A few days ago, the writer Marina Perezagua published a column in El País to which I have returned several times: Let love break my daughter’s soul, he titled it. He was talking about how we have been educated in submission to the point of -some- not noticing it. It is the tamers of wild animals who call “breaking the soul” the process by which the beasts are “tamed” and subdued.
Most of us humans are in the project of being educated in submission. And yet, not by chance, I think, the examples that Marina Perezagua cited were those of a female orangutan in the Vienna Zoo and of herself, both with their babies, she says, in their arms barely separated by glass. The ape mother approached as if to proudly show her offspring. She was going to fare worse in all probability.
If the platform hooked me, it was because of the ending in rebellion of the human mother, by Marina: “My daughter still does not understand, but I pronounce for her outcast, insurrectionist, disobedient. I spit wine at the orders and wars of my boss. (…) I will try to make love the only thing that breaks your soul”. Until that we assume. They also break without a doubt, but, in general, less. Recomposes sooner, perhaps. It usually resets in most cases.
The Ministry of Equality directed by Irene Montero has carried out what is known as Law of ‘only yes is yes’ (Law of Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom) that radically changes the concept of judging sexual violence. Consent becomes reinforced and essential and the figure of abuse disappears, which is changed to aggression. In recent years, this type of crime has intensified at the rate that machismo and ultras ideologies did. Gang rapes and some scandalous sentences showed the compelling need to act.
Irene Montero is systematically attacked. Media crime exposed her even with the ultrasounds of her pregnancy in a photo stolen by any of these media hitmen, and the almost daily attacks on networks and publications have not stopped. She seems to be Enemy number 1 of machismo in its various forms and of certain sectors of feminism. She never backs down, she is not a product of submission training.
Forcing a woman to have sexual relations without her consent, against her will, is always an act of violence that seeks her submission, subordination. Raw, brutal, selfish sex. Women’s objectification, discharge deposit. The long judicial history of the sentences that -even when the crime was typified- came to exonerate six types that they attacked, for example, a girl in Park Güell in Barcelona – a case that I included in a Weekly Report on TVE – because she did not resist enough. “How was I going to do it?” He said. Group violence or aggression will be aggravating. And the same, chemical submission or spreading sexual videos without authorization. There were cases like that of Verónica, from IVECO, which ended with the victim’s suicide. The law includes a crime of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. PP and Vox voted against.
With notable particular exceptions, it is true that they educate citizens in submission, compliance, even those who believe they reverse the role and dominate. They are prisoners of customs that bind them to the silence that obeys and swallows. They give this society presumed security in exchange for taking away its freedom, and they even grip it even more with cuts of all kinds that subject it to a regulated existence, in the mirage that they are free to choose. Every day.
There is no worse tyrant than the converted servant. The macho involution grows all over the world. Try clipping women’s wings from developed North America to cultures where women are worth less than a cow. And they can be killed for refusing a marriage of convenience. For the convenience of the would-be husband and the victim’s father. Spain’s rights law is an important achievement, just as same-sex marriage was in its day. New York Times has highlighted the approval of the Spanish law that comprehensively protects victims.
Of course, the troglodyte right has released its aberrations in Congress, to which the law has had to return due to a maneuver by the PP in the Senate. When you hear a woman made and very to the right, flesh and blood, not a robot, linking this law with an alleged male genital mutilation, you think that specimens very damaged in their criteria have entered the Spanish Parliament. Today’s society is being infected by these tremendous outbursts.
Educated in submission, then, it still has more merit to stand up and be free and autonomous. More and more women in the world, even in the countries where they are most persecuted for being women, grow in the dignity of being and not abide by atavistic norms. A very different life would be if the social majority freed itself from the chains that are not, that can be undone in all the fields that grip us. Among them, not supporting the violence of another’s desire, without desire. Today’s daughters -and hopefully their sons- learn rebellion, questioning, independence, self-sufficiency… and respect, for themselves and for others. Let it be what strengthens the soul in case it breaks for a while – better not – for love and had to learn to love again.
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