As if the revolting escalation that we have been witnessing in Brazil every day was not enough, it was reported, in this month marked by International Women’s Day, that one by one female refusal to make a marriage proposal went viral. When asked “no”, the pseudo-bullies of the machosphere rehearse hatred in the form of punches, stabs and shots.
This is a police case and, at least, it is being treated that way. It is not, however, enough to stop what is taking place. Processes like these, in which diverse and profound aspects conspire towards a pattern of criminal and psychopathic behavior, cannot be resolved overnight. It is imperative to insist on public repudiation and on measures, limited as they may seem, to address the issue.
The , which leads to and to femicide, is a kind of ancestry of evil. These are ancient situations, linked to cultural, biological and psychic flows… Misogyny is, as is well known, in the religious heart of the West, just look at the submissive and threatening place of women in the moral and institutional order of the Catholic Church.
For men, this whole context is thorny. We are not the ones who fear rape, an assault, a stab or a gunshot when we say no or wear this or that outfit. We are the ones who do this. It is a fact that not all men are this beast, but it is there, it is not strange to us.
When seeing videos of boys rehearsing aggression, most conscious men would agree that they are not behaviors from another planet; probably in their lives they have already had some contact, close or mediated, with this type of culture and even with those who could potentially participate in it.
It is restricted, but I see that there is movement among men to somehow interfere in this situation, even if the rejection, sometimes accompanied by a certain discomfort or disturbance, does not present itself as it could and should. The conviction that you are outside this mob or that being “progressive” would help you to pacify the issue is not enough.
The other day, thinking about these things, a post by a friend, professor at PUC-RJ and scholar of Brazilian counterculture, caught my attention. He said: “Being the father of two teenage daughters means, every day, having to imagine the worst in order to prepare them for a violent, misogynistic world that is hostile to the simplest feeling of existential freedom that they can have.”
It referred to . And it continued, in a way that, I must admit, would surprise me at the conclusion: “The fact of living with a collective rape of people of their age and social environment only deepens this daily sadness, just like parents who need to teach their black sons and daughters that, every day, their skin color turns them into potential victims of criminal acts.”
There is a message of empathy, in this case precipitated by the paternal feeling, although not only, that we lack in these times. A genuine impulse —yes, from a straight white man— to try to feel in someone else’s shoes and recognize the human drama to be confronted. We need this.
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