The masculinity mandate

Do not call it rape. Because attraction or irrepressible desire are not the real causes of rape. This is the conviction of Rita Segato, 74 years old, Argentinian by birth, and one of the most authoritative anthropologists on gender inequality and contemporary conflicts. She has investigated this subject in the zones and battlegrounds of war scattered throughout Latin America, from Salvador to Guatemala. Her work with prisoners convicted of sexual assaults in prisons in Brasilia gave rise to the intuition that, behind the individual case, mechanisms of collective action are hidden. In the 1990s, in the Mexican Ciudad Juárez scourged by a disconcerting wave of serial feminicides, she brought to fruition the theory of the “mandate of masculinity”, resumed in the recent La guerra contro le donne [The War Against Women], published in Italy by Tamu.

 “In so-called sexual violence, there are two dimensions that intersect. A vertical one, in which the assailant addresses the victim and chastises her because he considers her a challenge to the patriarchal order. This is, however, the least important one,” she says. “The fundamental one is the horizontal dimension and concerns the relationship between the assailant and his peers to whom he turns to ask to be admitted into the “group of males” because he has paid his “tribute” through savagery on the female body. Rape, then, is not an anomaly of a solitary subject, it is a message delivered to society. It responds to an expressive logic. That is why it is not a sexual crime insofar as it is committed by sexual means. The objective is not so much to conquer the body but to prove oneself in order to obtain the coveted male status. Obviously these are absolutely unconscious dynamics”.

Rita Segato explains, “When I interviewed convicted rapists over a two year period, I was very impressed that they could not explain the reasons for their act. They were not lying; they really did not understand it themselves. It is therefore a question of digging up and bringing to light what is buried. This is the task of intellectuals: to “give” the words with which to decipher reality, because what has no name does not exist on the mental horizon. Only once this something is named and, therefore, uncovered, can one decide whether to preserve it or eliminate it”.

In this way, the word becomes a pre-condition for change. It is not easy, however, to coin it. The history of gender asymmetry is confused with that of the species. For this reason, according to the anthropologist, it is the backbone of all forms of inequality nested in the social fabric. “Violence against women is not the concern of a particular social group but the seedbed, the nursery, the breeding ground of all other forms of abuse and oppression. It is in the genders that the subliminal, shadowy structure of relationships marked by a differential in prestige and power is disguised. Male status, considered superior, must be acquired and recognised by the other holders of masculinity. The ‘duty’ to obtain it is the woman’s body, perceived as the provider of gestures that nurture masculinity. In the very act of bestowing the tribute, it produces its own exclusion from the caste it consecrates”.

Laws alone, therefore, are not enough. It is no coincidence that, despite legal efforts, feminicides and rapes seem to increase. “In this time of global chaos, in which wealth is increasingly concentrated in a few hands, the competition to maintain the dominant status is fierce. To ‘keep up’, more and more tributes are demanded. Hence the increasing violence against women”. The extreme example are the so-called new wars, typical of the 21st century: in these, irregular armies, very often criminal gangs, fight each other. In this form of war, “the female body becomes one of the main battlefields. I saw this clearly in the Guatemalan conflict. Attacking the body of the women of a community or faction by sexually attacking it and, as is common, to the point of death, is like placing a bomb in the exact centre of a building, causing it to implode in an instant and without much investment of resources”. To combat gender-based violence - and, therefore, all the others that are based on it - a change of perspective is needed to bring the category of patriarchy back to the centre, to dismantle it. Contrary to popular belief, its demolition will not only benefit women. “Men are the first victims of the mandate of masculinity. This does not mean justifying crimes or minimizing them. Rather, they recognise that this way of being men imprisons them in a constant terror of losing their power at the slightest show of weakness. They cannot experience affectivity in a healthy way or let their emotions shine through. The mandate of masculinity is an oppressive cage. Men are beginning to realise this. Sometimes, young men stop me in the street to thank me for opening their eyes. It is the most beautiful recognition of my work”.

by Lucia Capuzzi
A Journalist with “Avvenire”, an Italian national newpaper