You may have spent years, maybe decades, developing a level of expertise that would command serious money in almost any other context.

But if you’re a woman, especially a woman in education or care work, there’s a good chance you’ve been taught to believe that your knowledge only counts inside the institution that underpays you for it.

I want to give you a new relationship to your own expertise.

This is the shift Substack gave me. Not just extra income, though yes, that too. More importantly, it changed how I see my value. Once I realized that the skills I use every day in the classroom were not confined to the classroom, everything shifted.

Here is what I did to take my teaching practice out of the classroom while remaining in the classroom (and it all started with a TikTok account I made to spy on my teenager).

The story of Heavy Meta and Girls’ School Book Club

When my son wanted to join TikTok last year, I relented and started my own account to follow him to keep an eye on him. I was also a newly single mom and out from under the judgmental eye of my “partner” and so I decided to DO something with the account. So I started talking about books, the books I was reading, the books my students were reading, what I was teaching, my ideas, what was working, etc. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest that you start a TikTok!)

I talked about banned books, about women and girls in literature (or the lack thereof), about feminist theory. I teach at an all-girls’ school so these are just the issues I think about daily anyway.

I also teach by pairing texts with supplemental readings, and each text is also part of a fiction pod, so every text is paired in some way. Years ago, when I was in undergrad, I noticed that no matter what classes I took each quarter, somehow they would end up connecting, and I was baffled and blown away by that. How was it happening? Now of course I know about Piaget and other reading theorists but I really started seeing the world in pairs, in connections, after I completed my master’s thesis on metaphor. And then when I started teaching, I realized I could create those connections as well, create and influence conceptual metaphor, and so I developed an interdisciplinary class with a colleague, called Perspectives.

For each text we read, we pair a discipline outside of English. So when I taught a class on Monsters, we read The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, and a supplemental reading was Terry Tempest Williams’ “Clan of the One-Breasted Women,” about the high incidence of breast cancer in the Mormon community in Utah due to its proximity to nuclear testing (in Nevada) in the 50s. And then I brought in our physics/rocketry teacher, who did a lesson on nuclear bombs (I learned so much!). And then I brought in the ethics teacher.

All of this is to say that I love my teaching practice, I see how successful it is, and I wanted to share the ideas that resonate most strongly with my students. And then I posted a very simple carousel pairing texts, and when it went viral, I realized that people are hungry are education, for thoughtful content.

I started to close read — noticing — what was resonating on my social media content, and then I pitched a book club idea to my followers. There was interest, and typically in my life I move slowly — I tend to follow the glacial pace of education — but this time I knew I needed to move quickly. Dare I say impulsively?

I already had a Substack account that I had been sporadically writing on, but I definitely wasn’t as familiar with the platform or its possibilities. Since I knew I wanted to provide reading guides, it seemed like a good gathering place and of course it could host long form, and I knew I could post a zoom link that people could access in one place.

And that zoom link made me realize I needed to protect my book club with a paywall.

I created the book club before I was ready, before every single element was in place, but I knew I needed to act quickly. Perfection is the enemy of done, right? I launched it and then drove to see one of my best friends, about 6 hours away. By the time I got there and checked my phone, I realized I had accidentally started a business.

6 months later: Substack Bestseller status. Now I speak at multiple academic conferences a year, I lecture at third spaces, I’ve lectured at a university, and the realization that my day-to-day teaching, combined with my obsession of conceptual metaphor, was the foundation of all of it, something that I’d studied and been obsessed with for years. It didn’t even occur to me that it was anything special because it’s literally what I do at work every day.

This is not a Side Hustle

I know a lot of teachers are looking for a Side Hustle, and I don’t think this is that. For one, that language is too minimizing, because I see Substack as something that provides more opportunity, potential, and possibility. But also, Substack has become an extension of my teaching, something that benefits my teaching, in both the short and long term. So it’s not side — it’s front and center.

It just takes some thinking and ingenuity, something teachers, and most women in general, already have in spades.

What are you obsessed with? What are you already good at? That’s where we’ll start.

And before you answer, I want you to sit for a second with how I opened this essay: you have spent years, possibly decades, developing a level of expertise that would command serious money in almost any other context. This was something I had to convince myself, so let me convince you.

If you’ve been teaching for any amount of time, you have a methodology. You have data and more importantly, you have results. The only thing standing between you and getting paid for what you know, outside of a classroom, on your own terms, is this story that’s been perpetuated that your knowledge only counts inside the very institution that underpays you for it. Whether it’s public or private school, someone else benefits from your labor. Especially if you’re a woman. Women, and those in care work, are chronically underpaid, and it’s self-perpetuating because we’re also overworked, so we don’t have the time to seek other avenues. So we convince ourselves it’s okay. We become martyrs for our cause, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Which is why I have been so surprised and delighted by my Substack journey.

It’s not that it hasn’t been hard. Sure it’s been hard. But it’s also been exciting, and liberating, and most importantly — it’s mine. My email list is mine. What I write is mine. There are no district or administrative constraints. No oversight.

