2023-04-20 10:24:00
BY: FLORENCE THOMAS
A more than complex relationship. Of course, what we lived through in the 60s, 70s and 80s at the university cannot be compared to today. In those days there was no talk of gender perspective and, even though some of us already shouted “democracy in the country and democracy at home” in the seventh race, this was still not valid nor did it worry the majority of our colleagues too much.
In addition, at that time, the glorious times of the class struggle were lived that hardly managed to include in their demands the most tenacious and prolonged discrimination, that of the women of the world. Before these patriarchs of the orthodox left of those times, the work was monumental.
The mockery of those brave women who already called themselves feminists were daily bread, and many symbolic bonfires awaited us. As Lucy Garrido, a well-known Uruguayan feminist, notes, in those times you could have global progressive thought and at the same time a reactionary practice in terms of women’s rights, and very specifically when talking about sexual politics.
I met many brilliant men, intellectuals and academics, tied almost genetically to a still largely intact patriarchal culture. And a sexual double standard usually reigned without qualms. These men of my generation –that is, those who today are around 70 or 80 years old– lived calmly. Solidarity between machos, or the mandate of masculinity, as the anthropologist Rita Laura Segato calls it, had not wavered yet.
Women continued to be expropriated from a politicization of their existence that would only be timidly built in the 1990s, and particularly thanks to the declaration of sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental rights.
Today we might think that it is difficult to be on the left and, for example, not to support the full legalization of abortion. However, many politicians in the campaign prefer not to stir the waters, due to the doubts that the issue subtracts their votes. The pact of the old patriarchs is somewhat fissured, but it still resists.
How many men, politicians, artists, teachers or intellectuals, fell for #MeToo in Colombia? Too few, I think, and what is evident is the resistance of that pact between men, silent but built with cement and that is exercised in the universe of politics, universities, large companies, culture and that allows an eternal silence in the field of intra-family and sexual violence.
The contemporary left has forgotten that the first and last objective of doing left politics is also to transform the current social relations between men and women and to shorten the distance between the public and the private. Today’s feminists cannot remain silent in the face of abuses that deny women political status. We look forward to much more.
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