People die from illnesses, accidents, heartbreak, gunshots, and natural causes. In addition to the causes that affect everyone, women also die from another “natural cause”: being a woman. This is not a “genetic illness”, it is a social engineering illness.
What explodes in the news are not specific events, they are not peaks on a graph, they are a constant. The scenario is repeated daily. Threats, screams, humiliation, rape, beatings, flaying, hanging and, often, the end.
The scary thing is that the killers are not monsters, they are “ordinary people”. They work, start families, walk the streets, sit next to us at work, and, with frightening frequency, live at home.
Femicide is the bottom step on a ladder of violence against women. It almost never starts with a punch, a gunshot, a knife or a fire. It starts with tone. In “shut up”, in “you are exaggerating”, in “no one says no to me”, in “she provoked me”. When this mechanism of power and control is repeated within the home, the child learns, the neighbor learns, the neighborhood learns, the city learns, society learns, and even women learn.
The brutality is such that sometimes the man does not kill because the woman is not dead. The violence seems to have become even more violent. Or maybe that was already the case, the difference is that now there are cameras, there is video, there are networks, there are female voices. We were outraged by the scenes and left in fear of the next chapters of this never-ending horror series. The horror is not only in the act, it is also in the normality.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu helps us understand the dynamic through what he calls symbolic violence. It does not need to break bones to break people, because it operates through language, through gestures, through what is accepted as “that’s how it is” and thus prepares the ground for concrete aggression.
Symbolic violence is intelligent: gentle, patient, subtle and therefore particularly effective. It enters through the cracks, contaminates the environment and becomes what philosophers call “doxa”, a well-entrenched belief that no one questions anymore. From then on, subordination begins to reproduce itself, and the intolerable becomes routine and socially accepted.
Even today, women are treated as territory – to be controlled, dominated, demarcated. Bourdieu would say: domination works better when we do not call domination domination. When he talks about “couple dynamics”. When he calls him a “strong genius”. When you call it “jealousy”. When you call it a “crime of passion”.
It is therefore not only a question of physical violence, it is a question of the materialization of an ancestral discourse. More than twenty centuries ago, Aristotle already defined woman as an “incomplete man”, and history takes care to adapt this idea to its time.
Each femicide is a stark reminder of our failure, the result of a chain of social omissions and institutional failures. Laws, no matter how strict, are not enough.
Symbolic violence settles in like air. And when it becomes air, everyone breathes it without realizing it. Until you run out of air.
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