I started my book club on Substack less than a year ago, and I was amazed that I was able to quickly replace a stipended position I had stepped down from at work through my Substack work. Then it replaced a class stipend. Now it’s replacing my rent. So those were the financial benefits I noticed. More recently though, I’m seeing the connections to how my book club is changing my relationship to work in general, because I’m able to more clearly see my value.

My work isn’t dependent on the school where I teach these skills. The school depends on me to teach these skills, and I can teach them anywhere. That mindset shift is changing everything.

Recently, I held my boundaries about some “extra” work I’ve been asked to do for years, which is unpaid. I declined, and the world didn’t end. In fact, I encouraged others to also decline, because it’s harder to take advantage when the system itself starts to break down, and now changes are in the works for next year. Sorry not sorry I’m demanding to be paid for what I’m worth.

***

For women educators, writers, and experts who know they have something valuable but need help identifying, naming, and monetizing it beyond the institution, let me help you think through what your genius is. Your superpower, as it were.

Initially, I was hesitant to roll this out to my audience, because again, I am subject to undermining my value in all aspects of my work. But when my colleagues saw how successful my Substack book club was, and even joined, they started asking how they could do something, too. We’re all teachers, we’re all in the same boat, and I want to lift everyone with this rising tide.

Platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers can absolutely be helpful, and some people view it as a side hustle and others (1%?) have completely replaced their teaching salary with their work there. It can be a smart and profitable way to sell materials. But I think there’s a bigger possibility here, especially for women whose work is more specific, more conceptual, or less easily reduced to worksheets. (And if you already have a TPT, you can still link it through your Substack and make money in multiple ways — they’re not mutually exclusive.)

Ultimately, TPT sells what you made. I’m interested in helping you sell what you know. I want to help you recognize and monetize the expertise beneath the materials.

Here is where my skill of close reading translates again — I can read between the lines. I can help you uncover the patterns in your own work.

I really see this as a symbiotic endeavor, one that improves your teaching philosophy/pedagogy while also sharing/increasing your knowledge. It’s Professional Development that you create, you own, and you benefit from.

I help women, especially educators, identify the expertise they’ve been taught to undervalue, translate it into powerful language, and build income around it on their own terms.

Light Work is where I teach women to use language to get paid. If you’re ready to find the thing you’re already doing and build economic opportunity around it, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe now

1:1 Expertise Intensive

This is the work I do with other women, especially educators, writers, and experts who know they have something valuable but need help identifying it, naming it, and building income around it beyond the institution.

In my 1:1 work, I help women uncover the deeper intellectual value of what you already know. I help you identify patterns in your work, articulate the method beneath what comes naturally to you, and translate that into sharper language, stronger positioning, and new economic possibilities. I also provide follow-up notes and next steps.

In other words: I help you stop underestimating you own expertise. Feminist theory has been making this argument for decades: the devaluation of women's expertise is not natural, not inevitable, and though it feels it, not personal.

It is structural and it is deliberate. It’s economic, of course!

Federici makes this argument, as do Hochschild, Folbre, and Audrey Lorde. We deserve to be paid for our work and making that happen is feminist work.

We can also look at Tori Dunlap, who has built a multi-million dollar platform on a single argument: that financial literacy is a feminist act, and she's right, but literacy is only part of it. The other part is recognizing that the expertise you've already built has economic value the institution has actively worked to obscure from you. And Katie Gatti Tassin's Rich Girl Nation takes this further, analyzing the structures specifically designed to shame women away from understanding their finances and their worth (even just “The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel” is worth the read!). The systems have been set up to keep women out, and there's a reason for that.

It’s all important work, and worth looking into, especially if you plan on remaining in the teaching profession, which I view as valuable, non-negotiable, AI-proof work.

Just because I’m mission-led doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be compensated. I should be paid for my work, and so should you.

Further Reading

Dunlap, Tori. Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsht to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love. Dey St., an imprint of William Morrow, 2022.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

Folbre, Nancy. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. The New Press, 2001.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983, 2012

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Firebrand Books, 1988.

Gatti Tassin, Katie. Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures. Crown, 2025.

A Harvard Business Review article “Why Women Stay Out of the Spotlight at Work” by Priya Fielding-Singh, Devon Magliozzi, and Swethaa Ballakrishnen, studied women who intentionally stayed out of the spotlight at work using a strategy called “intentional invisibility”:

To get ahead in the workplace, you have to be seen. Being visible at work allows employees to demonstrate their skills, land prominent assignments, and build strategic relationships.

For women, however, the importance of visibility creates a conundrum.

On the one hand, women’s contributions are systematically overlooked at work. This limits their professional advancement and helps to explain why the senior levels of organizations remain overwhelmingly male. Yet when women try to make themselves more visible, they can face backlash for violating expectations about how women should behave, and risk losing their hard-won career gains.

How do women navigate this no-win situation?

