C/W: Sexual violence, murder.
Ni Una Menos is a women’s rights activist group that has advocated against physical, psychological, and patrimonial violence against women among other issues such as homophobia, transphobia, and racism against black and indigenous women. The march that built their momentum was their 8M (8th of May) march in 2016 that took place in major cities across Latin America, from Buenos Aires (the birthplace of the movement), to Santiago de Chile, to Guatemala City.
Five years on, why are they still organising protests?
What is femicide and why does it happen?
Femicide is the killing of women based on their gender, sexual violence is a marker for femicide, and it usually occurs between partners, family members, and exes. Latin America and the Caribbean still contained some of the most dangerous countries to be a woman. With Saint Lucia, Honduras, and El Salvador being the worst three countries in the world in terms of the rate at which femicide happens, until Turkey recently became the most dangerous. Countries like Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil also have a serious problem with femicide.
There are many causes for this, and many theories abound as to which reasons are most prevalent. From organised crime, to machista culture, the post-conflict normalisation of sexual violence, and the tendency of authorities to demean and mishandle investigations concerning violence against and the disappearances of women. All of these factors facilitate and reproduce gendered violence. But I would like to look at machismo: what it is, where does it fit into femicide, and why should we in the UK pay attention to it?
What is 'Machismo'?
Machismo is essentially the Spanish word for the soul of masculinity, the components of a true man. Much like Anglophonic notions of traditional masculinity, one of the main elements to conventional manliness is having the upper hand in terms of power relations. It is a world of dichotomies and adversaries between the masculine and the feminine: looking at someone rather than being looked at; being sexually dominant rather than submissive; inflicting violence and asserting power rather than receiving violence and being subordinate.
Of course, there is more than one code of masculinity that a man can follow, but this a very prevalent and harmful type of manhood that is exhibited in Latin America.
Fighting with male peers, dangerous behaviour like drinking or driving recklessly, and androcentric sex (exclusively surrounding male pleasure) with women, are the main stages in which machista culture is performed. You might ask where gay or asexual people, trans, and nonbinary people fit into this landscape. There isn’t much room for these types of nuances in the realm of constantly conflicting binaries, which often results in homophobic and transphobic violence.
Expressions like “you’re not a real man until you’ve had sex however many times", or “you’re not a real man until you can get sex whenever you want it". This translates to ‘taking sex’ rather than having sex, it is more about a callous, one-sided use of the female body which should be eternally dispensable to the man, rather than a mutual satisfaction between equal partners.
Violence against women is expected as a punishment when a woman does not comply with what her family or partners want. The objectification and dehumanisation of women is therefore necessary for machista validation, which is excruciatingly peer-based.
With this information, the link between machista culture and violence against women is clear. This is not just present among creepy guys in alleyways. Most of the perpetrators of femicide are the boyfriends, husbands, relatives, and exes of the victims.
Even more ominously, these chauvinistic attitudes towards women exist among the highest echelons of Latin American society. The Ecuadorian president, LenÃn Moreno, apologized in February for saying that women only accuse ugly men of workplace sexual harassment. The minimalisation, dismissal, and aggression towards women by political representatives further justifies and normalises gendered violence.
Why should we care?
Reading this far into the article, you may ask yourself why we in the United Kingdom should particularly care about femicide in countries that are thousands of miles away? What has any of this got to do with us?
Well, there are things we can learn from the current affairs of other countries. Latin America tends to be a bit of a mystery continent in the UK. We don’t learn about it in schools, we increasingly go without the tools to learn Spanish or Portuguese to access Latin American resources.
Latin America is often just stuck under the same dismissals as Africa and Asia: corrupt governments, violence, migration to some victimised Anglophonic country. But the UK does in fact have a relationship with Latinx countries, and our historical roles in their establishment and their political regimes have not always been the prettiest. But hey, this isn’t the first time we’ve swept British imperialism under the rug.
So, again, why bother with femicide?
Toxic masculinity works along very similar lines.
Women in the UK, much like in Latin America, are often not given the resources to comprehend what qualifies as harassment or assault. Unsolicited touching, workplace harassment, catcalling, contraceptive deception, and threats of sexual violence are all crimes that can be prosecuted. But, on both sides of the Atlantic, women are often unaware that what has regularly happened to them throughout their lives is a crime, and men often do not know that they have committed these crimes.
Although less so than in previous decades, conventional masculinity has been based on having physical, financial, and sexual control over women. Any pushback is often an indictment on a woman’s character rather than on the male perpetrator - women are often chastised as being duplicitous, manipulative, or attention-seeking if they speak out about their trauma regarding sexual or domestic violence. We can see from the situation in Latin America that the most extreme ramifications of this demeaning of women results in the death of women, with little to no consequence for the perpetrator.
It is essential that we listen to the many voices of Latin America and tear down this geographical wall that we have built over an entire continent. Toxic masculinity in Britain and Hispanic machismo are not so far apart, and awareness and consciousness on the subject is the start to becoming better allies, better friends, and better lovers to the women in our lives.
Sources:
Evelyn P. Stevens, ‘Machismo and Marianismo’, Society, vol. 10 (1973), pp. 57-63.
Yolanda Quiñones Mayo and Rosa Perla Resnick, ‘The Impact of Machismo on Hispanic Women’, Affilia, vol.13 issue 3 (1996), pp. 257-277.
Donald L. Mosher and Silvan S. Tomkins, ‘Scripting the macho man: Hypermasculine socialization and enculturation’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 25 issue 1 (1988), pp. 60-84.
Image from Pixbay by Nick D610