About Equality

I wrote an article for the Slovenian newspaper Primorski dnevnik about a topic that is very dear to me. This is the English version.

"Imagine if this happened to your partner, sister, mother, or daughter."

But what if it happens to a person who is none of these?

It’s been said many times: the patriarchal society not only harms women, but for many reasons, it also harms men. One of these reasons is the model of performativity, according to which the man feels obliged to compete in areas such as work and social position, money, and political power. It damages him due to the idea that the man should not show his emotions, sensitivity, and weaknesses. The research platform Our World in Data shows that there is a higher suicide rate among men than women, and the above-mentioned concepts do not help. The Italian National Institute of Statistics, Istat, indicates that in courts, children are rarely assigned to their fathers. Again, we must thank the patriarchal model, according to which women are relegated to the home to take care of children and housework.

The patriarchal model must be dismantled, although it is unfortunate that in order to convince everyone we have to prove that it is not suitable for neither women nor men. The mere fact that it makes half the population weak and disadvantaged is not enough. But if reiterating this concept can help, then let's do it a million times.

The concepts of equality and equivalence should be taught from the early years of life. In recent years, the situation has improved and the society we live in is increasingly aware. However, I believe we should talk about it much more.

The problem is widespread, both among young people and adults, from work offices to Twitch channels (a popular video live-streaming service).

In Italy, from January this year to the time of writing this article, eighty-one women have died at the hands of their (ex) partners or men close to them. We can see now falling the convenient cliché: “A woman’s worst enemy is often the woman herself”. No. Women are not afraid of being raped or killed by other women nor by monsters, ogres, wolf packs, or other semi-fantastic creatures. Women are afraid of being raped or killed by men. In this regard, the aforementioned Istat states: “The most serious forms of violence are exercised by partners, relatives or friends”.

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,” said writer Margaret Atwood.

Of course, we know very well that not all men rape or kill – far from that. However, it is undeniable that most of these actions are performed by men. Each one of us is part of the society we live in, and every single person is responsible for their part, even if small. Hence, based on the culture we live in, questions like these arise: when a woman is faced with a stranger, how is she to know which category he belongs to? How is she to know whether she’s at risk of being raped or killed when she goes out with her friends, or when she comes home in the dark, or when she goes for a run or for a walk in the park? How is she to know if catcalling and street harassment will be limited to the painful feeling of being dominated, or if it will escalate into a much worse situation?

However, the fact that women are often not allies is true. Take the Italian President Giorgia Meloni as an example, when after a brutal group rape occurred in Palermo, Italy, and after the subsequent words of her partner, the President stated that women should keep their eyes open and their heads on their shoulders. Isn't it the rapist who must keep his genitals inside his pants?

We demand awareness of the real social conditions.

Feminism is not the other side of the coin of patriarchy; feminists don't want to overturn the system and make it matriarchal. Real feminism demands nothing more than equality and, as the poet Barbara Korun expressed with beautiful words, the preciousness of existence regardless of the gender, as those who practice it are human beings. Feminism is based on the basic assumption that a woman is a person, as Virginia Woolf wrote. It is that simple.

A friend once asked me if I believed the world would be a better place if women had led it instead of men in the past. This is a viewpoint I’d never considered before; but I’m strongly convinced that we’d be living in a more advanced world if the entire population, not just half of it, had worked on it and injected their ideas into it.

Hence, dear reader, I’m not asking you to empathize with the woman's cause because she could be your partner, sister, mother, or daughter. I’m asking you to do so because a woman is a person, a human being – just like you who are reading this.