In 2013 we embedded ourselves in a women’s professional development program at a large nonprofit organization in the U.S. to find out. Working with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, we conducted 86 in-depth interviews with women in the program, observed 36 discussion groups, and sat in on 15 program-wide meetings. The majority of women in our study were white and college-educated, and two-thirds were parents. Participants ranged from entry-level to VP-level employees, with an average tenure of 11 years at their organizations. Most decided to join the professional development program for its networking and educational opportunities, but many participants cited the chance to contribute to research as an added perk.

The women in our study were keenly aware of the rewards of visibility. They knew that being noticed — for example, by interjecting during meetings and taking credit for accomplishments — was a conventional strategy for professional advancement. Still, many women consciously rejected that strategy.

Instead, they opted for a risk-averse, conflict-avoidant strategy in the office. Women employed this “intentional invisibility” when they avoided conflict with colleagues, softened their assertiveness with niceness, and “got stuff done” by quietly moving things forward without drawing attention to themselves. The consequence of this approach was that they often ended up feeling well-liked but underappreciated.

Why did women choose this approach? We identified three motivations: to avoid conflict or backlash, to feel authentic at work, and to balance professional and personal demands.

While I can see their motivations and I can empathize with their situations, what I can’t do anymore is remain in the shadows.

Using conceptual metaphor theory, we can see that the metaphors here are: Recognition is Visibility & Invisibility is Erasure.

In some ways, the metaphor itself is flawed, because it assumes a passivity that assumes lack of control. When we conceptualize professional success as visibility, who are we visible to? Advancement can be moving into the light and recognition is being seen, but by whom? You’re simply not in control of who is controlling the light (source) or who is doing the seeing, right? (Quick note: to check for passive voice, add the phrase "by zombies." If the sentence still makes grammatical sense, it's in the passive voice.)

So in some ways, you have to be seen by yourself (and in some ways, this prevents you from becoming the zombie).

I teach at an all-girls’ school and we’re always teaching our students to be audacious and to be their own advocates. To take up space, ask for the raise, apply for the thing they’re not quite qualified for yet, say yes before they feel ready. I have given approximately nine hundred thousand speeches about this and through the texts that I teach, I can say look at what it costs women to be erased. Look at what it costs them to erase themselves.

So then I needed to take a good long look at my own life and reflect on where I wasn’t being my own advocate. I have always been pretty good with boundaries, and I often know something intellectually, but turning that into practice is sometimes a challenge. So in short, over the past year, in order to not only see myself, but to be able to look at myself in the mirror, I’ve been leaning pretty hard into the spotlight.

I’ve also been leaning into cringe and delusion in equal measure. I refuse to fig tree my life away.

So here is a list of what I have been doing over the past year to make myself more visible in all the places: work, home, and whatever screen you’re reading this on right now.

1. Academic Conferences: I started presenting regularly at academic conferences and applying for fellowships. I’ve been accepted to everything I’ve applied for, and often it’s just about sharing what you already know, what you already do, so it’s not a ton of extra work (and I enjoy the travel involved — this summer, Toronto!).

   This does a few things for the purposes of spotlight: for one, my head of school is sometimes at these conferences, so she comes to my presentations and she can actively see for herself — apart from the rest of my colleagues — my work. She can also see my ambition, my drive, but most importantly, she can see others appreciating my work, and sometimes that’s the spotlight you need on your work — outside appreciation.

2. Joining Professional Boards: I joined my second board this year, a role I was invited to partially due to my presence at so many conferences. Being a board member is a great think tank opportunity, as well as a place to learn and to make connections for the future. Both of my boards have one zoom meeting once a month, and the additional work output is fairly low (until you take on a more prominent role — but then again, more spotlight).

3. Social media: now I debated about putting social media so far up on the list, but it has actually been one of the most visible things I’ve done that has opened the door to other opportunities. When my son wanted to join TikTok last January, I agreed (after I made him read the Surgeon general’s Warning, among other research), with the caveat that I would also join, follow him, and monitor his use.

   And then I started creating literary content. And HE started following ME.

   More significantly to the purposes of this list, this visibility did a few things: it opened my eyes to this incredible community that I sensed wanted more than just the surface level ideas that a 1 or 2 minute video could produce (that being said, people are brilliant and can really synthesize an idea in an impressively short amount of time!); it built my speaking skills; it thickened my skin and held me accountable—it made me double and triple check my ideas and resources, which has made me a sharper thinker and scholar. But most importantly, it led me to create Girls’ School Book Club.

4. Girls’ School Book Club: July of 2025 I started this book club on Substack and it has been one of the most audacious, and most satisfying, personal and professional decisions I’ve ever made. I had been on Substack intermittently for a year or year two before this but I didn’t really get it. When I was looking for a platform for the book club, I also considered The Bindery because I had just been invited to that platform, but it was another learning curve and I wanted to move quickly. Substack was ALSO a learning curve but one I was more willing to make, partially because of Substack’s growing visibility — and it’s certainly visible now!

