I have been working for years with young and old men on issues related to equality, and in particular trying to make them understand the link between sexist culture and violence. Violence in general and, more specifically, that suffered by women. In most cases, I have always found a tendency to approach this reality as if it were something external to them, something that happens to others. These “others”, not them, who are the sexists and not to mention the violent. With a few exceptions, it is difficult for them to admit that we all reproduce machismo every day and that we have been socialized in such a way that our identity has been built on a culture of domination, public importance and unquestionable subjectivity and autonomy. A paradigm that, in turn, requires one that conceives of women as having a status inferior to ours, as well as being permanently available to satisfy our desires and needs. It is precisely these hierarchical power relations that feminism, with the help of the critical tool that gender represents, has revealed and subjected to criticism. Hierarchies on which, let us not forget, we build incomplete democracies and constitutional systems made in the image and likeness of men.
The above does not imply that all men are sexual aggressors or aggressors of our partner, but it does imply that we all carry within us a long and complex process of socialization that has prepared us to feel dominant and protagonists, to normalize the use of violence. . , to deny the voice of those we do not consider equivalent to us and to feel part of a phratry that allows us to reaffirm our fantasies of omnipotence. It would be enough to review, for example, the collective imaginations that have constructed for centuries the asymmetrical references that have defined the status of men and women. From classical mythology to Instagram, through cinema or the work of illustrious writers, we have a very long repertoire that supports what feminism has identified with the “rape culture”, which, far from disappearing, has only acquired new forms and new clothes in the “pornographic” societies in which we live.
