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Reflections on International Women’s Day, March 8
It is nighttime, and we are heading back home. “G,” my wife, is behind the wheel. Happy, she tells me she will show me a recently discovered shortcut. With amazement, I see, little by little, she begins what I suspect will be a long detour. G. asks me to be patient, yet we reach a point where whatever direction she chooses will be a long deviation: the shortest path is left behind. Her shortcut turns out to be a considerable detour through clear overpasses; the car advances quickly, giving me a feeling of flight and freedom. “See? It’s a good route, don’t you think?” I laugh. I try to disguise my thoughts and be kind. We traveled several kilometers more, expending gasoline and time. However, with my calm disposition, the trip seemed light and convenient. We arrived home without arguing. G. is also at ease; we have not fought about who is right.
In fact, there are always a thousand reasons to take a different route than the “right” one. Reasons that have nothing to do with the usual logic; reasons that call into question our concept of error; reasons that prefer agile mental paths giving a sensation of flight through wide and illuminated spaces, where there is room for intimacy and affection, respect and consideration, and which add to the landing experience when one comes to a conclusion; reasoning having more to do with inviting the other to share an experience. Reasoning reminds me of the phrase by Blas Pascal, the French scientist and mystic, “The heart has reasons that reason does not know.”
Darío Sztajnszrajber, a famous Argentine writer and popularizer of philosophy, proposes that we change the meaning of the word philosophy (love of wisdom) to emphasize love more than knowledge. That’s what G does. Surely, when she goes around experiencing new routes, she learns something and loves what she learns.
In writing this, suddenly, those verses of Oliverio Girondo come to mind that refers to women, saying, “I do not forgive them, under any pretext, because they do not know how to fly.” Those words engulf me, yes, yet they are verses I do not like. Who is Girondo, however poetic he may be, to tell women how they should be, to ask them to meet his expectations, and, to receive his forgiveness, they must learn to fly? Is he some high-altitude bird, a cherub, a fast glider waiting for women to catch up? I, in truth, imagine him instead as a corpulent, earthy man, reclining in his bed and asking the women to fly for him; through them, he rises and enjoys his flight. However, G. loves those verses. She told me that more than twenty years ago when I met her. Maybe she hoped I would be that man who encouraged her to fly, admired her flight, and encouraged her to go higher. But what I did on that first date was criticize Girondo.
I criticized him, yes, without feigning the slightest romanticism. But ok, at least I also explained to G. why I did it. In the end, saying everything I think is my weakness. She and I admit that it is one of the things that has kept us together. The other is that G. is relatively quiet, at least in things I consider essential. Both “weaknesses” have kept us together because, being together, we have learned to listen to each other. Listening to her silence has been the hardest thing for me. Talking and listening to me has been a challenge for her. That’s how I see it. And together, we are learning and creating a space of speech, silence, and communication.
We are creating a space for communication for our children and us. We have two. We want them to learn from that rumorous and chatty silence we have created together, where words can speak, but not always say “the definitive,” “the right thing.” They attempt it but do not always succeed. Sometimes, they exceed the line of prudent silence but usually manage to backtrack and even apologize.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish thinker, describes today’s world as liquid modernity in which everything flows and escapes through our hands, all the truths overflowing that could be contained. In this world, there is no direction, only dispersion. Nothing stays still, stops to be examined, or slows down long enough to be sampled. I am surprised that this image of liquid dispersion is also the one that, according to the ancient Taoist Chinese, represents youthful foolishness, which flows everywhere without any posture or direction. Yet, thanks to its stubbornness, it fills everything and overcomes the obstacles to keep running: this is how rivers are made, carving the great channels that make humanity remain.
Liquid reality has the virtue that it teaches us to be permeable. The term permeability (synonymous, for me, with communication) serves the main idea of this article, which is to clear the ideological cobwebs that have been forged around the differences between men and women, to carry out an exercise of unlearning, and to question all those forceful reasonings that lock women and men into arbitrary niches, in stereotypes “impermeable” to each other.
My mind then goes back to the modern origin of this type of questioning, that is, more or less to the sixteenth century, when humanity began to get rid of a clerical system that had turned the mysteries of heaven and earth into rules and obedience, repressing all kinds of independent thought. Feeling that his reason could understand reality, the human being saw how to recover the by-then-already-very-worn spirit of transcendence in mathematical and scientific knowledge. The initial promise was to include women on that flight. The halls of some wealthy ladies were filled with men and women who discussed together the critical advances of philosophy and science. As central figures of these gatherings, they influenced indirectly but forcefully the opportunities for men to enter academic circles (which, by the way, were forbidden to them). In addition, by demanding that in their classrooms, they speak without pedantry but with plain language and understandable to all, they became the first popularizers of science.
