Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Lthe longing for freedom of many peoples passes today through the rebellion of women. This is the case in Iran, Afghanistan, India, in many countries where many civil rights, not just women, are brutally denied.
Yet it is the courage of women that emerges, because men, even if oppressed by a tyrant, become oppressors when it is necessary to maintain the patriarchal status quo that has been perpetuated for centuries in their countries.
Mind it, only young men take to the streets to support women’s protests.
Yet, a few nights ago, a friend of mine, whose daughter is about to have a baby in Italy by a man of Muslim faith, pointed out to me that as we grow up, that solidarity tends to fail.
It is as if, in order to definitively enter the world of adults, young men accept its rulesforgetting to have thought that that set of unwritten norms are anachronistic and deeply unjust.
Failure to integrate does not help: feeling rejected by a free Western world that (often only in words) condemns the patriarchal rules pushes us to “go home”, to our own traditions, to our own reassuring patterns.
Then there is a “third way”, a “fictional Middle Eastern model”which is followed in countries such as the United Arab Emirates or Turkey, albeit with different nuances.
It’s a sneaky way, because externally it conveys an idea of freedom and gender equality, but in reality it preserves the discriminatory scheme intact.
I have already talked about here another time about Turkish fiction that is popular in Italy: the stories seem the same as ours, women dress western, leave the house, drive, love and betray in the same way. But always staying one step behind menfathers, brothers and husbands, of whom they are ultimately the toy, the prey, the trophy.
You will never see any kisses or embraces in these fiction because the body and intimacy of women do not belong to them but are exclusively available to those who take them over by the force of the law or by the law of the strongest.
Like the body of the young Pakistani girl Samàn, which her relatives gave up only on condition that they consign it to death.
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