5. Being interviewed for my bestselling Substack — Girls’ School Book Club! When of Make Writing Your Job reached out to me for an interview, that’s when I felt things…shift. I was visible to someone outside of my exact niche.

   📚 Editor’s Note: When Reading Becomes Resistance

   Through her bestselling Substack Heavy Meta, Tarra has created a space where reading isn’t just a pastime — it’s a practice, a discipline, and a form of resistance. Grounded in her work as an English teacher and Writing Center Director at a girls’ school, her Girls’ School Book Club brings feminist theory, banned books, conceptual metaphor, and lived experience into conversation with the world as it is now.

   What I love about Tarra’s work is how she’s not afraid to dig deep. Nothing in her work is rushed or shallow. Each month’s reading is part of a larger ecosystem — essays, resources, discussions — designed to help readers think more deeply and read more deliberately. There’s a care to the way she builds community, protects it, and asks people to value both the labor and the learning involved.

   This interview is a reminder that making writing your job doesn’t always look loud or linear. Sometimes it looks like teaching, reading closely, showing up consistently, and trusting that depth will find its audience — because it always does.

   – Amy Suto

   Editor & Curator of GuestStack

6. Interviewing authors: I have interviewed twice, once on a Substack live and once at a bookstore(!), for her debut novel Vicious Cycle. As someone who has such a profound love and appreciation for good books and good ideas, this has been such a fun and professionally challenging opportunity, one because it’s new to me, and two because it requires a level of creativity that I’m still building. That being said, it taps into critical thinking and research and making connections and it has truly been such a highlight of the year. And Jaime is brilliant and fun so it’s win-win. Win.

7. Creating a third place with my brilliant friend/actress/director/event planner/writer, Brook. Together we have created Lectures & Libations, “A live lecture series produced by Art Crush LA, designed to bring compelling thinkers into a social, accessible, and elevated environment.” I share some ideas in a beautiful space, I ask for a lot of volunteers to share their thoughts (and/or a poem), and then (before/during and) after we’re having wine and snacks and discussing the ideas and texts from the lecture.

   

   February: Frankenstein: the Postmodern Prometheus (and the erasure of women)

   March: Eat or Be Eaten: Desire & Metaphor in Literature

   *Clearly I’m trying to bring the book club to life, because March is directly aligned with the book club’s theme.

8. Guest teaching university classes: Because of my visibility in #1-7, I’ve lectured on conceptual metaphor theory and The Handmaid’s Tale, and I’ll be lecturing on Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: La Frontera in a few weeks.

9. Substack Community: I have found the most interesting writers and thinkers on Substack, and I’m doing a live with of Inheriting Inequality next week! She’s so multifaceted — she knows a lot about a lot. This is a newer kind of visibility for me, but I’m so eager to learn.

10. I started highlighting my eye wrinkles (crow’s feet — such a weird term!) by rubbing gold glitter into them instead of trying to erase them — again, I’m done with erasure. Except to point it out.

This list is longer than I thought, which I’m so excited about. Some of the results of this audacious visibility: I now have a daily writing practice. I am full of ideas, and I have started writing my fiction again. I’m in touch with alumni who have found me here, and continuing to see them grow as thinkers and humans has been an absolute delight.

Recognition is Visibility & Invisibility is Erasure

See yourself first. And then see what happens in a year when you let others see you, too.

What is it about this story that epitomizes the cruelty, or even worse, the thoughtlessness, of this war?

As you can imagine, teaching at an all-girls school means I took this one particularly hard. Girls are already up against enough — in all three countries involved — so making it a target, whether intentional or not, is another kind of slap in the face, except it’s worse, it’s a violence of profound proportions, a violence that resulted in this:

The strikes began in the morning and since Saturday is a school day in Iran, when the school was hit at 10:45, students were in session. Whoever planned this strike either knew children would be there, which is cruel, or failed to account for the fact that Saturday morning in Iran means children in classrooms, which is thoughtlessness. It’s the possibility of thoughtlessness that might be the more damning indictment, because who would rather risk the possibility of killing children than negatively impact the stock market? (I think we all know who. That was rhetorical.)

And then after, with both the U.S. and Israel seeking to distance themselves from the attack, with no one admitting responsibility as they “continue to investigate.” The children are dead and as such are now just numbers, now just casualties of war, like the gross “friendly-fire” euphemism that took down three F-15s this week as well (pilots survived).

There is a very specific moral horror in the gap between killing children and regime change.

This is a girls’ school. The education of girls is a political act, and building girls’ cognitive capacity is threatening to systems that depend on their passivity and silence. When girls are banned from school it’s usually because an educated girl is an ungovernable girl. A girl who can’t be controlled.

The name of the school makes me want to cry: Shajarah Tayyebeh. The Good Tree. A school explicitly built to grow girls.

Rhetoric: Pete Hegseth just turned 1984 into 2026

During the “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine Press Briefing” on March 2, Pete Hegseth took us way back to 1984 in a few words on the heels of this administration’s renaming The Department of Defense to The Department of War:

Peace through strength, the warrior ethos, lethality, unity of purpose, those are not slogans.

