Read more

[Chorus]
…
Ni adiós ni buenas noches
Good luck, good night

[Outro]
Te digo finalmente
Se hará como tú quieras
Yo sé que tú te sientes mejor que los demás

Tiny Desk, Silvana Estrada

No-one owes anyone else their presence, painful as that truth is to hear, but nothing stings more, that being ghosted. It may be that there are many ways for letting someone know they are dumped, but it is like everyone slips in and out of our lives more easily. We’ve got a list of options to avoid messages and not text or pick up the phone; and if most couples are also meeting online and there are so many choices, I think it’s because the rules for how we feel and tell others how we feel about talking to them, have also changed.

Ghosting is kind of a twist on an old experience. Ignoring someone, forgetting, leaving behind, is as old as time; it’s in Greek myths, religious stories, and folk tales. People have always felt compelled to suddenly follow their own mind and heart towards a new life, even if this meant hurting those who rely on them to continue living in a specific way, or in a specific place; but in a time with so many ways to communicate it stings that we do not get any chance to say we also feel the conversation is dry.

I do not know the exact go-to story when ghosting but I read something in a book that may land it:

“We’ve only been on one date so far, and surely everyone who has signed up for a dating app knows this possibility comes with it. I also think sometimes it’s better to just wink away than give a laundry list of all the reasons you’d prefer not to continue the preamble to any genuine conversation. If you really think about it, you’re kind of being noble, by sparing the other person those specific ego bruises. Yes, you’re being somewhat heroic. Better to let them just think you’re kind of a bad person or a coward than give them even more insecurities than they clearly already have”.

I do believe detaching is a necessary skill, second only to avoiding new attachments; and there can be certainly ‘legitimate’ reasons to ghost, especially when the other person is violent, aggressive, abusive, or manipulative. Feminist writers can be especially clear in pointing out that we don’t owe anyone our presence, even if we have been always there in the past.

Having said that, if the other person did not go into the violent or abusive, do they need or ‘deserve’ a brief explanation for why someone feels they need to break contact?

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

I am definitely sceptical of a billion dollars industry that sells access to an educated and “nice life”, saying that opportunities can be achieved by a constant process of expensive self-optimisation. Learn and make an effort can often sound like just another consumer imperative: taking an expensive course or paying for a laptop lifestyle. The kind of nonsense you might hear from trust funders disembarking from their planet-choking private flight back from an Ayahuasca retreat.

Money inevitably creates differences between educated and adventurous individuals and those who are not, which will effectively translate into differences in rights. Individual achievements are personal chances and not personal choices, like the

Read more

[Verse 1: ROSALIA]
Hello, peace thief
Minefield for my sensitivity
Playboy, a champion
Spends the money he has and also the one he doesn't
He's so charming, a star of senselessness
A mirage, Olympic gold medal for the biggest je%$*
You've got the podium of the great disappointment

[Chorus: Yahritza Y Su Esencia & ROSALIA]
I don't pity you, whoever stays with you gets drained
Always self-invited, lives in others houses if he can
A walking red flag, a huge disaster
He'll say it wasn't him, it was his doppelgänger

Many of the things in the song are spoken of in social media, which labels things using hashtags or pop culture categories, but highlights how exhausting, historical, and difficult is to be heterosexual. The kind of relationships with men who are popular precisely because their behaviour can be considered charisma, intelligence, and independence, as something almost admirable if you tilt your head the wrong way. And that’s where the song comes in, not as an abstract complaint, but as a repeated confrontation with a script that feels wrong, where wanting and being disappointed are entangled. In another song on her album Lux, “Berghain”, which is an art piece, she sings: “The only way I will be saved (Is through) divine intervention …” and “[Outro: Yves Tumor] I'll fu%$* you 'til you love me…”, which are based on an interview with Mike Tyson where he mentioned this before a boxing fight.

