The Most Feminine Thing I Ever Did Was Learn How To Fight
“Tienes brazos de boxeador” my mom told me as she pinched the fat in my arm and gave me a mocking look. I had the arms of a boxer. She was telling me I was big. Unfeminine. I don't remember how old I was, but I remember exactly how those words landed. Fighting was something men and boys did, and to be compared to one was not a compliment. It was a warning. I took it to heart. I shrank myself as much as possible and avoided wearing clothes that revealed the curves of my muscular frame, as if hiding my body would make me easier to accept and love.
What I Was Taught Femininity Looked Like
Fighting was not something I ever imagined associating with my femininity. My version of femininity was built through the lens of Marianismo, the counterpart to Machismo. As a Latina, these traditional gender roles were deeply ingrained in my family and in me. Marianismo is organized around five core pillars1:
Family-Oriented: Placing family needs above personal desires.
Virtuous and Chaste: Maintaining purity before marriage and being non-sexual or passive in marriage.
Spiritual/Moral Superiority: Being the moral compass of the family.
Subordinate to Others: Deferring to husbands and patriarchal authority.
Self-Silencing to Maintain Harmony: Suppressing personal opinions or emotions to avoid conflict.
My family enforced the last two with particular enthusiasm. Womanhood, in practice, meant constant self-monitoring and shrinking to maintain harmony. After all, you are supposed to be his peace. It’s an exhausting existence when you were never built to disappear.
What this created in me was a dissonance I would eventually learn to call anxiety. The more I tried to fit the structure, the more distorted my reality became. I leaned deeper into the fantasy that if I just complied enough, things would stabilize. My health suffered greatly for it. I always felt like too much because no one around me seemed to see what I saw. Looking back, I understand now that I was living inside a life that had been built around my silence. I was not thriving inside if. I was surviving it, and barely.
The Mats Changed Everything
I came to Brazilian jiu-jitsu through my kids. They trained for about a year before I finally felt brave enough to step on the mats myself. I found another mom willing to go in with me, and together, we stepped into a whole new world.
What I felt on those mats that first day was something I didn’t have a word for yet. I felt a sense of presence and power available to me that I had never given myself permission to access before. I wanted more of it immediately.
As someone who had spent years being quiet, agreeable, and just a mom, I was deeply uncomfortable with aggression. Taking up physical space felt foreign. Learning to use my body for protection, rather than for shrinking, was a cathartic process. The mats asked nothing of me except to show up and engage. It was the beginning of something I didn’t fully understand yet.
My daughter and I showing off the medals we earned at the last tournament we competed at together.
Fighting Is a Feminine Act
The qualities that make a great fighter, precision, intuition, adaptability, are deeply feminine. They are not brute traits. They are refined ones 2.
My sparring style has evolved over time towards leverage and away from force. I don’t try to overpower. I aim to read, adapt, and move with intelligence. In this way, Jiu-Jitsu became a mirror for how I had always needed to move through life, not overpowering my circumstances, but learning to work within them strategically without losing myself.
I aim to embody the warrior archetype, led by courage and anchored in composure. The woman who walked on the mats all those years ago was an echo of my full self, a smaller, more guarded version who was necessary for survival at the time. I don’t dismiss her. I am grateful for her. Knowing her and accepting her is part of what made me the woman I am now, physically and psychologically sovereign.
After winning at a local tournament, I pose with my teammates
An Invitation
I believe every woman should know how to physically defend herself. That said, I also know that combat sports are not for everyone, and that's not the point.
The deeper invitation is this: inhabit your body fully. Learn to hear yourself. Whatever that practice looks like for you, movement, stillness, sport, art, when you bring yourself back into your body, you bring your power with you. You become harder to move. Harder to silence. Harder to overpower in every room you walk into.
The most feminine thing I ever did was learn how to fight. I hope you find your version of that. Citations:
