Manual ultravioleta: Feminismo para mirar el mundo

by Clara Serra

There is no such thing as gender violence. There is domestic violence.
Neither male chauvinism nor feminism. The world needs humanism.
Women have greater emotional intelligence.
Inclusive language is redundant/ungrammatical/ridiculous.
We have equal rights now. Why do we still need feminism?

We hear or read nonsense like this on a daily basis. In her book, Clara Serra does an excellent job debunking common myths (or, rather, flagrant lies) and doubts about feminism patiently, in an accessible language and with watertight logic. Ah, if only voters cared for logic. Or read books, for that matter.

Quite unlike the books I reviewed here last month, viz. Mala mujer and El Placer, this one has no illustrations at all, save the cover art. But what a treasure it is!

Manual ultravioleta: Feminismo para mirar el mundo

Introducción: La revolución del siglo XXI
This book it is not a neutral text.
1. La desigualdad no es cosa del pasado
   Even the most right-wing politicians would not deny that inequality between men and women existed for millennia. But that was in the past. The Constitution says everybody has equal rights. So what’s the problem?
2. La desigualdad no es cosa de países lejanos
   Likewise, we know that there is sex discrimination, somewhere there, in Africa or in the Gulf states, but not here.
3. La desigualdad no está a punto de acabar
   “Of course, in olden times the situation of women was not brilliant, but now? Why do you need to fight now? We’ve come a long way since the Dark Ages, you know.” This is the default stance of the society. Similar rhetoric was used back in the time when women’s suffrage was considered unnecessary and radical.
4. ¿Y cuándo comenzó todo esto?
   Most of written history tells us that patriarchal societies have been dominant form of social organisation. But patriarchy is a cultural institution, not an inevitable outcome of biological evolution.
5. Un poco de mitología griega
   This and the following one are probably the most entertaining chapters of the book. I’m sure from now on you will see Greek myths with very different eyes.
6. Las peligrosas madres solteras
   Curiously, the Greek goddesses could procreate without males and to give birth to both female and male children (so we can rule parthenogenesis out). This had to be stopped, thought Zeus.
7. La familia como intercambio de mujeres
   Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that throughout the history alliances were formed when women from one family married men from another. This, by the way, explains why the single mothers (and single women in general) were not to be tolerated, as discussed in the previous chapter.
8. La mujer como naturaleza
   Woman as Nature, or, at the very least, woman as a some sort of “intermediate step” between mankind and animals. Think about that next time somebody talks about “women’s intuition” or supposedly better connection of women with natural world. This is not a compliment.
9. Las idénticas
   In fictional worlds, most of which are created by men, the diversity is not just tolerated but actively promoted. How else would you differentiate between your (super)heroes? As long as they are male, of course. Sure enough, there is a female character present — just one. Why would you need more? Celia Amorós argues that while the men occupy the “space of equals”, women are consigned to the “space of identicals”, and therefore perfectly replaceables.
10. El control del cuerpo de las mujeres
    In any patriarchal system men are entitled to control women’s bodies. Think criminalisation of abortion and contraception, stigmatisation of any non-reproductive sexual activity, idealisation of virginity, FGM, female infanticide. Long ago and far away? Closer home: the Popular Party’s restrictive policies towards fertility treatment for single women and lesbians.
11. Un sistema jerárquico entre varones
    From ancient droit du seigneur to modern-day war atrocities such as mass rapes in Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, women’s bodies were treated as a part of (or extension of) the conquered territory. Rita Laura Segato, the anthropologist whose work inspired the song Un violador en tu camino, notes in her book La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez that violence against women is a language and the victims of rape, of torture, of femicide are the messages — to other males.
12. Caperucita Roja o la enseñanza del miedo
    The earlier versions of Little Red Riding Hood didn’t end well at all and were far less innocent than the Brothers Grimm’s one. The moral, however, didn’t change much. Whatever the Big Bad Wolf does, it’s the victim’s fault, as the mediatic treatment of Diana Quer case demonstrated. The right pretends not to understand the message “Sola o acompañada, sobria o borracha, quiero llegar a casa” (“Alone or accompanied, sober or drunk, I want to get home”).
13. La misoginia: las mujeres y el mal
    In her article Derecho al mal, Amelia Valcárcel argues that if in egalitarian society women should be able to do things (from writing books to ruling the country) as well as men do, they also should be granted the right to do all this as bad as men. The examples of Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May shall not rid us of hope that one day Britain, whatever remains of it, will have a decent female PM.
14. Eternas menores de edad
    Olympe de Gouges famously said, “Si la femme a le droit de monter sur l’échafaud, elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la tribune” (“If a woman has the right to climb the scaffold, she should equally have the right to take the rostrum”). However, the society treats women differently: adult enough to be responsible before the law but  underage in regard to exercising their citizen’s rights. In Western democracies this only started to change in the last century; in Spain, only after the death of Franco.
15. Lo visible y lo invisible
    Feminist economists such as María Ángeles Durán and Amaia Pérez Orozco came up with metaphor of iceberg to talk about the “visible”, for example, paid work, and “invisible”, for example, domestic labour. The patriarchal economy reproduces itself through politics: while women are busy with domestic chores, care about children, sick and elderly, men are legislating.
16. ¿Ni machismo ni feminismo?
    “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”, said Desmond Tutu. To repeat, like a parrot, “neither male chauvinism nor feminism” is to try to discredit feminism implying that it is nothing but “reverse machismo”. When Vox politicians claim that “the violence does not have gender”, they not only ignore the statistics, they deny that the problem even exist. Gender-blindness does not help those who suffer systematic abuse.

    En los parlamentos no faltan personas, faltan mujeres. La violencia machista no la sufren personas, la sufren mujeres, y el acoso callejero no viven las personas en abstracto, lo viven las mujeres de carne y hueso.

17. ¿Son las cuotas justas?
    To continue with the topic of the previous chapter: pretending to be gender-blind is to perpetuate the status quo.
18. El lenguaje es machista
    The androcentrism of our language simply reflects the androcentrism of our society. Moreover, it would be strange if the speakers of patriarchal society used inclusive language. As the times are changing, the language is changing too, much to the annoyance of linguistic purists (and the right, of course).
19. ¿La filosofía, la ciencia y el arte contra las mujeres?
    Or: what to do about the fact that most of philosophy, science and art are misogynist (and this is a fact). Shall we reject it all? Accept its misogyny as an “inevitable evil”? There is another way.
20. Los debates sobre #MeToo y la justicia patriarcal
    The cases of Juana Rivas or La Manada and, more recently, the Manresa case have demonstrated that the Spanish justice system remains deeply patriarchal.
21. ¿Pueden los hombres ser feministas?
    Women’s rights require the end of certain men’s privileges. That would do men a lot of good.