In the final lines of the English translation, Castellanos looks away from the report and toward the sleeping man. She writes: "He doesn't know that she doesn't sleep. / He doesn't know that she knows. / And the night goes on, longer than any statistic."

We marry, doctor Kinsey, because it’s cheaper than hiring a servant. A servant, plus a nurse, plus a nanny, plus a whore. That’s the wife.

Rosario Castellanos, one of Mexico’s most influential feminist voices, wrote the essay "Lección de cocina" (Cooking Lesson) as a direct response to the changing social landscape of the 1950s and 60s. A significant, though often subtextual, influence on her work during this period was the "Kinsey Reports"—the groundbreaking studies on human sexuality by Alfred Kinsey.

Castellanos used Kinsey to wage war against the idealized, asexual maternal figure. She argued that by denying women their sexuality, Mexican society reduced them to functional objects—wombs for reproduction and hands for domestic labor. Kinsey’s data allowed her to argue that women who experienced sexual pleasure and possessed autonomous desires were not "deviant" or "sinful," but statistically normal. By translating scientific data into cultural critique, Castellanos validated the lived, somatic experiences of women who had been conditioned to feel shame for their bodies. Literary Manifestations of Bodily Autonomy

One stanza from the English translation (Allgood) reads:

For non-Spanish speakers, accessing Castellanos's journalistic essays requires looking into specific anthologies.