So war has come back into our lives. A deaf war, a little distant, but which, because of the parties involved, carries with it the threat of a general conflagration driven by nuclear fire.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Already, we hear the calls for the strong way, for intransigence and we are worried: have we alienated ourselves from our collective capacity to defend ourselves against aggression by educating a generation of more progressive men and endowed with new skills? emotional? Skills such as taking care of yourself, listening to others, respecting everyone’s boundaries.
For some, this question even has revanchist overtones and they call for a return to more conservative masculine values: aggressiveness, stoicism, sense of control. I obviously disagree. We have to go back to the origin of what we call gender studies. They meet a social need.
If, for thirty years, our Western societies have questioned the way of bringing up girls and boys, it is precisely because they are fed up with this war waged in our homes and in our streets, mainly by men. The figures for violence against women and children have hit us hard. They describe a violence which, if it is not only masculine, is carried out more by men, and often against men themselves. We systematically hold the upper hand – and by a lot! – with regard to imprisonment, homicide or even suicide.
The masculine stereotype was constructed by and for the war. However, collectively, we have made the choice to educate our boys differently and I challenge anyone to produce a psycho-social analysis proving that this evolution is not for everyone’s benefit!
Let’s go back to the war, which we are told will soon run out of arms – as if that were bad news. Indeed, we lack young people brought up in the virile myth of heroism and self-sacrifice on a battlefield. Let us remember that all historic collective brainwashing enterprises have praised fighting spirit and all-male bravery.
The sword is male, writes Jablonka in righteous men. The reverse is also true: the male is a sword. Heroism is the very mark of manhood, the horizon against which to measure our lives, when we are a man. Which is obviously a double scam. The first being, of course, the idea that the feminine cannot be brave. The second eludes what may be the other side of this bravery.
While the Ukrainians obviously arouse our admiration for their resilience and tenacity, we must also remember how heroism is sometimes exercised in war. Pierre Bourdieu, who remembered the engagement of the men of his generation in the colonial war in Algeria, reminds us of what virility can do when it is combined with obedience and submission.
He writes: “What is called courage is thus sometimes rooted in a form of cowardice: it suffices, to be convinced of this, to evoke all the situations where, in order to obtain acts such as killing, torturing or raping , the desire for domination, exploitation or oppression is based on the virile fear of excluding oneself from the world of men without weakness, of those who are sometimes called the tough because they are tough for their own suffering and above all for the suffering of others. »
History has shown us that you can do all kinds of crap in the name of courage.
Ukraine, up against the wall, is currently generating its “talents”, to use a managerial verbiage in vogue. She began to hold the men at the border, often young men who were completely unprepared to crawl through mud, sleep in wet laundry, or shoot a man at point-blank range, and who will make their classes quickly. They will go where the males are born, in fury and cries, in the cold belly of the filthy beast. And the country will have to manage for the next fifty years this army of veterans who will return to civilian life. Ukraine, like Russia, is already a loser.
It’s easy to rewrite history, but I can’t help but ask myself the question: what if we had fought to defend our convictions? Namely that it was necessary, even vital, to bring up boys differently. What if we had taken seriously the truckloads of studies on gender and gender socialization?
We would then have been absolutely frightened to hear the stories that had been coming to us for years from Russia.
The hatred of gays and sissies, the talk about women being “grabbed by the pussy”, the relentless promotion of the cult of the muscular body and testosterone, the infinite tolerance for hooliganism and radicalized male groups have is making a resounding comeback, and not just in Russia.
Alas, all these things have not deterred us from continuing to regard Russia as an honorable partner. Business as usual! A country which nevertheless armed its social body with millions of men ready to do battle.
We have not taken seriously the conviction that leads us. This threat, to consider it properly, should have worried us just as much as Mr. Putin’s declared imperialist tendencies or nuclear proliferation. It announced the war.