Maria Sanchez

One of my girlfriends from school used to joke: “sometimes it’s easier to just kiss the guy than explain to him why you don’t want to.” We would all laugh, but the message was clear — we were more worried about offending the guy, or being uncomfortable with him, or hurting his feelings, than about doing what we wanted to do.

At home, the subject of sexual activity was solely discussed in terms of a woman’s decency and unplanned pregnancy scares. Avoiding “the sex talk” by instilling a sufficient amount of fear from the consequences was the ultimate Jedi mind-trick of the Silent Generation.

I used to love debate. I believed in testing ideas and theories, and in the power of discourse. And I thought that debate, the back and forth of ideas, was instrumental to that. This love carried me through my Political Science degree. But I’ve found that there are two types of debate. There’s the debate of ideas represented in new vs. old schools of thought, nuanced critique, new study, and the progression of circumstance and ideas. And then there’s the patriarchal sport of debate now given new life in the age of the internet.