One Man's Crusade Against Machismo in Latin America
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Take another look at the problems described: physical assault, illegal drug use, theft, robbery, murder, child neglect. These things have nothing to do with cultural norms and they have nothing to do with machismo either. These are crimes against the law and the human rights of the victims. These crimes can have any gender as the criminal or the victim. And they have any number of reasons from mental health to poverty and profit seeking, which again have nothing to do with social norms, toxic masculinity or any other PC concepts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/13ojmn/reklam_f%C3%...
Machismo in Latin America is a lot more toxic and hurts the men much more over there, they just don't see it.
In theory I guess it makes sense to try and curtail human nature for the benefit of society, but on a fundamental level I have a problem with tax payer money being used to run government pysops on their own civilian population to change behavior
Perhaps if you swapped the populations of Bogotá and Berlin you would find the new Berliners becoming more "chill" and the new Bogotans becoming more "hot-blooded."
“Bogotá has an oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) bordering on a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb). The average temperature is 14.5 °C (58 °F), varying from 6 to 19 °C (43 to 66 °F) on sunny days to 10 to 18 °C (50 to 64 °F) on rainy days. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogotá
Berlin is literally a furnace compared to this, with average daily maximums well above 30 °C in the summer.
But we should also investigate whether living in a city that has an accent in its name is predisposing people to violence? Maybe that’s why Bogotá, Medellín and Cancún are more violent than Berlin or London. Brb, I’m gonna look at the data…
Having grown up in this kind of environment (though not nearly as bad as some of the stories in this article), It definitely affected my ability to emote, though I only learned that after going to therapy for a few months.
Great article.
OwO
Your reaction is almost synonymous to this, mainly showing fear women have, statistics for women, etc. Regardless if perpetrators are primarily men, men tend to be victims far more often than women, and far more often than they are perpetrators. For almost every country. Yet the narrative never reveals this, and goes as far as to make it sound like men are predominantly perpetrators (which is a vastly different statement than 'perpetrators are predominantly men').
Even writers who recognize this will quickly dismiss any notion that the West is introducing other problems through the methods used. That statement of 'men need much more civilizing'? That happened, and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder. Western media is arrogant enough to denounce counterculture to boot.
Whether that be better than what is the current state in LA is irrelevant to those preoccupied with looking at the West alone. Doubly so since the situation is LA is generally irrelevant to them and won't ever affect them directly.
But not for the same things
I don’t see the point of saying “men get killed too” - the point is to stop the killing
> and now boys are walking around thinking they are the problem before they even had a chance to prove themselves while girls are told they can do everything, even get way with (sometimes literal) murder
Trying to give you the HN comment benefit of the doubt but that is a very broad generalization that can’t possibly apply to most boys or girls - sounds like BS to me
The man subject in the article is a self-proclaimed victim of toxic masculinity. He didn't die per-se but it doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand that many young men imprisoned for never being taught how to be civilized are as much victims of their circumstance as they are guilty for their behaviors wrought from it.
I think it was Bell Hooks who talked a lot about this, how men are also victims of patriarchy in general, and how overlooking this truth retards the healing progress
At the core of a violent act an individual acts in a way that harms another individual - be it theft, rape or murder. Could be heat of the moment, or cold blooded action. Either way someone gets hurt
In addition to enforcing consequences we should identify the causes and work to continue civilizing individuals
Same for the Bacha-bazi custom in Afghanistan ("a custom in Afghanistan involving child sexual abuse by older men of young adolescent males or boys, called dancing boys, often involving sexual slavery and child prostitution").
The proper way to evaluate cultural practices is by looking at what society they create. Western culture is by no means perfect, but as a whole package - it's the best there is. So yes, they would be better.
Sure - if we’re talking about Finland vs Iceland or something like that where people are 95% on the same page. But other cultures have the abusive practices you mention above - and worse. China used to have foot-binding. FGM is pretty common in Africa right now (no jokes about that in the latest Black Panther though).
Western culture already has driven fertility rates well below replacement. Alongside that we also have skyrocketing obesity rates, skyrocketing rates of mental illness and drug dependence/abuse, plummeting testosterone levels, the end of the Flynn Effect, governmental approval ratings approaching zero, and more. Our culture, in its current form, is not even remotely close to sustainable.
There has to be some meet in the middle between "Follow the ancient holy book, or die!" and "Let's hedonize ourselves out of existence." As both those extremes mostly feel like two opposite ends of a horse-shoe, to me.
