Respect Yourself Analysis

The sexual practices and identities of Latina youth are addressed in Lorena Garcia’s book Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity. The sexual practices of minority youth are often stereotyped and hyper sexualized. In order to break down these myths Garcia creates an ethnography on a handful of sexually active second generation Chicago Latina youth and their mothers. The girls Garcia interviews feel pressure from society and their families to demonstrate sexual agency due to the social inequalities they face.

Garcia shifts the conversation from sex education about abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education to the educational contexts of school based and local organizations on how their sex education, or lack
Garcia finds that the girls were able to navigate safe-sex communication and negotiation with their partners in the face of gender and heteronormative inequality (133). The largest obstacle for these girls in maintaining their respectability was the perception of femininity and masculinity. In which the girls did not want to be “one of those girls” (134) but also were aware of their boyfriends’ reputation in regards to respectability. These girls were able to secure respectability through safe sex; however, in order to obtain safe sex, generally through condom use, the girls manipulated their boyfriends’ notions of respectability through masculinity in using condoms. The lesbian identified girls also struggled with conversations about safe sex with their partners. Garcia finds that may of the lesbian identified girls used educational resources to correct their partner’s beliefs around not being “at risk” and negative sexual outcomes. Conversations related to desire/pleasure were more difficult to discuss and were shaped by gender inequality and heteronormativity. Wherein the framing of their own sexual pleasure was related to what they had been told/read that felt good rather than their own experiences of pleasure
The need to demonstrate agency in the face of a multitude of disparities is one of the few ways Latina youth can express control over their lives. Garcia closes her book with ways in which citizens in power can help marginalized youth, through social policy. Garcia recommends practical ways in which policymakers can develop best practices for sex education in order to facilitate positive and healthy sexual experiences and outcomes for all youth. Garcia emphasizes that improvements to sex education must be inclusive to the youth and the community, wherein the opportunity must be given to these figures in order to determine what youth need to learn. This requires that we view students seriously and consider them as sexual subjects (156). Garcia’s work is powerful because it is able to break stereotypes of young Latina women and reveals that society needs to ask different questions related to sex and sexuality in order to provide effective sex education to all