But that incipient protagonism was short-lived. The new spirit of transcendence that had distanced itself from the official religion and now saw reason as the pinnacle of the human did not separate itself from the old philosophical duality between soul and body. Now the mind, the intellect, rose above nature, trying to reduce the material world to the object of study and satisfy physical needs. The latter being never-ending, someone needed to tend to them. The woman believed to be more attached to nature,* was the ideal candidate for the tasks of that daily materiality, such as managing the home and raising children.
By the seventeenth century, “wise women” were mocked (the great French playwright Moliere made the mistake of ridiculing them in at least two of his comedies). Many women hid their strength to retain at least the power to appear weak. Others gave battle. However, society was not yet liquid enough (confused and ungraspable enough) to demand the permeability that, in the current era, is beginning to be a requirement for survival. Science was starting to take flight, and it would still take a long time to reach its highest point. After a nineteenth century that intensified both faith in scientific truth and repression of women (whose intellectual inferiority was now “scientifically proven”), human beings saw the goddess Reason approach her point of clearest lucidity. However, her wings began to sprout, like those of poor Icarus, who flew too close to the sun without considering that they were made of wax.
Today, in our world of liquefied wings and truths, it no longer makes sense for masculine and feminine (real or stereotyped) to remain separate; they finally begin to permeate each other. Increasingly, the emotional/familiar converges with the intellectual/social; their separation has been an explicit tool of the rationalist patriarchy that shaped modern society. Here and there, in dark corners, begins to forge a new world whose main characteristic promises to be a moldable solidity. Having lost a valuable opportunity for equality, which was opened at the beginning of modernity, an incipient community of permeable beings cracks the molds with an aggressiveness that had been contained for centuries: Explosive women arise to defend themselves (and their entire gender) from violent men who do not want to give up being right. Other men seek and find in femininity the qualities they had lost. Some fathers stay home to care for their children, while mothers go out to set an example of strength and femininity. Around us, the air mixes all the essences, flying who knows where, without direction (still without direction), in search of a more promising earthly home. They go towards it by uncertain shortcuts and detours of several kilometers (lost to reason but recovered for the heart) before landing.
Although in biblical mythology, the woman is the first to disobey God and eats the fruit that gives “discernment” and offers it to man, it is the latter, Adam, who is the first to know disloyalty (a characteristic that cannot be imputed to woman). He immediately accuses her before the creator: “She gave it to me.” And he renounces to God what was previously his own: “She, the woman, You gave me.”
I admire Eva more. While this can be seen as a form of personal empathy, it is still extremely useful for me to take the position that today’s world shows me as the fairest: to side with women and their struggle for equality (some prefer to talk about equity).
Supporting women is not easy for men because it means accepting that we are at a disadvantage before them. Let me explain. Having attributed to women for centuries affective superiority and better qualities for raising children, today, as women demonstrate their intellectual equality in all orders, men make women owners of those first qualities in addition to their cognitive abilities and intelligence. (Men are left only with superiority in bodily strength, and in many cases, not even that). Setting women aside and reserving the emotional world for them had its risks, and now men see how women grow and threaten to leave them at their feet, in the shadows.
In any case, the criticality of struggling for women’s equality and educating our children in that sense underlies the mobilization of corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual rights under a flag that belongs to both genders. (Sometimes, women had to erupt with explosiveness because men seemed willing to continue in the same state of alienation for a long time, maintaining arbitrary differences that did not represent us in any way).
I believe that a permeable society will end up revealing to us that we are very similar, that, in reality, our central conflict lies precisely in always mirroring ourselves: for example, wanting the other to know in advance who I am, what I want, what I need, all without having to tell or ask for it; or wanting to express it loudly without giving time for silence to reveal it. All as if I were a self duplicated, a self looking in the mirror (the opposite of someone permeable, instead, a Narcissus).
*It seems that women have always resisted much more than men losing their integrity and renouncing their nature. In the end, Pierre Roussel was right when, in a 1775 book, he said (believing to point out a defect) that “woman is not only woman by one face, but by all the faces in which she can be contemplated.”
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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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