Summary Of Junot Diaz's How To Date A Brown Girl

According to the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, the average age at which teens lose their virginity is between 16.9 and 17.4 years old. Despite this statistic, there are still people who do not experience sex until later in life. Because people begin having sex at such varying times, two distinct groups of teens can be formed. Insiders, or those who have sexual experience, and outsiders, who have yet to engage in sexual activity. In Junot Diaz’s instruction manual “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)”, the narrator Yunior, who is presumably a teenage Dominican boy, describes how to convince a girl to have sex. The manual explores the differences between sexual insiders and outsiders and describes …show more content…
Before his date begins, Yunior gets nervous when the girl does not arrive on time. However, when his date finally arrives at his house, Yunior is disappointed to see that, “a whole crowd [has shown] up at [his] apartment” and he knows that he “ain’t getting shit” (1). If the girl Yunior was determined to have sex with decided to bring “a whole crowd” of her friends with her, Yunior was undoubtedly not clear enough with his intentions when asking the girl out. With a large group of other people in the apartment, it is unlikely that the two would be able to do anything more intimate than kissing. A true insider would be able to subliminally tell his date that he intended to have sex with her, but because Yunior is not this suggestive, he becomes more of an outsider. Yunior also seems to have a hard time determining when a girl is interested in him. Even if a girl knows that he is trying to have sex with her, when she is uninterested, she might bring friends along with her, so that she can ensure that Yunior doesn’t get “shit”. Yunior’s incapacity for finding girls who are mutually interested in having sex with him can also be seen when he describes the girl he asked out not coming over at all. The girl in question ends up not coming, “over at all and the next day in school …show more content…
Like Yunior, his dates are also outsiders, but unlike him, they have little to no experience and essentially date through their parents, allowing them to make major decisions about sex and dating for themselves. The girls Yunior dates are generally condensed into the same social group, but because they come from such different socioeconomic backgrounds, they must be treated in a way that is respective to what they are used to. In reality, most people exhibit qualities of both insiders and outsiders, but when it comes down to it, the decision of which a person chooses to be can only be made by one person - the