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‘For centuries, your ancestors brutally established the color of one’s skin as the basis for the ranking of power, privilege, and worth’
A rerouted bus stop had me walking through an unfamiliar street in Berlin one evening where I encountered a man who asked me for a massage.
Seeing me walking home alone to the train station that night, you casually approach me and say, “Entschuldigung…”
I stop, expecting a question.
“Entschuldigung! Do you do massage?”
Ent-schul-di—gung! Was?
Why do you interpret my appearance as my resume? As a summary of my experience, my expertise, and my worth.
Is it my size? Petite, tiny. Or in your mind, nimble and pocket size.
Does my smallness intoxicate you with delusions of power?
The men of your lineage were the first to make me and women who look like me their unwilling muse. Pages and pages of their chronicles compare us to dolls. A doll that you can play with. A doll that will never object to what you do to it. A doll that can be painted and dressed, to fit your every unexplored perversity or deviance. A doll that can be bent, pulled, and yanked in the shape of your desire. A doll whose blank stare and pasted smile tell you that the range of her vocabulary consists of two words: yes and please.
Your ancestors were the first to reduce me to an exotic fetish. You and your friends carry on this tradition when you salivate about women who look like me and, oh god, how they are so tight.
You code my smallness as submission.
Why does my size tell you that I can be objectified but do not have the capacity to object? What is it to you that signals that my emotions, my desires can only be extracted for a price? That my affections are negotiable, and you can bargain and haggle it down to a price that suits your libido, which is much much bigger than your wallet.
Why do you interpret my appearance as my resume? As a summary of my experience, my expertise, and my worth.
Is it the brown color of my skin? The supposed mark of toiling under the sun. You assume that I am suited for dirty work, which will leave me covered in the sweat, dirt, and grime of your own skin. Like a domestic worker. You probably don’t know that word. It is used by labor activists demanding respect and recognition for the value, respect, and dignity of scrubbing other people’s homes. You probably know this work more as “the maid.” Or the other word that was so flagrantly used by your ancestors: slave.
For centuries, your ancestors brutally established the color of one’s skin as the basis for the ranking of power, privilege, and worth.
Is that why you read my appearance, my size, and my skin as my resume?
You ask me how much to work with my hands. To scrub your toilet. To massage the filth of your skin. To stroke your fragile ego and give it the illusion that it is big and hard.
It is too uncomfortable for you to think of me as your equal. So you make sure to tell me, show me, and make me feel that I am not.
Until I can prove otherwise. Out on the street and in bureaucratic windows that serve as the first line of a border that separates your people from mine. This is where I am asked to prove the reason for my visit. Where I must swear that I will leave once my purpose has been served. Papers from my bank, stamps on my passport, and letters of invitation attest to the authenticity of my intention to travel.
Today you ask me to prove it by stopping me on the street and asking for a massage.
Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with work that requires my body. There is dignity and value in domestic work and in the many forms that intimate care work takes. What is wrong is that you think that’s all I do, that’s all I’m capable of, that’s all I’m good for—just because I am brown. – Rappler.com
Ana P. Santos is an investigative journalist who writes a gender and sexuality column for Rappler titled “DASH of SAS” and also hosts “Sex and Sensibilities”, a sexuality education video series. Ana has a Masters in Gender & Sexuality from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she was a Chevening Scholar.