“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” — official slogans of The Party in 1984

Who is writing his speeches, O’Brien himself?

We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

Turns out the regime who chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" was gifted death from America and death from Israel.

This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.

Whoever is writing it seems to have just learned about antimetabole, a form of chiasmus, which is repeating words in reverse order to create a pointed contrast. (Or as my colleague just mentioned, AI).

“Death to America” and “Death to Israel” to “death from America and death from Israel.”

The syntax here is flipped — death to vs death from— and Hegseth seems to derive glee from the message. It’s rhetorically elegant in a way that should make you deeply uncomfortable because the device creates a kind of poetic justice, a satisfying click of completion, and that satisfaction is being manufactured around the deaths of girls between seven and twelve years old. And educators. And citizens. We’ve seen presidents and skilled orators use it for centuries, like JFK’s inauguration with "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." (Chiasmus makes an X, chi, in its organization on the line).

The quote that’s getting the most attention, “not a regime-change war, but the regime sure did change” is antithesis sharpened by syllepsis: using the word “regime change” in two different senses simultaneously (the formal policy designation and the literal outcome) to make a joke. It’s a wink. It’s manipulation. It’s so gross.

What these devices do together is transform a war and its very real casualties into a punchline. It’s Hegseth’s attempt at wit, I think? The use of these literary devices makes Hegseth seem to be in rhetorical control and its effect is to desensitize, aestheticize our reaction to mass violence, along the lines of our passivity and acceptance of another school shooting — thoughts and prayers.

He is trying to shape how we’re allowed to feel about this war, and in doing so it’s clear how he feels about it. He is not a serious person, and yet he has a very serious job. So serious he made a joke of killing young girls.

Let’s discuss how these expectations get placed on women starting from when they’re young girls, and why it’s such a hard habit to break. Because it is just a habit. It’s not innate, as much as the powers that be would like us to think. We can break the habit, once we see it. (Although there is research that this level of acquired sexism does alter the brain.)

The Pattern

Amanda Montell identifies the three primary source domains English speakers draw from when insulting women:

“When English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut).”
— Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

This is not random. Each source domain positions women as consumable, controllable, or commodified, and I’d like for us to find a way to turn our language about women into agents, builders, or equals. Even when/if insulting! But our level of insults are so ingrained, because of our inherited conceptual metaphor, that the systems have to change for the insults to follow suit.

THE CATTY PROBLEM: WOMEN ARE CATS

We have male-coded terms and female-coded terms, and I don’t know that one is better than the other, as men here are coded as only one way—aggressive. So when you fall outside of either of these gendered stereotypes, the term becomes one of layered insult. Competitive, alpha, cutthroat women aren’t exactly embraced by our society, and neither are catty men. You’re saying something when you choose to mix insults in this way.

WOMEN ARE FOOD (The Dessert Metaphor)

@girlsschoolbooksI use Wordslut in my research ALL the time. Side note: Piglet can be found under “Absurdist Fiction” but…is it all that absurd? #booktok #literaturetok #tiktokshop #bookrecs #wordslut #piglet #sula

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Now this is an idea I think about a lot and I wrote about women and eating food in fairy tales (and other literature) in a column I had (2021) in The Coachella Review called “Hard to Swallow,” which was based on my grad school work which was based on being a woman and obsessively exploring monster metaphors. Last year I made this short video on it. Piglet and Wordslut really opened my eyes to specifically the food related metaphors women are described as after I’d read them together, and I still find myself thinking about this concept all the time.

Linguist Caitlin Hines’s groundbreaking work “Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor” (1999, 2000) notes that,

“A consistent, widespread, generally unconscious and undocumented metaphor in English equat[es] women-as-sex-objects with desserts.”

This metaphor reduces women to objects that are: sweet (pleasant, compliant), single-serving (easily consumed, disposable), decorative (displayed for visual pleasure), sinful/decadent (associated with temptation and guilt), or just easily done without (non-essential, expendable).

English: tart, cookie, cupcake, sweetie, honey, cheesecake, sugar, candy, piece of cake, piece of pie
Spanish: bombón, pastelito, bizcocho, melocotoncito

Cross-cultural research (López-Rodríguez 2007) shows that this pattern appears in multiple languages, which suggests deep ideological roots rather than linguistic accident.

One of the most frequent metaphors used by the written media in both English and Spanish is the WOMAN AS DESSERT metaphor. Flicking through the pages of magazines and newspapers, one encounters a host of linguistic metaphors portraying women in the guise of honey, pie, cake, tart, bombón, pastel or bizcocho. Although at first sight these metaphors may be taken as compliments, an analysis of the assumptions that inform the use of such linguistic products reveals that, more often than not, these metaphors present women as objects of sexual desire.

Key words: metaphor, desserts, women, sexual desire, written media, English and Spanish.

