THE SYSTEMATIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Not only in India but around the world women are abused, beaten, raped, tortured and killed. The outcry is still not loud enough. I will take the example of Mexico as a possible mirror of this infamous reality.

Sometime towards the end of the seventeenth century, penned up in a convent in the City of Mexico, an inspired nun wrote a poem accusing men of provoking women to commit the faults for which they blamed them. “O cuál es más de culpar,/ aunque cualquiera mal haga?” she asked with rhetorical savvy, “¿la que peca por la paga/ o el que paga por pecar?” [“Or which is more to be blamed/ though both have cause for chagrin:/ the woman who sins for money/ or the man who pays to sin?”] Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz unerringly identified the paradoxical relationship of men towards women as one of power. Her poem concluded: “Bien con muchas armas fundo/ que lidia vuestra arrogancia,/ pues en promesa e instancia/ juntáis diablo, carne y mundo.” [“I well know what powerful arms/ you wield in pressing for evil;/ your arrogance is allied/ with the world, the flesh, and the devil.”] In a patriarchal society, whoever lacks a penis is considered naturally inferior.

Octavio Paz, in his now classic dissection of Mexican society, El laberinto de la soledad, suggested that this paradigm is reflected in Mexican Spanish and that the verb chingar, with the sense of breaking or ripping apart has sexual connotations but it is not a synonym for the sexual act. “One may chingar a woman without actually possessing her,” Paz notes. “And when it does allude to the sexual act, violation or deception gives it a particular shading. The man who commits it never does so with the consent of the woman that is chingada. Chingar, then, is to do violence to another. The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction.” Paz takes the connotation the earliest awakenings of Mexican identity. “Chingada is a representation of the violated Mother,” he writes, “and it is valid to associate her with the Conquista, which was also a violation, not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women.” The symbol of this violation, according to Paz, is Doña Malinche, the mistress of Cortés, who served as translator in his encounters with the natives in a solid example of traduttore traditore. Paz notes that “It is true that she gave herself voluntarily to the conquistador, but he forgot her as soon as her usefulness was over.”

In Mexico, in the past few weeks, a young woman, Ingrid Escamilla, 25, was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled, and a 7-year-old girl, Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett, was abducted from school, her body later found wrapped in a plastic bag. The government’s response was negligible. Why are these atrocities still happening?

Our societies seem to conform themselves to a set of established prejudices that have taken form over the centuries to protect and foster the ambitions of certain groups in power : racism justified slavery, misogyny the debasement of women. Misogyny in its various incarnations defined the relationship of the European conquistadores with the land and with its people. The fifteenth and sixteenth century insisted that women were chattel, like slaves and cattle. Don Juan, in his first Mexican incarnation, Tirso de Molina’s homonymous play, merely wants to conquer the full range of women’s social status:. His list includes the aristocratic Isabella, the washerwoman Tisbea, the noble Donna Ana, the rustic Aminta. The catalogue recited by the hero’s servant, Leporello, in Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni is even longer. Women are things to be collected and chingadas, and then tossed away.

The history of misogyny runs side by side with the history of misogyny’s caricatures, from the moustachioed and bullish macho man to the kind-hearted prostitute he loves and then abandons. In time, every abomination and every infamy becomes a cliché or literary commonplace, and the misogynistic definition of the sexes quickly became part of Mexican popular culture, from the corridos of the mariachis to the conventions of the soap operas or culebrones. But the dilution of these attitudes in songs and dramas does not affect or prevent their enactment in everyday life. The statistics are terrifying. Officials say 3,142 women were murdered in Mexico during the first 10 months of 2019. Something has to be done.

Feminism has claimed a voice ever since Lysistrata launched women’s first protest movement, but ever since then not much has changed in depth in society’s gender balance. The rape of Philomela and Lucrecia entered the cultured conscience of the West, but in spite of our awareness today, 80% of the young girls and women trying to gain access into the United States are systematically raped: so much for American feminist power. Help will not come from that northern quarter where children are torn from the arms of their parents who brave bureaucratic interdictions trying to save them from social violence, and are thrown by the American authorities in concentration camps. Mexico has to change both its horizons and its vocabulary if it is to change its social mind-frame. Then perhaps there will be hope that some sort of equality might take root among its citizens against that patriarchal arrogance denounced by Sor Juana.

Alberto Manguel