Milo Santamaria

When I was in community college – there was an English professor that everyone dreaded. He taught the only honors English 1C section – a required class if you wanted to transfer to university. 

When I showed up on day 1 of class, he turned off all the lights and had us arrange all of our desks in a circle. Then he talked to us from the middle of the circle, walking around like a character in a dramatic soliloquy moment. 

The sounds of his footsteps around the classroom were so haunting that I ended up dropping his class immediately. It was like he wanted us to be unsettled and uncomfortable in his presence – which as a child abuse survivor, was a big red flag to me lol!

Dropping his class meant I had to wait another semester to take English 1C, non-honors of course, but it ended up being the best decision for me. We read so many books in my English 1C class that have stuck with me until this day – most notably, Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

We read a lot of writers discussing misogyny and the ways women’s bodies are portrayed in media in that class, like Jean Klinebourne, and writers that talked about myths and tropes like Roland Barthes. But for some reason, John Berger’s work on how women self police themselves and objectify themselves to fit into misogynistic ideals stood out and impacted me the most.

There was a quote that has stuck with me specifically that I almost put in the book but it seemed like I was emphasizing the metaphor too much. I wanted the conversations on the male gaze / centering men’s perspectives to be subtle, something implied rather than fully spelled out. 

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

As a sociology major, we also read W.E.B DuBois and his writing on double-consciousness, the idea that marginalized people, particularly black and racialized people, often view themselves through 2 lenses, their own lens or the lens of the communities they belong to, and the lens of their oppressors. 

When I transferred to UC Santa Cruz we read Fanon and his writing on recognition – the ways that people of color in predominantly white environments are denied recognition because white people have no way to conceptualize our lives outside of negative stereotypes. 

For my final essay at UCSC, I used Fanon’s concept of recognition to talk about reality TV shows, such as Love is Blind, that ask contestants to look beyond people’s differences and find love that conquers all. 

What I found was that these shows had no real way for people to have the conversations that are necessary for marginalized people to feel recognized and seen. More privileged contestants are simply asked to look past their partners’ differences and rarely have conversations about what it really means to center and care for someone that has been historically marginalized in our society. 

I guess in a way I was contending with the question of romance and relationships long before I ever chose to date anyone. By the time I started dating, I’d already seen my friends go through so much in their relationships – I’d picked them up while they were crying, helped them block creepy men, heard all of their painful experiences, and felt them as though they were my own. 

I’d been kept naive and innocent by my evangelical parents, and then shamed for being inexperienced by my friends. I’d also seen how women like Amber Heard and Britney Spears and countless abuse survivors were treated by the media and people online. It already felt like there was no winning for young girls navigating the world. 

During my last few months of community college I also read all about love, by bell hooks. I know the internet is a little divided on her these days, whether her takes were feminist enough or too male centered. But I’ve never seen myself as the target audience of her work – she wasn’t primarily writing for a queer Gen Z girl like me. She was writing for Black women that were raised in conservative christian households like herself, and for these women, decentering men was completely unheard of. 

I also see bell hooks as an idealist, she was writing for the best-case scenario, something a lot of us have stopped believing in for valid reasons. But she was writing for a world in which patriarchy ceases to exist, where people can have equal partnerships that aren’t based in power and control. 

We’ve seen that patriarchy has only gotten worse and dug in its heels trying endlessly to stop women from gaining autonomy and the little freedoms we’ve been awarded. And maybe Will To Change was a little too optimistic, sure, but I don’t think she was wrong to hope for a better world – and she’s still made a huge impact in how we see relationships and our place in them. 

This Is Why I Never Left was my way of integrating these lessons – taking my experiences and the quotes I loved from books I read in school, synthesizing them together to create a worldview that makes sense for me. Continuing a conversation that feminists began decades, millennia before me, and bringing them into the present moment.