Una de las metáforas más comunes utilizadas por la prensa escrita tanto en inglés como en español es la metáfora LA MUJER COMO POSTRE. Ojeando las páginas de periódicos y revistas, es frecuente encontrar un buen número de metáforas que presentan a la mujer como honey, pie, cake, tart, bombón, pastel o bizcocho. Aunque a primera vista dichos términos pueden parecer halagos, el análisis de las motivaciones que subyacen bajo estas metáforas revela que muy a menudo presentan a la mujer como objeto de deseo sexual.

Palabras clave: metáfora, postres, mujeres, deseo sexual, prensa escrita, inglés y español. (“Are Women Really Sweet? An Analysis of the woman As Dessert Metaphor in the English and Spanish Written Press” by Irene López Rodríguez, Universidad de Extremadura)

Consumption as Destruction

The food metaphor contains an inherent violence: to consume is to destroy. The desirable woman is eaten, used up, gone. Her value exists only in the moment of consumption. There is no reciprocity, no exchange — just constant giving and giving until she’s gone.

WOMEN ARE ANIMALS (The Great Chain of Being)

Lakoff and Turner’s “Great Chain of Being” describes a conceptual hierarchy:

• God/supernatural

• Humans

• Animals

• Plants

• Inorganic matter

Animal metaphors for women pull them down the chain, away from full human status, and this is done fairly unconsciously. So much of metaphor is!

More Caitlin Hines: “Foxy Chicks and Playboy Bunnies: A Case Study in Metaphorical Lexicalization” (1999) documents how women are described through animal terms that emphasize: sexual availability (bunny, chick, fox, vixen), domesticity/containment (kitten, bird), unpleasant behavior (bitch, cow, shrew, hen), and prey status (game, catch).

The Gendered Animal Asymmetry

Research consistently shows that male and female animal terms undergo different semantic development:

Research on Vietnamese literary metaphors (Pham 2023) found women portrayed as “Wild animals, livestock, pets, or birds. Metaphorical linguistic expressions convey a biased view towards the low and inferior role and position of women in the family and society.”

So here too the pattern is cross-cultural: women animalized as smaller, domesticated, or prey.

THE SEMANTIC DEROGATION OF WOMEN

Muriel Schulz’s Foundational Work

This use of language has been around for centuries, but the 70s were big for published work – almost as though women finally being allowed to have a credit card meant they were curious about other ways they had been demeaned. In “The Semantic Derogation of Woman” (1975), linguist Muriel Schulz documented a consistent pattern:

Again and again in the history of the [English] language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging, but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.

The Pattern

Stage 1: Neutral term (housewife)
Stage 2: Slightly disparaging (hussy)
Stage 3: Sexual slur (hussy = promiscuous woman)

Examples of

Words for women consistently drift toward the negative and the sexual. Words for men either remain stable or improve. Deborah Cameron says it well: “Word-meanings can change—and when the words refer to women, they have a tendency to change for the worse.” (“Language: A Feminist Guide”)

SOME LITERARY SUBVERSIONS

Sula by Toni Morrison

The ice cream store scene where Sula and Nel gaze at men’s bodies (specifically crotches) reverses the consumption metaphor, with women as consumers rather than consumed:

It was not really Edna Finch's ice cream that made them brave the stretch of those panther eyes. Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs. The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled. Those smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow gabardines beckoned to them. They moved toward the ice-cream parlor like tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome. Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams.

Piglet by Lottie Hazell

Food as metaphor for control, intimacy, class, and gender. The protagonist refuses to be small, easily snapped up, or devoured — and this confuses everyone.

In truth, she didn’t know if her family would love her food: repeating the word “sumac,” smacking their lips like the spice had been a lemon, an acidic taste left on their tongues. They would prefer pie, or lasagne, or casserole. Crumble, treacle tart, or bread-and-butter pudding.
― Lottie Hazell, Piglet

The confusion is so interesting, because it conveys how uncomfortable most people are with women stepping outside of expected behaviors, revealing unconscious biases. When a woman refuses the consumption frame, the system doesn’t know how to process her. In both of these examples, the women are the ones doing the devouring, and society punishes them.

Maybe the fear is they’ll be consumed instead?

The Script

Refuse to argue within a frame you don’t accept. Name it. Expose it. Offer a different frame or decline to engage with the premise.

“Oh, are they catty?”

“Actually, I see girls learning to compete over ideas and advocate for their positions. They’re supportive of each other and have high expectations for themselves. They’re brilliant students and thinkers. There’s probably a word for that when boys do it, but I’m not sure there is when girls do.”

Maybe the lack of the word is the point. Girl Boss isn’t it.

Works Cited

Cameron, Deborah. “Semantic Change.” Language: A Feminist Guide, WordPress, debuk.wordpress.com/tag/semantic-change/. Accessed 2025.

Giang, Pham. “Conceptual Metaphor “WOMEN ARE ANIMALS” In 20th-century Vietnamese Literature.” ICTE Conference Proceedings. 3. 26-40. 2023.

