On Gender Disparities: Can Women Be Blamed For Machismo?

By Silvia Casablanca, Voxxi

While teaching a family health course at the University of Cartagena many years ago, the stories students told about the different roles that members of their family played always amazed me. It was obvious that they had grown up in the land of male privilege – in the land of machismo.

Sisters made the male students’ beds and served their dinner; fathers had more than one woman and publicly displayed pride for their sexual prowess; brothers determined whom sisters could date. If a man invited a woman out on a date, he had sexual privileges because he was footing the bill! One student even said that women were all prostitutes until proven otherwise.

But I was there precisely to challenge their beliefs, especially regarding gender disparities. Since they were medical, dentistry and nursing students training to become skilled in understanding and educating families, it was essential for them to realize that not everything they had taken for granted was healthy, beneficial or ideal.

Let’s say it aloud: Machismo reigns in Latin America

Wrong! It also reigns in the United States and mostly everywhere, but true, it’s prevalent among Latinos.

Latin American writers have portrayed it beautifully and even contributed to perpetuate the ‘cult of the macho.’ See Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges romanticizing courage when he depicts gauchos, for example.

Read Colombian Gabriel García Márquez in Cien Años de Soledad, portraying the Buendías, their masculinity expressed through force, sexual licentiousness, pride in male heirs and – worse – verbal and physical abuse and subjugation of others.

And what about soap operas? Why does the protagonist always choose the jerk over the nice guy? Oh, sure, she’ll smother him, won’t she?

There are exceptions, of course … mostly among female writers. Among them, Colombian journalist Silvana Paternostro who became aware of the damaging gender contradictions that diminish women in the Latin world. In The Land of God and Man: A Latin’s Woman’s Journey (1998), Paternostro shares her ideas.

Are women perpetuating machismo?

What has been truly puzzling to me is how women seem to perpetuate the state of affairs.

Listening to my student’s anecdotes, the mothers were clearly the ones asking my female students to serve the table or make the beds. Women accepted men´s infidelity on the grounds that they were “the queens” in their man’s universe. And women accepted male violence to the point that daughters would end up marrying guys resembling their abusive fathers.

However, and I shared this with students, what I was also reading between the lines was a certain inferiority attributed to men. Their weakness would explain why males were slaves to their drives. Men, no matter how courageous they might seem, couldn’t help but spread their seeds, couldn’t bring their rage under control, couldn’t be restrained to the four walls of one single household. And also, according to what I was hearing, men were so inadequate and unreliable that they could not tackle simple chores.

In other words, it dawned on me, women seemed to have created and spread a myth of male superiority – in which they didn’t believe – to secretly regain some control over their lost universe. But with an unbearable cost to them.

For millennia, women have been subjugated in patriarchal societies to the point that males have written history and we believe their tales.

There is strong evidence to support the idea that matriarchal societies (rather called women-centered) existed before agriculture was even invented. Notwithstanding, some scholars are reluctant to accept their existence. Since patriarchy entails men ruling over women, people tend to think of matriarchy as women ruling over men. Not the case. Archeologists have found thatwomen-centered societies were actually egalitarian.

Just imagine for a minute, cultures that never put legally minor females under the control of their male relatives or spouse; that never accepted physical or sexual abuse; that didn’t amputate or deform female body parts.

But by the time agriculture was invented, male supremacy had started to change things around: women were deprived of their roles in the community, excluded from governing bodies, secluded to their homes, forced to be faithful to their man and killed if they weren´t, while men were allowed to be with as many women as they pleased.

Today, women can vote in most countries and have been elected presidents; they have massive access to the university; they excel as managers, but are still second-class citizens around the globe.

We live in societies that give rights to women on paper, and yet continue to relegate them to secondary roles. As we recently saw with the Republicans opposing the Paycheck Fairness Act, even in the United States, women are considered to be inferior to men.

Hopefully, the transformation taking place in Latin America, which is certainly improving the status of women, will continue to move forward.

This article first appeared in Voxxi.

Silvia Casabianca is a Reiki Master/Teacher, Medical QiGong practitioner and Holistic psychotherapist. She graduated as a Medical Doctor in 1972 and practiced Medicine in Colombia for 28 years. She is the author of the book Regaining Body Wisdom: A Multidimensional Approach. She has a Master in Art Therapy from Concordia University (Canada). She founded the nonprofit Web of Holistic Educators – WHOLE, and is the director of Eyes Wide Open holistic center in Florida. www.silviacasabianca.com