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On a corner, a young woman from a humble class is about to board a public transport van to go to work when a car pulls beside her, and a couple of men emerge and attempt to pull her away. She punches, kicks, and extends her arms to cling to the bus door. “Help, I don’t know these men,” she shouts. Passengers react by holding and pulling her so they cannot take her away. After a few moments, the kidnappers give up and leave, leaving the girl heaving breaths and crying in the arms of those who helped her.
The above describes a news incident I read somewhere not long ago. To delve into it, I can say that talking about a “young girl of humble class” and a “public transport van” that will take her to work immediately places the action in an economically low neighborhood. There, the thugs are also of the lower class; I imagine them with thin faces (due to poor diet, sleeplessness, and drugs), dressed in ragtag clothing, not very clean, and executing their crime mechanically and fast, indifferent to the environment and, of course, the life of their victim, whom they only realize is young and female.
I presume that, like me, anyone hearing such a story will be impacted first by sensitively feeling the terror of the scene. However, little by little, that first impression will fade into conventions that make the story increasingly tolerable in the memory: it has “thugs,” “passengers,” and a “young woman of humble class,” a description that evokes stereotypical feelings. (In reality, humility has nothing to do with people’s economic resources. However, to speak like this seems to describe a harmless and helpless woman with little money, an image of someone predestined to suffer, an “inevitable victim.”
Language accomplishes this first stereotyping. Next, we use other psychological resources to protect ourselves and keep forgetting. For example, those who do not frequent low-income neighborhoods or take public transport feel safe. Those who do not have young daughters or granddaughters, too. Others find shelter under the story’s happy ending (the young woman is saved) and thereby ignore the many other cases where things do not end like this.
What our mind will try to do at all costs is erase as soon as possible all the details in our first impression, the wide eyes, frantic gestures, screams of terror, and violence, and turn them into an impersonal, archived image, like a “newspaper of old” that, as the song says, no one reads anymore. If the event turns out well, it will remain in a vague memory, and if it becomes data, it will be added to the crime statistics, nourishing political speeches and electronic information. Nevertheless, none of this will fully reveal the tragic moment when that girl’s life changes forever when people risk helping her and when men decide that any young woman’s life is worth less than their personal interests.
Since I am writing a short article, I only have one or two paragraphs highlighting other intuitions about what happened during the failed kidnapping. In the case of the girl, I understand that her reaction is first instinctive, something that turns her into a beast, an animal defending herself, and perhaps something else, another aspect that can only arise in her from the same place that the kidnappers recognize when choosing her to take her: she is a woman. She is a woman who draws strength from the anger aroused by those who want to take away her right to live only because she is a woman and a man is not equally valuable to them.
None of the levels of her being (instinct, humanity, feminism) are in her in a stereotyped way but as part of her body and mind. The bus’s passengers see all this in her eyes and, reflected in her gaze, they act to defend her and themselves in some way against the criminal injustice that wants to take her life just for being a woman. For their part, the kidnappers do not see themselves as inhuman monsters but as people in need, violent and indifferent to pain, and also aware that a whole criminal network supports them, a network that will pay for their actions to nothing more and nothing less than the justice system that should stop them, but which is doubly corrupt in the case of women, whom it undervalues.
It is evident that feminist values begin to advance while today’s society still entrenches patriarchal structures. Today, it is increasingly common for women to teach us all to call a spade a spade and to stop hiding the patriarchal dimension of much social violence. One example is femicide, which was previously seen as one of many types of crimes occurring in society, but today, women have made known that these crimes are committed against women for being women and not for anything else.
However, even in the face of such clear facts, men cannot admit such discrimination. Even when we believe ourselves to be supporters of the feminist struggle, when questioned on the subject by the women around us, we react by trying to equate our position with theirs and reproaching them if they do not accept our conciliatory attitude. Thus, the only thing we achieve is to unleash in them a feeling of hopelessness, from which they often try to speak without finding the right words because, deep down, it is so obvious that it should not be necessary to explain it.
The same thing happens to them that happened to me in 2009 when, in the middle of the influenza pandemic, I wrote the first draft of a didactic novel about the health crisis. The book dealt with characters who suffered innumerable vicissitudes while giving or obtaining scientific explanations about what was happening. However, the fact that I was so immersed in the terror of the moment, like the entire population, made me believe that my words reflected the passion and feeling I carried inside. But no, the whole exciting adventure had remained inside me without emerging. What resulted was a coherent text in terms of information but not very engaging because it did not authentically convey the emotion of the experience. As I said, I think that many times, women have the same thing happen when they try to express the experiences of their feminism: to them, it is so apparent what is happening that they do not realize that men’s words are a caricature of the facts.
The truth is that men should be able to understand women through these infuriating descriptions, but it is not so; we refute them and accuse them of being reductionist, obsessive, and scheming (similar to, in the ruckus of the kidnapping, one of the passengers complained that the terrified girl was tearing his tie). Women, powerless in the face of so much blindness, usually conclude that we cannot understand them because the things that have happened to them have not happened to us. This answer offends men: we feel that we are called “fools” because we know that the proper thing of human understanding is abstracting experience and finding humane models that allow us to understand each other. However, it is not that we cannot understand the abuse committed against our fellow human beings, but something more serious: we do not understand what they tell us because, deep down, we realize that this denunciation is also directed at us, that in their fury they are not only talking about specific characters who have committed abuse but the entire male gender. In reality, the only thing that men should understand is that all this, rather than a theoretical discussion, is a social struggle and that we, with our always at least latent aggressiveness and privileges, are inevitably on one side, even if we call ourselves supporters of the opposite side.
It is not enough to affirm that we individually listen to them and defend their rights. On March 7, 2019, I publicly mentioned that men should organize a march supporting the protest action that women would undertake the following day, on International Women’s Day. Immediately, a friend stopped me: “Don’t dare.” I felt hurt, pushed aside, helpless…yet I already understand that reaction, at least a little: in this gender struggle, women least want our supposed alliance or that we try to alleviate the injustice of centuries by calling ourselves their accomplices.
Men have three missions if we genuinely want, at least, not to be a hindrance in that struggle: the first is to recognize the permanent injustice we exercise against women, even when we say we are on their side; the second is to be silent and assume responsibility, listening when they want to speak; and the third, really the only important one, is to change ourselves. What women expect from us is that we change and that we demonstrate that change in daily life and each of our acts.
In the meantime, they will keep fighting.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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