Hazell, Lottie. Piglet. Henry Holt and Company, 2024.

Hines, Caitlin. “Foxy Chicks and Playboy Bunnies: A Case Study in Metaphorical Lexicalization.” Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Masako K. Hiraga, Chris Sinha, and Sherman Wilcox, John Benjamins, 1999, pp. 9–23.

Hines, Caitlin. “Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor.” Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, edited by Mary Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 145–62.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. U of Chicago P, 1989.

López-Rodríguez, Irene. “Are Women Really Sweet? An Analysis of the Woman as Dessert Metaphor in the English and Spanish Written Press.” ABEL-AFIAL, 17/Ano 2008, pp. 127–42.

Montell, Amanda. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper Wave, 2019.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. Knopf, 1973.

Schulz, Muriel. “The Semantic Derogation of Woman.” The Feminist Critique of Language, edited by Deborah Cameron, Routledge, 1990, pp. 134–47. Originally published in Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, edited by Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, Newbury House, 1975.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I think motherhood is the mother of invention.

The economy would collapse without mothers, but our systems in place have made sure we never realize it. I’m going to give you some data you’ve probably heard, but then of course we’ll look at it through a conceptual metaphor lens.

This topic is particularly important to me because I’m a single mom. And a teacher. Without family wealth (though I am incredibly fortunate when it comes to my parents – they’re lovely people). My dad was in the military and mom worked intermittently over the course of my childhood – moving so often makes it difficult for military spouses to work. When I was in middle school, my mom went to school for her BS and then went on to nursing school – she graduated a semester before I graduated from high school. My parents made “smart” investments and purchased their home when my dad retired from the military, and now that my mom is also retired and their house is paid off, they still live comfortably.

Women today are not necessarily in the same boat.

As economist Misty Heggeness says, after analyzing the steepest decline in working mothers in 40 years:

“Women are going to start backtracking and coming [out of] the labor force because it’s too intense and exhausting. We don’t have enough support and structure around policies that actually help caregivers. When they’re faced with this choice, they’re not gonna leave their children, so they’re left with leaving their jobs.” (Lana Zak, “U.S. sees steepest decline of mothers of young children in the workforce in 40 years, study finds,” September 8, 2025)

Between January and June 2025, 212,000 women age 20 and older left the workforce. By contrast, 44,000 men entered it. (Time)

This isn’t new. In September 2020 alone, 865,000 women left the labor force, which is more than four times the 216,000 men who exited (Time). But then, flexible work policies during the pandemic brought women back. By January 2025, maternal labor force participation had reached record highs.

Then return-to-office mandates hit. Full-time office requirements among Fortune 500 companies nearly doubled from 13% at the end of 2024 to 24% by mid-2025. Federal childcare stabilization funding ended in September 2023. Childcare centers closed or raised prices and the choice to stay home stopped being a choice.

The labor force participation rate for mothers ages 25-44 with children under 5 fell nearly three percentage points between January and June 2025—to its lowest level in over three years.

College-educated mothers of very young children saw participation drop from near 80% in 2023 to 77% in August 2025 (Fortune).

Let’s start with the language. When headlines talk about “women leaving the workforce,” two things need to be addressed: one, the clarification that they’re leaving the paid workforce, and two, they never really specify: leaving to do what?

They’re leaving to provide:

• Project management (coordinating multiple schedules, appointments, logistics)

• Predictive modeling (anticipating needs before they arise)

• Risk assessment (evaluating developmental, health, safety concerns in real-time)

• Stakeholder management (coordinating between pediatricians, teachers, therapists, family members)

• Emotional regulation (their own + their children’s, a spouse and/or other dependents in the household, often simultaneously)

• Systems design (creating and maintaining household routines under constantly changing conditions)

• Crisis management (responding to illness ((knowledge of medication, fevers, stomach virus, how to clean up vomit, disinfection, triage for broken bones)), school closures, behavioral challenges)

This is high-level labor and “soft skills” all at once, work that corporations would pay consultants really good money to perform. All of this is happening in the background of your brain at all times. Even when you’re not actively caregiving, you’re carrying the cognitive load of anticipating needs, managing schedules, remembering details, planning ahead, does the car need gas, when is baseball practice, etc. Emergency management professionals are trained for this and compensated accordingly, but mothers are expected to just figure it out.

As we know, that is the exhausting work. It’s not so much the physical tasks as it is the fact that your brain never stops running, but moms are told this is just natural.

Conceptual Metaphors in Economic Discourse:

As Silvia Federici argues in Wages Against Housework, labor’s value becomes visible through its refusal.

“Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the fact that they reduce wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.”

Federici further discusses how capitalism depends on positioning women’s labor as natural rather than economic:

“The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.

