WOMAN MAN – MAN WOMAN

I read with interest the article of the guys of February 3 that ended with 3 questions:

• Why are women who rebel still being killed?
• What tools can we use to change these things?
• What is the way to achieve a breakthrough in the history of women and their freedom?

Questions that are hard to answer. Perhaps we should start a long way from here, when women stayed inside the caverns to look after their offspring and paint the walls of the cave as the men went out during the day to hunt for food. A clear division of tasks due to the greater physical strength of the males and the physical conformation of the females giving birth and nursing the children. Division of tasks that actually brought women into contact with babies, to respond to their needs of human relationship and to develop their imagination while males were forced to invent weapons and hunting techniques increasingly precise and rational to be able to respond to the needs of survival.

We should then talk about the development of thought in the Western world where, starting from the usual triad Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we come to decree that human identity resides in reason while the irrational is madness going so paradoxically hand in hand with the Christian religion for which the irrational is Evil and the woman is relegated to the role of virgin and mother.

Today women can study (as we well know it is not true everywhere) and also hold very important positions but I have the feeling that this is often achieved by renouncing in part the female identity, becoming a bit “male”. And this feeling becomes a certainty when I think of certain important figures in our country. 

But back to the questions.

There is really a lot to say, but I will try to respond from a strictly psychological point of view, leaving aside the historical, political and cultural aspects that are absolutely fundamental to framing these problems.

Why are women who rebel killed? We read daily in the newspapers of women killed or scarred for wanting to separate from their partner, for saying no to the continuation of a violent relationship. But perhaps what does not appear in the newspapers is a daily “killing” that happens inside their home, made up of devaluations and denials of female identity, as I mentioned in a previous article. 

Then we must think that the problem lies in those males who have failed to realize and keep within themselves the female image. Males who, coming out of the cave, have canceled that irrational world of imagination, images, affections and receptivity. A world that they have pathologically tried to find again possessing the female who, not corresponding to an internal image of the lost female, has become an external object to hold close and control. The loss of this “object” entails the collapse of one’s male and human identity. Hence the most violent reactions to prevent this from happening.

But we must also ask ourselves why certain women fall in love with these men. And here we should get into the dynamics of the sadomasochistic relationship, the depressed schizoid couple, but we can still brutally summarize it like this: these women believed in their inferiority because they believed in the rational and religious thinking imposed by men over the years. 

How can we get out of this? (summarizing the other two questions)

I believe that there are basically two routes that must be followed, and they are not divided.

On the one hand, I am thinking of a necessary and deep crisis of the male identity, as it has been handed to us over millennia of history. At the same time, women must reject the cultural violence suffered over time and proudly regain possession of their own feminine identity, different from the men’s.

I think I can see some signs towards this desirable change, even if they are often confused and chaotic signals – just think of this concept of liquid identity applied to gender identity – but they testify to a ferment, a desire to change. As always happens in these periods of transition and crisis, there is the reactionary on duty who wants to propose the consolidated (and violent) “god, homeland and family” or who speaks of the decadence of Western values.

Dear kids, the theme you have proposed is very vast and lends itself to many interpretations. I do not think that I have answered you exhaustively, but I hope I have given rise to further reflection and questions. I’ve thought of a couple. 

Why do we speak so little and do nothing for the young Iranian women who are demonstrating to the streets risking their lives? Will it be because they claim their own free and different female identity from the males’? 

What is the point of talking about heterosexuality when we then realize that this term often hides a devaluation, a negation, a oppression, not to say a hatred, of males towards females? The Treccani dictionary says that heterosexuality is “the erotic tendency towards the opposite sex”. Yeah, but what is the erotic tendency? Might it be time to deal with the invisible world of human beings and begin to understand that manifest behavior tells us little or nothing about the inner reality of man?

Marco Michelini

Thanks to Chiara Fanasca for the translation of this article