Every man is born of a woman

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I come from a family of nine women. I grew up with the image of women cooking and chasing children while men drank in groups. I remember my mother, at the end of Sunday barbecues, organizing the cooking while my father watched football. In the second, when each of them went to work, she was the “angry mother” and he was the “playful mother.” It was normal for me.

Just as it was normal for the boy to insult the girls as sluts divided between “family” and “chubby” and even attacks justified by “he drank too much”. The fact that women were called problematic and out of control was also completely normal. So I grew up thinking that I should be a marriageable woman. Pleasant. Editable. The kind who pretends to laugh at her husband’s sexist jokes. I only understood the word abuse when I saw, for the first time, the face of a hurt woman. When I read the story of Maria da Penha. When “Me Too” arrived in Brazil, friends began quietly recounting the abuse they had suffered at the hands of family members and loved ones.

I remember the first campaign on domestic violence which explained the different types of abuse: sexual, property, psychological. For many, this is boring feminist talk. For us, a lifetime. We just didn’t know the name. Because my generation still normalizes abuse. We read, listen, publish but often we are still there: repeating our mothers.

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Yes, we must include men. But how? I asked a straight friend. He responded: “You present yourself in a boring and angry way. We don’t want to listen. Women also destroy a man psychologically. It’s hypocrisy for you to present yourself as more fragile. If it’s bad, leave. It’s cowardice to use the cause to victimize you. That’s what ends feminism. They have the same rights, don’t they?”

While I was taking cutting and sewing lessons at school (yes! I studied at a nuns’ school), you were already stealing in dad’s car. Cowardice is starting the race with us in the back when you were born with training wheels on your feet. The beginning was never the same. If we don’t start the conversation by admitting that we are historically behind, we are faced with the obvious. And another: how can we spend years talking about the downfall of a player, analyzing angry replays and, faced with the death of women… say nothing? In Brazil today, silence is not neutrality: it is complicity. And I say more: EVERY MAN IS BORN OF A WOMAN!

Of course, I didn’t say any of that. I fought in my own head, as I have done so many times, trying not to fall into the category of annoying feminist or unhinged woman. I swear my friend is cool. He has just been created like all men: at the center of the world.