Yet just how natural it is to be a housewife is shown by the fact that it takes at least twenty years of socialization – day-to-day training, performed by an unwaged mother – to prepare a woman for this role, to convince her that children and husband are the best she can expect from life. Even so, it hardly succeeds. No matter how well-trained we are, few are the women who do not feel cheated when the bride’s day is over and they find themselves in front of a dirty sink. Many of us still have the illusion that we marry for love. A lot of us recognise that we marry for money and security; but it is time to make it clear that while the love or money involved is very little, the work which awaits us is enormous. This is why older women always tell us ‘Enjoy your freedom while you can, buy whatever you want now…’ But unfortunately it is almost impossible to enjoy any freedom if from the earliest days of life you are trained to be docile, subservient, dependent and most important to sacrifice yourself and even to get pleasure from it. If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality.” (76-77)

When housework and childcare are framed as expressions of female identity rather than economic contributions, women can’t refuse without refusing womanhood itself. Seems tricky.

This is why 212,000 women leaving the workforce gets reported as women ‘struggling to balance’ rather than workers withdrawing labor in response to truly unsustainable and actually ridiculous conditions. The language itself obscures the reality.

Ultimately, women’s economic contributions only become visible when women stop doing the work they’ve always just done for free.

Housework/Motherhood “is a natural attribute of our female physique and personality” (Federici).

Ugh. If this feels like a gut punch – same. Here’s how the metaphor works (domain language taken from Metaphors We Live By):

Source Domain: Biological/Physical Traits (eye color, height, bone structure)

These traits are: innate, unchangeable; require no training or development; are just part of your body; and can’t be separated from who you are physically

Target Domain: Maternal Labor

Maternal labor is: actually learned, skilled work, which requires enormous cognitive development, and is socially constructed and culturally variable

What the metaphor does: When we map Biology onto Labor, the labor disappears as labor and becomes identity/essence.

How Labor Becomes Biology

We’ve been trained to think of maternal cognitive labor as a natural attribute of our female physique and personality – through language and even social systems and structures.

When caregiving work gets mapped onto biology and personality, several things happen simultaneously:

1. Struggling becomes a biological defect, because if maternal cognitive labor is natural, then finding it exhausting means something is wrong with you.

2. Compensation becomes absurd, because other than models, we don’t really pay people for how they look, for their physical attributes, for having brown eyes. We don’t compensate people for their height. We don’t offer wages for having arms.

3. Refusal becomes refusing womanhood, because as Federici posits: “To refuse that work means to refuse to be a woman.” So if maternal labor is mapped onto your female body and personality—not something you do but something you are—then you can’t refuse the labor without refusing the identity. The labor can’t be separated from female identity, so it can’t be recognized as labor at all.

4. Systems and infrastructure becomes unnecessary, right? Your body doesn’t need training to have blue eyes. Natural processes just happen, so when caregiving is naturalized, policy support seems absurd. Why would we need universal childcare if women are naturally equipped to provide care? Why would we need parental leave if mothering is instinctive?

5. The exhaustion becomes proof of inadequacy because if you can’t do the work you body was made for, it’s just evidence of personal failure.

Here’s the language:

• “She’s just naturally good with kids” (personality attribute)

• “Maternal instinct kicked in” (biological programming)

• “She’s built for motherhood” (physical design)

• “It’s in her nature to nurture” (essential character)

• “Your body is made to give birth” (biological purpose)

This type of language is what makes labor become invisible, but it’s also what concretizes gender roles and defines them in these narrow and essentialist ways.

New Mexico: What Support Looks Like

In November 2025, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to offer universal childcare with no income limits. Here’s what that means:

• Average savings per family: $12,000/year per child

• Average cost to families: $0 (copays waived)

• Income eligibility: No income limit (previously capped at 400% of federal poverty level, or ~$128,000 for a family of four). Adults must be working, in school, or job-seeking.*

• Funding: $463 million in FY2026, funded by oil and gas permanent endowment

• Provider reimbursement: Base rates increased; enhanced rates available for providers paying entry-level staff minimum $18/hour

• Projected new capacity: 12,000 additional childcare slots

*Exceptions include grandparents raising grandchildren

Women are forced out of the workforce and into the home by design. But we can change the design, even if we can’t all move to New Mexico.

After we recognize how language has been weaponized against us, after we start living our lives without guilt, we have to change the language and we have to change the policies. This involves voting, asking questions, running for government ourselves.

These aren’t easy fixes.

But recognizing how the language is used against us if the first step.

For Further Reading:

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (The Atlantic, 2012)

• Center for American Progress, “How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward”

• KPMG, “The Great Exit” (2025)

• New Mexico Early Childhood Education & Care Department, Universal Child Care documentation

• Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

I have two Substack accounts: Heavy Meta and Heavy Meta, Light Work. You are subscribed to Heavy Meta, Light Work, which is my account focused on the use of conceptual metaphor, language, and how to leverage these concepts specifically in the workplace. If you thought you were subscribing to the book club, that’s my other account, Heavy Meta, and this is the link to the January book poll, if you want to subscribe and vote for January’s books.

If you’re in the right place — wonderful! I am so excited to work with you, and if you’re a paid subscriber and haven’t reached out yet about your language audit, please do. :)