Daily Inspiration Quote by Ana Castillo

Castillo’s line lands like an indictment because it refuses the softer language of “influence” and goes straight to “regulated and shaped” -- verbs that belong to law, religion, medicine, schools, and the family. She’s not arguing that men merely misunderstand women; she’s naming a system that treats sexuality as infrastructure. If desire is a resource, regulation is how you control who gets access, who bears risk, and who is blamed when the rules are broken.

The bite is in the double purpose: “regulated” suggests restriction (don’t do this, don’t want that), while “shaped” suggests production (be this kind of woman, want this kind of man). Castillo’s subtext is that patriarchy doesn’t only police sex; it manufactures sexual scripts that look “natural” because they’re rehearsed everywhere. The endpoint is “serve men’s needs,” a phrase that collapses romance into labor. Women’s sexuality becomes a service economy: purity that protects male status, availability that satisfies male pleasure, motherhood that supplies lineage, silence that shields male power.

Context matters. Castillo writes out of Chicana feminist traditions that scrutinize how Catholic morality, machismo, and colonial histories braid together: the “good woman/bad woman” split, the politics of motherhood, the way honor culture disciplines female bodies while excusing male entitlement. The sentence works because it’s broad without being vague; it points to institutions rather than individual villains, and it dares the reader to ask the uncomfortable follow-up: if sexuality has been engineered, what would it look like if women authored the design?