Cisneros shows how Chicanas, like women of many other ethnicities, internalize these norms starting at a young age, through informal education by family members and popular culture. In The House on Mango Street, for example, a group of girl characters speculate about what function a woman's hips have: "They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says ... You need them to dance, says Lucy ... You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know." Traditional female roles, such as childrearing, cooking, and attracting male attention, are understood by Cisneros's characters to be their biological destiny. However, when they reach adolescence and womanhood, they must reconcile their expectations about love and sex with their own experiences of disillusionment, confusion and anguish. Esperanza describes her "sexual initiation"—an assault by a group of Anglo-American boys while awaiting her friend Sally at the fairground. She feels stricken and powerless after this, but above all betrayed; not only by Sally, who was not there for her, but "by all the women who ever failed to contradict the romantic mythology of love and sex". Cisneros illustrates how this romantic mythology, fueled by popular culture, is often at odds with reality in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, where multiple references to romantic telenovelas obsessively watched by the female characters are juxtaposed with the abuse and poverty they face in their own lives.
