Voices in the Darkness

Telling our stories is essential to fighting against the erasure of powerful women.

I’ve said this many times: as a parent, I would rather see my kids exposed to naked bodies and healthy sexuality than to violence. When my youngest son was small, he became interested in toys made to mimic guns. My instinct was to strictly forbid such toys, to teach him that, no, guns are not fun. They are weapons that are made to hurt and kill people. They are not for play. Unfortunately, I could not keep my son away from the world. It seemed toy guns were everywhere. He would look at me with pleading eyes and I would repeat my philosophy about it patiently, again. One day he came home from a visit with his grandparents with a wooden carving of a handgun his grandfather had made for him. For his 5th birthday, friends gave him Nurf guns that shot foam pellets.

Consulting with my coparents and friends, understanding that this gun-filled culture would never leave us alone, and seeing that my hard line about it had only increased his intrigue, I relented and amended my position. OK, I said, you can play with these, but you cannot aim them at people, nor can you pretend to hurt or kill people with them. How about pretending that they shoot out rainbows or something? Even as I write this, I feel the futility in my amendment. I cannot control my son’s play fantasies, nor can I control the influences of the world around us on those fantasies.

I have raised my kids to be feminists and anti-racists. I read them children’s books on these themes, explained ideas of equity and community, of love for fellow humans, and how our differences make us richer and more interesting with lots of stories to share. We’ve discussed how different doesn’t equate to other and how all humans are created equal. Still, my youngest came home from preschool one day and told me that his friend told him that girls can’t be doctors. It was easy enough to show him this was not true—most of our family doctors are female. But I lost sleep over the realities of the culture of misogyny that still exist in four-year-olds’ classrooms. Then my older son, at age twelve, told me very thoughtfully that “when people look at boys, they care about what they think, and when they look at girls, they care about what they look like.” I made my case that this should not be true and realized a stroll by any present-day newsstand would work against me.

All of this was at the forefront of my mind as I read Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. The novel is based on the true story of Ana Mendieta, a feminist Cuban-American artist who, after an argument with her husband in 1985, fell to her death from her New York apartment window, thirty-four stories high. Her husband was also a famous artist, a sculptor named Carl Andre, He was charged with her murder. Andre was acquitted, however, after claiming Mendieta tripped and fell. There was no hard evidence to prove otherwise. Tech advances like trace evidence analysis and crime scene digital reconstruction were still several years away. Andre went on to enjoy continued success in his career as a sculptor while Mendieta's feminist legacy was largely erased.

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez braids feminism and queerness with the experience of living as a woman of color in a white and male dominated world. The story switches between the point of view of Anita de Monte (based on Ana Mendieta) and Raquel Toro, a student at Brown University studying art history more than a decade later. Raquel Toro finds Anita's story for a thesis topic and seizes upon it while herself dealing with issues of classist, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic discrimination in her Ivy League environment.

In 2018, the New York Times published in its “Overlooked No More” series an obituary for Ana Mendieta. It included a short blurb about a film she and her sister made called Moffitt Building Piece, showing reactions of passersby to a bucket of spilled pig’s blood on a city sidewalk. People did not react with alarm or disgust but rather mild curiosity, if not outright indifference.

I watched a close relative raise her children with free and open exposure to often extremely violent films while shielding them vigilantly from any images of nudity or sex. That same relative told her young daughters that they should be very careful about who they “give their virginity” to because they will “never get it back,” as if their sexuality would be a commodity to withhold or barter; as though they would be somehow diminished by exploring and engaging in the natural appetites of their bodies, like the sexual act meant something was being taken from them.

A friend I was talking with on the phone chided her small son playfully, asking if he wanted to keep throwing like a girl. It was a lighthearted moment between them. She did not notice the way I held my breath or the tension it caused me. Taking my son to the skateboard park, we saw one boy kick his skateboard into the shins of another boy. The parent of the offending child responded by saying, “That’s just how boys are.” Why did everyone around us accept this reaction? I am fairly certain that if a girl had slammed her skateboard into the boy’s shins in the same manner the reaction might have been something like, “So much anger for a girl! Something must be seriously wrong.”

Boys will be boys. How many times do we hear this sentence romanticizing male persistence? Why are we still witnessing in schools the policing girls’ clothes instead of boys’ behaviors? Mothers continue doing all the emotional labor in families, glorifying female sacrifice. It’s 2025 and still we’re mocking or punishing male vulnerability, promoting double standards in sexuality. These are the everyday ways that culture reinforces harmful gender norms, planting poisonous seeds that grow and grow and enable terrors like femicide and rampant unaccountable violence.

Cases like Ana Mendieta are not uncommon. Reeva Steenkamp was a South African model and law school graduate who dated Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius. He murdered her at their home in Pretoria, first claiming he had believed she was an intruder. He was convicted for manslaughter, then later for murder, but received lenient sentencing compared to the immense brutality of the crime. Steenkamp’s story was overshadowed by the media’s focus on Pistorius. To this day it is his name that is remembered before hers.

Lana Clarkson was an actress and model shot by music producer Phil Spector in his Los Angeles home. Spector initially walked free after claiming her death was an accident. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and only years later was he finally convicted. His ex-wife, Ronnie Bennett, and two of his children accused him of horrific acts of family violence. When he died in a prison hospital in 2021 media outlets focused on his music career, downplaying his history of abuse and his incarceration for murder. Clarkson’s resting place is not far from that of Dorothy Stratten, a Canadian actress and Playboy model murdered in Los Angeles by her husband, Paul Snider. Snider’s actions were framed as fueled by jealousy, as “crimes of passion”—yet another phrase we should be striking from our collective vocabulary.

Many of these cases reflect a pattern: powerful or well-connected men avoiding consequences, the media focused on perpetrators rather than victims, and societal apathy toward violence against women — especially women of color. Today there are countless cases of missing Black women and Indigenous women—a November 2024 report to the U.S. government estimates “more than 5800”— whose disappearances and suspected murders receive little media coverage or legal attention; whose names we may never know.

Are my concerns regarding toy guns and Xochitl Gonzalez’s deep respect for the genius of Ana Mendieta really related to all of this? For me they are; to me all things connect. It seems obvious that as a culture we should double our efforts to embrace love and reject violence.

Embracing our community means caring for each other in spite of, or even because of, our differences. We need to refuse to stand by silently and watch while violence is perpetrated around us. Or, worse, while others celebrate and glorify that violence. It seems incredibly backwards and deeply ignorant to me that, as a culture, we have this so dangerously turned around. And we are so deep in the woods with it that most days it seems there is no hope of finding our way free.

And yet. There are voices in the darkness. We are telling our stories; we are raising mindful children. In these endeavors we continue to shine the light of obvious truth on the backwards societal lies that presently dominate. Through our voices we will continue to find each other, to grow in numbers. As we grow, our community will become a powerful force to intervene against the erasure of powerful women and to stop the tragic cycle of forgetting.

Original illustration by Nicole Roberts (@nicolerobertsart)