In Spain, the song ‘La Perla’ is used by public campaigns against sexual violence, and educational programs that try to teach women how to “read the signs,” how to identify manipulation, coercion, or emotional abuse before it escalates. And yet, there are many limits to this response; because it is always a red flag wrapped in ‘love’, signs that are indistinguishable from what we’ve been taught to want. We are told to recognise insecurity, but also socialised to find it interesting. And so, the difficulty of being heterosexual is not about men themselves, but about navigating a traditional masculinity that teaches boys that’s the right way to be a man.

Read more

Read more

Crime gets to be intellectual, and worthy of literary and critical merit. It is considered smart, serious, and of course it is a genre often written by men. Same for fantasy. Even if fantasy is sometimes seen as what nerds or geeks like, people think of it differently than they do of romance or romantasy. Again, men write fantasy or at least have written some of the most iconic and influential fantasy books. So I do think there is definitely certain sexism when we talk about genre and romance.

Even if romance is growing and selling more than other books, it is not perceived as literary as other genres. It is the guilty pleasure of it all; and what I am now thinking of is “Why women feel guilty about sitting down with a romance or fantasy book, while men spend hours

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

I’m not sure he even considers that a city could have the same climate all year round, or that clocks don’t need to change. He laughed when I mentioned that it was getting dark early at five in the afternoon, like it was a big deal. How could he possibly understand why I was late, my expressive gestures, my love for coffee, my fascination with snow or my habit of holding my backpack and checking my wallet every few minutes?

He doesn’t know what a zapote or a guanábana is, and although he vaguely recognises guayabas, he has never tasted one, not truly. I remember clearly when he told me smiling that I have “Indian hair”. Maybe a compliment? But one that is very loaded in Latin America.

When people say “Indian” in Latin America, they rarely mean someone from India. The word has a colonial history from the moment Europeans first arrived in the Americas believing they had reached the Indies. The label stuck, even after the geographic mistake was obvious, and it became shorthand for Indigenous peoples in the continent. Over time, the term took on different meanings, sometimes affectionate, often dismissive, influenced by colonial social systems, racial hierarchies, and the coexistence of admiration and prejudice that still impacts how indigenous descendants are perceived. So when someone refers to “Indian hair,” they are usually pointing to straight dark hair, associated with indigenous communities in Latin America.

My hair, like my accent, my gestures, are a trace of a much larger, messier story that almost no one takes the time to learn and that I try to inhabit without an apology. It’s interesting that people feel entitled to complete the story themselves and fill in the blanks. It’s as if once I’ve been placed inside a narrative: tropical, dangerous, excessive, there’s no need to listen and it’s easier to joke about it.

Read more

One recess, the librarian, a woman with black hair, round glasses, and pastel cardigans, she said she knitted herself, sat beside me and asked, “What do you think you’ll do after school?” Without thinking, I said, “I’d like to be a librarian.” And so I kept coming back.

Every day, I would go after class to the library, reading everything from Robinson Crusoe to whatever new stories arrived next. Eventually, I learned where my favourite books were and what were the new books. That is why I have always believed the library is a kind of biography, one that reminds me who I used to be when I visited it.

When I look back, I do not just remember the books. I remember being

Read more

Read more

The female body has always been measured, exhibited, punished, and desired; but it is particularly blatant that, in the social imaginary, Latin women are always thin, voluptuous, dark-skinned, and dressed in colourful and low-cut clothes . Maybe Latin culture does have a certain flavour

Read more

Read more

I think a lot, and often, about the ethics and economics of tourism. And I’ve encountered variations on this question—and asked it myself —many times. It’s fresh in my mind again now because

Read more

I have lost count of the queer characters I have met in literary fiction the last years who end up alone, or in dramatic relationships, lost and ultimately sad. I talked to my friends and family (those who would read queer literature without stigmas or read it in the first place) and they all said the same. In queer novels sadness is always unresolved. It’s free-floating, ambient, existential. There is so much to be sad about, of course. There’s the violence, state-sanctioned or otherwise; the regression of rights and liberties by those who insist in a narrow vision of the world; families and friends (sometimes best friends) who turn away; exclusion and speeches about compassion and love that only condemn and judge. There is the isolation that comes from being told, time and time again,

Read more