From a very young age, Noemí López Trujillo learned that extreme femininity was synonymous with frivolity, wickedness, or threat. Me dibujaron así is part of that early suspicion to build a direct defense of everything that has been considered “too feminine” and, therefore, shallow or wicked. From Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears to Jessica Rabbit or La Veneno, the author revisits punished cultural icons and rereads them as figures of resistance, desire, and excess.

The book weaves these pop images with her own story: a childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness, a turbulent adolescence, and motherhood marked by expectations about how “a good mother” should be. Alongside media references appear the biblical figures of Jezebel and Salome, the harpies, the sirens, and other “monsters” that tradition has built as warnings against dangerously seductive women. The result is a clear-sighted and unashamed defense of the femme in all its forms.

Halfway between cultural essay and autobiographical account, Me dibujaron así. Por qué el mundo odia la feminidad dismantles the discourses that reduce femininity to submission and meekness. In a context where “new masculinities” are endlessly theorized, this book shifts the focus and considers how rape culture is precisely sustained by hatred of the feminine. It is also a celebration of everything labeled as “girly,” from bimbos and transvestites to chonis, whores, or gypsy women, reclaiming femininity as a political identity, pleasure, and battleground.

About the author

Noemí López Trujillo (Bilbao, 1988) is a journalist and writer, specialized in social and gender information. She has worked in media such as ABC, 20minutos, and El Español and is currently head of Gender at Newtral. She is the author of the books Volveremos. Memoria oral de los que se fueron durante la crisis and El vientre vacío, and of the sound documentary Lo conocí en un Corpus about the gender-based murder of Ana Orantes. In 2017 she received the Young Journalism Award on Gender Violence from Injuve.