that’s what comes flooding in after you realize, “Oh, of course.” The realization itself is just an echoing chasm of disappointment.
And I get it. I mean, I’ve sat in therapy for years trying to come to terms with this. We are all broken, flawed people. Everyone is the equivalent of a toy built out of broken Legos — it's just that some people have enough pieces with one good side to show a face to the world that looks solid. And most of us are just trying our best out here, to make a life out of these broken pieces of ourselves.
But why are so many men who work for the betterment of the world broken in the exact same way? A way that makes it impossible for them to imagine seeing women fully as people — and not just (in the “best”-case scenario) also as an opportunity for sexual gratification?
I don’t really have a pithy conclusion. I don’t have a solution. And frankly, I know I’m not going to live to see a time when having this body doesn’t make my life harder. But that’s my hope for us anyway — that the freedom movements we are so integral to can someday understand us as being fully deserving of that freedom.
