“Prettier when quiet.” The phrase is still there, circulating disguised as advice, a joke, or custom, as if it didn’t carry a fierce idea within: that a woman is worth more when she takes up less space, when she doesn’t disturb with her thoughts, when she doesn’t interrupt the script. Our co-founder Ursula Pfeiffer mentions it not as a verbal relic, but as evidence of something deeper: the way language draws, clips, and reduces women until acceptable forms of contempt, repeated enough, end up seeming natural.
There are words that do not just describe; they also discipline. Some teach what is expected of a woman. Others remind her what part of herself she should hide. Others, more perverse, teach her to see herself through the eyes of those who have never looked at her whole. That is why the discussion about language is not a theoretical luxury or a semantic obsession. It is a discussion about power. About who names, from where they name, and what becomes possible when a person has been narrated for generations as less rational, less complex, or less human than their male counterpart.
Ursula formulates it from the beginning with two questions that seem simple, but are not: “How do the words we use frame our experience? How does the way we talk about ourselves delimit our capacity, our potential, and our self-esteem?” The question becomes sharper when it leaves the intimate terrain and enters the social one. Because it doesn’t only matter how a woman talks to herself; it also matters how those around her name her, how people talk about “her innate nature, inherent as a woman” and what ideas stick to that description.
The problem begins when certain words seem innocent because they have become custom. If it is said that women are emotional, what is insinuated —says Ursula— is that they are not rational. If they are called the weaker sex, the daily strength of those who carry their own well-being and that of others, work inside and outside the home, and sustain bonds, care, and multiple responsibilities without that always receiving a name, recognition, or rest is erased in one stroke. And if they are compared to animals, the slip ceases to be metaphorical and becomes political: “We are animalizing women, turning them into wild beings of instinct”. The next step is inevitable: “We are dehumanizing them”.
That dehumanization has concrete consequences. A woman turned into instinct, body, or ornament ceases to be perceived as a full interlocutor. Her voice bothers more quickly. Her intelligence matters less. Her judgment becomes secondary. Hence, phrases like “prettier when quiet” are not minor folklore, but a brutal synthesis of a system: if she speaks, she interrupts; if she remains silent, she beautifies. What is celebrated is not her presence, but her silence.
The serious thing is that this logic rarely presents itself as open aggression. It arrives in the form of a joke, a compliment, a colloquial expression, a song, an inherited custom. And precisely for that reason, it becomes harder to challenge. Because many women learn to let it pass. To tell themselves it doesn’t matter. To minimize the effect so as not to seem exaggerated. But Ursula insists: “It does matter and it matters more than we think”. It matters because that way of speaking “seeps in”, and what starts as external noise ends up, sometimes, turned into an inner voice.
That is one of the hardest points of the text: language repeated from the outside does not stay outside. It is internalized. It becomes an echo. It becomes a filter to read one’s own body, one’s own value, one’s own ambition. A woman can know rationally that she is worth more than her appearance and still live evaluating herself from a system of words that has fragmented her all her life. And that fragmentation is central to the reading that Ursula proposes.
Because one of the most effective ways to reduce a woman has been to turn her into parts. Not a totality, but a sum of observable attributes: hair, breasts, waist, legs, lips, age. A part of the body ends up acting as a measure of the value of the whole. Ursula names it with lucidity when she says that “a fragmentation” of identity is produced and that, in that process, “our self-image blurs” and “we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of others”.
That way of looking is not accidental. It is reinforced by expressions that seem common, but enclose a brutal view of the female body. Ursula dwells on one especially revealing one: “lomazo” (hot body/big back). She analyzes it with a frankness that forces one to hear it again. “When we say that a woman is a ‘lomazo’, we are saying that she is a piece of meat”. What disappears in that phrase is not only the delicacy of language; the entire person disappears. Her intelligence, her inner world, her interests, her humor, her pain, her ability to think. The meat remains. And when only the meat remains, respect has already retreated.
That is why the problem is not exhausted in individual self-esteem. It is also about the collective imaginary that those words build. Ursula says it with all clarity: “The words we choose to describe ourselves and other women shape the image we have of ourselves and of women in general”. They are not ornaments. They are a chisel. They go carving an idea of the feminine and, with it, a series of permissions and limits: how far a woman is listened to, how far she is taken seriously, how far it is considered natural for her to think, lead, desire, or contradict.
From there, the reference Ursula makes to Mary Daly, a radical feminist philosopher who questioned language as a power structure, gains strength. Daly’s intuition remains uncomfortable because it remains relevant: if language was consolidated within an order where man occupied the symbolic center, then that language is not neutral. It is not accidental that “man” has functioned so many times as a synonym for humanity, while “woman” appears as a particular, derived, or secondary category. Ursula asks the question that exposes that asymmetry: “Why does it seem so senseless to us to say ‘woman’ to represent all of humanity?” And the answer doesn’t need too much theory: “Because that is how we have been taught”.
This is not about winning a terminological dispute or replacing one center with another. It is about noticing what vision of the world has been solidified in everyday speech. Ursula illustrates it even by returning to the figure of Eve: woman as a secondary character, created to accompany, derived from man, and then held responsible for the fall. Beyond each person’s faith, what matters is the symbolic architecture that this leaves: man as the human prototype; woman as complement, derivation, or problem.
And yet, this is not a call for a war between the sexes. Ursula makes it clear: “if we are going to build a society, we have to do it together”. Precisely for that reason, it matters to review the words. Because language that degrades women also impoverishes the society that reproduces it. A culture that does not know how to name women as complete beings also does not know how to live fully with them, nor learn from them, nor imagine a more just order for everyone.
So the task is not just to talk “prettier”. It is to listen to what words inhabit us, which ones we repeat, which ones we inherit without examining them, and which ones we continue to use to describe ourselves and other women. Naming ourselves well does not solve inequality by itself, but it does deactivate one of its most persistent machineries. It returns thickness where there was reduction. Humanity where there was an object. Voice where there was silence. And that recovery of the woman as an integral, thinking, and dignified being dialogues directly with Yuriyana Club’s mission of accompanying women toward a fuller life at an emotional, physical, and sexual level through knowledge and enriching connections.
You can find the companion video to this article here: https://youtu.be/arRlz9885Yg
