MEN AND WOMEN (by Elvira Lindo)

  Drawing by Robert Crumb, a must-have indeed (but I didn'd dare show a naughtier one. Sorry )

Sometimes, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a boy. Not out of penis envy, but just to be treated as boys were treated. I envied their liberty, the less rigid norms that applied to them, their freedom from domestic chores, the indulgence with which mothers viewed their defects. Later I discovered
that what I wanted was to have the same rights, and to be strengthened with the same degree of self-esteem.


There are children who have an innate talent for mathematics, or for sports; I quickly developed an implacable sense of equality and justice: I had no tolerance for being cold-shouldered. And here I am. I don’t want to be treated with the paternalism that infantilizes women until they collapse of old age, nor with the disdain that female public figures sometimes have to bear. Just as I felt uncomfortable in my girl’s role, there were boys for whom the degree of manhood demanded of them was too great. These men have welcomed feminism. They are men who listen to women, and detest the male complicity of hard-boiled laddie talk. They and we, who never liked the segregated world of our childhood (girls on one side, boys on the other)
are enjoying this other world where complicity is possible between the sexes.


I have read, of course, the now famous article by Enrique Lynch published last month in EL PAÍS, which
was unpleasing to many women readers, who seemed to think that something ought to be done to shut this
man up. The most striking thing about the article was the way it mixed sosensitive a matter as male violence (a crime) with certain misogynous habits that women have to put up with on a daily basis. But there is something barely apparent in Lynch’s article that stood out in the indignant letters from readers: the acceptance of a world dividein two. On this side we the women; on that side they the men. We are the innocent, they the guilty. Or, inversely, women are out for feminist revenge, and men are the victims of
this threatening wave. I refuse to accept these rules of the game, among others things because they do not reflect reality. Most of the men I know detest violence; most men have never struck a woman; many
young men have never harassed a girlfriend; men who rape their daughters are a social abnormality. So why not include male rejection of these things alongside our own? Why not play on the same team?


All this is on account of a poster I saw lately for a campaign against gender violence, with the slogan, “no
woman will be less than me.” I am seldom satisfied with the government’s campaigns on social matters.
First I am tired of seeing the same faces of famous people from one campaign to the next. Nor do the slogans sound quite right. They are not subtle, when not all the dominance is always on the male side in the lives of couples, and any general statement about them all would have to be very subtle indeed.
I like to think that men, the sort who were never happy in the role of little man of the house that their mothers gave them, enjoy having women walking by their side. My dear Chekhov, so unjustly accused of misogyny
(how blind the critics can be) wrote to his brother: “Remember, it was despotism and lies that ruined our mother’s youth. The same despotism so mutilated our childhood, that it is sickly and fearful to even think of it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt those times when father made a fuss at dinner
because the soup was too salty, and shouted at mother that she was an idiot. There is just no way that father
can beg forgiveness now for all that.” He wrote this more than a century ago: even then, there were men who were on our side.

 EL PAÍS (ENGLISH EDITION) December 19, 2009