Mariana Carbajal He always broke the mold. She was just a primary school student when her parents gave her the key to her house, in Lomas de Zamora. In that home, mother and father were feminist (unusual at that time) all washed the dishes and played football. At 15 years Carbajal had already learned to drive and before finishing high school he returned from a conurbano club at 10 at night on a train with a hockey stick that he considered “his protective shield”. He studied journalism and became a pioneer to address gender issues that were then invisible in the media. Today, with 55 years, this journalist and writer is a reference in gender issues.
Published a book on gender violence (“Mattered”) When almost nobody talked about the subject and “abortion in debate” several years before the creation of the Ni One less, movement of which is part. It was “La Mami” that more than a decade ago he asked the director of her daughter’s school to say “students” instead of using the male as generic. And she was the tennis player who was fighting for the “wives” category to change his name.
Last year published “Light, an intimate journey through menopause” and broke the mold again. Not only because he addressed a “taboo” theme, but because he took it out of the closet without romantizing or pathologizing it. The book is a guide to anticipate and accompany women who, like her, feel alone when crossing that stage of life. The 160 pages narrate consultations with specialists in gynecology/sexuality, give simple explanations to complex scientific issues and reproduce super personal dialogues with women. The result? An exquisite mix between journalism, literature, evidence -based medicine and “mines talk.”
News: You dive into hidden and uncomfortable land, such as the “heats” of menopause, the “mental mist”, the lack of libido … and does so in the first person! In a passage read: “I didn’t lubricate, I didn’t feel like catching, I felt down, with low self -esteem and did not recognize me in front of the mirror.” What motivated her to incorporate such a personal and intimate tone to the book?
Mariana Carbajal: It’s true, it’s my most intimate book. It is not that I was looking for how to tell it, it came out in the first person and speaking to a friend, because I had a drive to talk about menopause. I felt that the silence with which women arrived at this stage of life is another great injustice of patriarchy. It cannot be that all of us who arrive at this age (we are all going to go through this, it is not something elective …) do not have the necessary information to make decisions, to pass it in the best way and not suffer it.
News: Is it a silenced theme between women?
Carbajal: Yes. There are many prejudices and the truth is that still the word “menopausic” sounds like an insult, like a disqualification. I started listening to testimonies of women who were having a very bad time, who did not know what happened to them, who went to a doctor found no timely response. So, in front of that I said: “If I am proposing this conversation and I consider expanding it, I have to tell what is happening to me because that is an invitation to others also dare to speak.” If not, do we all keep looking for the side and changing the subject, which was what I felt that it was happening? The intimate tone of the book does not go through a matter of “spectacularization” of my life or to put sensationalism to read me. Not at all. I think it was an appropriate tone to make the conversation more robust.
News: It is strengthening. He launched a podcast on this subject (which is very listened to), and is also giving talks in a theater.
Carbajal: Yes. With Ingrid Beck we embarked on the adventure of making the “on” podcast (available in Spotify) and in March we made presentations in a theater (Picadero) We exhaust the tickets! Now we are going to do another on April 22. The proposal is to appropriate the word and that we begin to change the narrative on the subject. It is also an invitation to laugh at things that happen to us, to put humor, it is like taking our hands, hugging us, laughing together. We take out the drama because some things are dramatic.
News: He grew up in a feminist house at a time when that movement was not very common. What did he imply when he grew up?
Carbajal: With my sister we sometimes laughed and said jokingly: “How they shit our life with this feminism!” Because a little feminist being plants you in a place of some conflict in links with your peers, your partner and your friends, because you see things that other people do not see, and there they do not want He bothered, but the same told the teacher, “Why don’t they put a scientist or a doctor?” And there is always someone who tells you: “You only see those things …” When one puts what we call the “violet lenses”, you can’t see certain things. And when you start seeing – even more being communicator – a try to transmit it too. That is why I also give workshops and talks.
News: How do you see men today? Do you think they find it hard to interact with empowered women?
Carbajal: I don’t know … I don’t go with a “feminist” measuring the guys (laughs), but I think there is good will. I cross with attentive men, who can reflect on history, on privileges, on the place where society placed them (or have been located). The possibility of dialogue, reflection is good. I don’t think I have “the truth”; I think it is good to open the conversations. Then I say that we are not afraid of feminist. It seems that we are taking exam. No, relax.
News: What would you say to those who describe feminist women “as” feminazis “?
Carbajal: It is very functional to the growth of ultra -right. They want to stigmatize and have taken feminisms as one of their great targets of the “cultural battle.” They attack us for the famous “gender ideology”, which is a stigmatizing way to name everything that has been the transformations of expanding rights for women and diversities of the last decades. Putting into a place of extremism aims to disqualify our word. It is very functional to the retreat in rights.
News: Some sectors think “their hand is going” or “five villages were passed.” What do you think of those expressions?
Carbajal: When women do not have access to decide on their own body and are forced to pregnancies that do not want to continue, “five villages were passed.” Imagine if a guy will be forced to carry a pregnancy and the raising of a child throughout life, unintentionally … nobody puts in that place, in that skin. Would they tell you that “five villages were passed” to women who at the beginning of the last century fighting the female vote and threw bombs to make noise to attract attention? Why don’t they say that with retirees or corruption five villages were passed? It is very easy to attack feminisms because today we are like the scapegoat of failures that have to do with other causes.
News: Do you think that Milei – beyond threats – will encourage to go against the Law of Legal and Free Abortion?
Carbajal: I imagine that it will first measure, because for society today it is a right that has enough endorsement. I suppose that as soon as I have the opportunity and see that it may be possible to eliminate it, it will put it at stake, but today I do not think it is the context. What he has already done is not to buy more supplies from the national level to guarantee abortion with medicines in the provinces. What is happening today in health is atrocious.
News: It has been writing difficult life stories for decades. Which of them marked it?
Carbajal: They have been so many … (think and make a prolonged silence). In my beginnings in journalism I had to cover a news in a popular neighborhood. I went to a house where there was no light and I was with a mother who had to make her son nebulizations due to Broncoospasm problems and tried to give her steam with a candle. In that image I saw the inequality, I materialized it. I clearly saw the despair of wanting to guarantee the best for a child and that the conditions do not allow it. Some years later I was a mother and I had to intern my son for Broncoospasmos. I had a prepaid, I got bed in a private sanatorium. At one point I had to go looking for a clothes, I got to the corner and my tears fell, thinking that I had had the opportunity … in that feeling and thinking “what a privilege I have”, I came as for reflecting the image of that mother with the candle. I never took it out of my head.
By Mariana Comolli
