Let's Talk About...

21 - The boy crisis and gender talk

One aspect of the unfortunate battle of sexes, with radical feminists on one side and angry men's rights advocates on the other, is the failure to step outside the gender box and be able to hear the other side and acknowledge legitimate claims. Each gender remains inside its own box shouting at the other, impermeable to dialogue. Instead of acknowledging a problem of "the adversary," each side retaliates, invalidates, accuses, blames, and then turns back to their own issues. How are we ever going to build a better world at this rate?

The question is, there shouldn't even be a war of genders because, before being male or female, we are all human. Furthermore, if things are not good for women, that affects men too, and vice-versa. It affects the future generations of boys and girls. No matter the gender, we're all the foundation of families and the society as a whole. While 1 in 4 women will be raped in their lifetime and men represent the majority of the perpetrators of violence, the fact is women have a voice, special help centers and laws to protect them, and men don't.

Nowadays, with women emancipated and men no longer being the sole breadwinners, men fel lost. I watched an instigating discussion about male-female relationships involving two Brazilian philosophers, Luiz Felipe Pondé and Márcia Tiburi,. To Pondé, women were like phoenixes: a woman quits an unsatisfactory marriage, she's devastated and you think she's not going to survive; for weeks she's down, she talks to her girlfriends, cries, badmouths the ex, and when you least expect it she displays an astounding ability to pick up the pieces.

Men are more dependent, and the proof of that is they usually only break up when they have another woman, says Pondé. When their partner breaks up with them, they don't have that informal network of solidarity like women. At most, men go out with friends and get drunk. Since the old paradigm of the dependent female has perished, men are confused with their partners.

But women also seem confused. In a time when the masculine sensitivity is encouraged, a woman actually gets disoriented if confronted with her partner's vulnerability, and if that persists, she eventually loses interest and the relationship succumbs. Pondé mentions a gap between what is said in theory by female authors in books, and what occurs in reality: women are understanding of male vulnerability in general but can't accept it in their own partner.

Tiburi argues that the gap probably exists because women themselves have internalized the ideal of the strong male partner propagated by culture. She adds that since the birth of feminism, women have been deconstructing the female gender (gender is always a cultural construct) because they were forced to, whereas men only recently started to look into themselves and deconstruct the male gender, adding to their confusion.

In my view, another aspect should also be noted. Nobody admires a weak partner, and without admiration, romance is not possible. Men are socially conditioned to be more accepting of weak women due to the cultural standard of feminine fragility, but usually if a partner is vulnerable and in pain for too long, it becomes harder to keep a romantic interest in them. I've seen, however, many women being supportive of their men during their prolonged emotional hardships, and many men becoming disinterested in their women if they drag into depression.

As for men's difficulties, the fact that for most part they don't have channels to vent their own issues only makes matters worse. Help centers and laws were created to protect women out of a genuine necessity in face of the violence and sexism they have historically been enduring. On the other hand, if a woman abuses the voice she's granted or a law protecting her, men feel helpless. Now let me be clear once again: although men are statistically the main perpetrators of violence, not all men are bad or violent, and not all women are good or non-violent.

The question is not masculinity or femininity. Those are neutral. The question is how they are constructed, the man box and the woman box, and above all the asphyxiating system that has created and contains those boxes, a system that doesn't promote harmony and mental health but instead engenders violence, superficiality, materialism, sexual vulgarity and narcissism. Those boxes dehumanize us, conditions us to be reduced to—metaphorical or not—Barbie dolls and Rambo soldiers. The essence of a woman, a man, a human being is far richer than that.