Yes but it's clear it's not 'western culture' but 'industrial economy'. It's happening everywhere. Eg. Iranian TFR dropped off a cliff since the 80s.
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/466445/Fertility-at-below-r...
Kids used to be income generators, now they're a luxury.
And, like China, it worked too well. Their birth rate fertility rate dropped from above 6 to below 3 in less than a decade. But then it kept falling, to the point of unsustainability. They realized they'd made a huge mistake so they began efforts to try to reverse it. Yet, like China, that has generally been a complete failure.
This is one of the most insidious things about fertility rates. They're not terribly difficult to send low, even to extinction trajectory low. But getting them back up is something that nobody has yet managed to achieve.
Which apparently isn't all that old. And you know, which the Taliban hates. A lot of the evil things the Taliban did (and do!) were justified in outrage over sexual violence.
What’s white about it ?
These days we tend to talk about race and culture in a weird way, where we ascribe bad things to white Europeans, but pretend like aspects of white European culture we think are good (like attitudes on gender norms or sexuality) transcend culture and are universal truths. In a way, that's more condescending than just saying "Europeans have figured out how to do this particular thing better."
I think it's important to be honest. I'm a Bangladeshi who changes diapers and feeds the baby at night because I was raised around people of European descent. Men in my home country overwhelmingly do not do that.
Bangladesh was not an isolated cultural island, where did they import their current gender role attitudes from ?
the real problem of machismo spelled out in the article is not diapers or dishes, but violence against the rights of others
Can someone look at the enlightenment and say “white” ?
Nearly a millennium of rule by Islamic empires.
> Can someone look at the enlightenment and say “white” ?
Yes, and far more so than pretty much anything else commonly ascribed to “white people” these days.
> Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.
(other here https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin
Once, many years ago, there came an anthropologist to study a distant mountain village. They were an oddly nervous, twitchy people. If a twig snapped, they would throw themselves to the ground. At night, they went through elaborate rituals of barricading their doors, even though, to the anthropologist's marvel, theft and interpersonal violence was virtually unheard of among them. The anthropologist did not speak the language very well, in particular because in these villagers' dialect temporal clauses were especially odd. But he could get out of them that the reason for these customs was that in the distant past, the village had been plagued with man-eating tigers.
The anthropologist, being a compassionate man, thought long and hard about how he could help these people, make them less timid, since it was clear their customs came with a lot of stress and anguish, as well as ostracism of those deemed to be sloppy in maintaining the old anti-tiger customs. But before he could...
You see where this is going, right?
He was eaten by a tiger.
The lesson I want to suggest by this parable: people aren't stupid. They don't adopt harmful behaviours without some sort of reason. A situation that made the behavior make sense.
If the situation persists for a long time, it may stick to culture, and maybe hang around for a while even after the situation has gone.
If the situation persists for a really long time, maybe the behaviour even sticks to biology.
But that doesn't matter. The first step must still be to consider the present situation. Make sure the tigers are not still around.
You name child labour as an evil thing. That's a great example of something that could potentially be made even worse if you just tell people to stop doing that evil thing without doing anything about the reason people do the evil thing.
It's true that behaviours can reinforce themselves. "Machismo" could easily be a thing where you are forced to play that game because so many others play that game, and that we could all be better off if we managed to coordinate a break with those practices. I said customs can be sticky.
When I said make sure the tigers are gone, I meant just that. Maybe the tigers ARE gone, and this is just our process of unsticking our bad customs. I just don't want us to take the easy way of assuming we are inherently better than earlier generations/other cultures.
I see your point, and understand the inclination to find a generalizable principal for understanding complex social situations. But there kind of just isn't one, each has its own nuances.
And the article is also open that this "crusader against machismo" started his crusade when working for an NGO. It doesn't say which, but at the very least one agreeable to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I'd wager.
That foundation is not at all reluctant about pushing their peculiar cultural perspectives. In particular, they are infamous in certain circles for promoting the American custom of infant circumcision of boys, as a preventive measure against AIDS. The science in support for that is suspicious, to put it mildly (it's worse than mere cultural bias, too).
Does it really work, then, to teach male domestic abusers to change diapers? Was that sort of practical knowledge the thing they were lacking? I'm inclined to be suspicious - and also to be suspicious of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's arguments for it.