I guess I was also a "whore" for some 'bro' when I was 15.

PalmRiding the TIB bus is, as we all know, a risky sport. Personally, my favorite activity is listening to other people's conversations, because of the unexpected surprises you might encounter. Teenagers on their way to a festival in some village in the Migjorn region.fuck friends', ex... And their words pierced my soul like a scalpel, reaching directly to my teenage self who, unknowingly, was still beating. A distress settled in the form of a knot in my stomach that, from time to time, rose to my throat, forcing me to send saliva and contain the urge to cry.

Every sentence they said began or ended with a "bro", that vocative that among the new generations has become the magic wand of connivance and complicity. As if they achieved total impunity regarding what they had just said - no matter how serious it was - if they had said "bro" before. "This is a whore", "When she does it to me, I'm taking it. You'll see how she doesn't forget about "I", "She says I'm using her, but the thing is that I want a fuck friend", "You see he has a face like 'slut' and then you regret having slept with her."

These are just some of the phrases I managed to remember during the journey of just over half an hour that I shared with them. There were three or four of them, they were between 15 and 16 years old, and they chatted so loudly that the man couldn't hear them. I would have loved to turn around and ask them what scale they use to classify girls as whores or 'sluts'. Being told what I had to do to receive any of these ratings: having rejected them, hooking up with a friend of theirs, having sex with more people than them...

But the conversation continued. One of the comments that hurt me the most was the one from the young man who wanted to find a place to sleep that night. His strategy was to pick up a girl: "She told me I could sleep over at her house, so I'll just do it today and that's it." Everyone applauded, but the remark of one of his colleagues, who insisted they had to prove they were "mature," sparked a dissenting third party: "I don't give a damn what they think. They're the retarded ones, we don't have to prove anything. All I want is for them not to report me."

Then, it seemed to me it was my 15-year-old self listening to that debate. I experienced, once again, the misogyny I had to swallow when I didn't even know how to name it. I experienced how the male gaze still struggles to define us. I empathized with the tremendous objectification those girls were subjected to, one after another, as if their will had been overridden. And suddenly, I felt like I was all of them at once. Surely, at 15, I was a "whore" to some 'bro' like them. Or, on the contrary, I was one of those they regretted having gotten involved with.

I remembered the times I let them do it to get validation, and the other times I was made to learn too quickly to set boundaries. I also remembered the times we had to console a friend who, for some reason, came back crying after spending a quick moment with a boy in a parking lot. None of us knew how to interpret those tears. We still see them as incompatible with the fact that she had left happily and willingly with him. Just like in the movie. How to have sex, to the point that it seems as if the director, Molly Manning, had been inspired by one of those experiences to film –on a street that intentionally resembles Magaluf– the scene in which the protagonist, Tara, returns crying to her hotel after an afternoon of partying.

"Childhood ends with a kiss," says Cristina Rivera Garza in Liliana's invincible summer, the book about her sister's murder, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. "This waiting, which is childhood, finally ends with a kiss. Lips on lips. Teeth. Saliva. The ragged breath. The open eyes. Childhood ends with the establishment of secrecy," she reflects on the romantic theme, the very thing that, at just 20 years old, earned her her death. I can't help but feel her words resonate with me. "Childhood ends with a kiss." I hope we can one day free ourselves from all the suffering that begins with this kiss.