We arrived in Urueña surrounded by walls when we traveled through the vast and arid land of the province of Valladolid. It's a town as small as it's curious. Although it does not have 200 inhabitants, there are eight bookstores, a literary museum and a corner of known stories from universal literature. This hamlet, enchanted with letters, was declared Book City in 2007, and has since received a significant influx of visitors throughout the year. In the bookstore First page of the locality I got the collection of stories written by Emilia Pardo, writer and journalist who died a hundred years ago, about violence against women. Stories of more than a century old have a special touch because of their ancient writing and the cruelty of the stories. In recent weeks, news from Afghanistan has announced that the situation of women will go back 200 years. Incidentally, I've made a certain relationship with Pardo's writings, which seem to dance on the limit of truthfulness and fiction.

The geostrategic reasons and economic interests of intervention in this territory are undeniable; war is profitable, at least when it takes place in other lands. However, along with these concrete interests, there is violence that manifests itself especially on women, that is, the denial of all activity outside the home: the inability to work outside the home, the denial of studies, the need to go out accompanied by men, or the covering of the whole skin of the body. Control of empty existence.
If we zoom in, the examples of harassment of women around the world are very diverse. According to UN statistics in 2020, 200 million girls have been victims of genital mutilation (and another 68 million will be at risk of genital mutilation by 2030), some 60 million children will be forced into marriage and every year more than 14 million adolescents will be born as a result of forced sexual intercourse. These data are no more than sketches of reality, but they certainly reflect the seriousness of the situation.

Many of these barbarities have been related to women's sexuality. Tradition has rooted many mistaken beliefs to flee the desire of women. For example, the beliefs that relate clitoral resection with the fidelity of women and their purity are significant, and it should not be forgotten that we were thrown out of paradise by Eva's desire. Mireia Darder, a PhD in Psychology and an expert in female sexuality, presents in a pedagogical and fluid way in Nacidas for the pleasure the consequences of the control of the female body. The author believes that for centuries desire and pleasure, as if they were crimes, dirty, or impurities, have been felt and punished. Darder, for example, is able to put upside down the beliefs we have today through the etymology of the words slut or virginity. The writer wants to assert the potentiality of personal pleasure, proposing the liberation of sexuality from control and dependence of others (in most cases masculine) and the conciliation of desire.

Darder's proposals can be utopian for many women, and writers such as Pardo's stories can be remote and bizarre for others. But, as books have devoured the world of Urueña, we also lead us to unknown situations, to places that sometimes seem impossible. If oneself and the body can be strengths of freedom, we read, awake, to dream of utopias.