Of all Argentine politicians, Javier Milei is by far the most explicitly macho. Loud, combative, boastful and coarse-speaking, in public he acts like a caricature of the comic strip troglodyte who, for feminists, is an evil ogre who must be disciplined. Even so, the alpha male of national politics has not hesitated to cede a lot of power to his sister Karina, a woman who maneuvers in a very feminine way to isolate and then cancel her rivals, whether they are men like Santiago Caputo who refuse to subordinate themselves to her orders or other women, such as Vice President Victoria Villarruel or ex-girlfriends Fátima Florez and Yuyito González, who threaten to deprive her of the role of emotional support for her brother. By the way, there is no doubt that her influence is decidedly greater than that of the wives of other presidents with the alleged, and not at all anecdotal, exception of that of another very macho character, Juan Domingo Perón.
Those who, between truth and mockery, affirm that, in Argentina, Karina rules and lets her brother play with the macroeconomy, may be exaggerating, but it will not be by much. By common agreement, the sister – many say “sister” – was the main architect of the post-electoral government in which Diego Santilli occupies the place of Minister of the Interior that advisor Caputo had hoped to fill until the last moment, and Manuel Adorni replaced Guillermo Francos as chief of staff. It is legitimate to assume that, if it had not been for the fear of snubbing his sister and thus exposing himself to unbearable psychological stress, Javier would have acted differently. Good or bad, this is a factor that those interested in the vicissitudes of the libertarian president’s eventful management have to take into account.
Although Argentina has a reputation for being very sexist, here the social and political influence of the feminine mentality has been strikingly stronger than in almost all other countries with Western traditions. It is therefore reasonable to ask how much attitudes that were driven by Evita Perón, Isabelita and Cristina who, as women, privileged their personal emotions over ugly economic rationality contributed to the prolonged decline.
Today, in dozens of countries, men tend to be much more “right-wing” than women, who mostly favor the collectivist remedies proposed by the left, but for understandable reasons, few want to recognize that, since prehistoric times, men and women have always taken very different positions regarding the problems of the communities in which they live. There will be exceptions, since female leaders trained in societies long ruled by men, such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, were not known for their adherence to political criteria that their adversaries would have reviled as maternal, although, in their respective private lives, they served as traditional housewives.
On the other hand, the German Angela Merkel, who began her administration when the British and the Israeli had already distanced themselves from power, was so moved by the tears of a young Palestinian that, from one day to the next, she allowed more than a million people from the Middle East to enter, thus causing a potentially explosive situation that the current chancellor Friedrich Merz is trying to defuse. “Mama Merkel” also chose to close all nuclear plants; For reasons that appear to be linked to fear that nuclear activities will affect the unborn, women everywhere are much more likely than men to oppose the use of atomic energy.
According to the North American essayist Helen Andrews, much of what is happening politically and socially in her own country and in the rest of the Western world is due to what she calls “the great feminization”, the title of an article that was recently published in Compact that has motivated passionate debates in the United States. Andrews points out that, in addition to demoralizing many men who feel unfairly neglected and denigrated, the seemingly unstoppable advance of women in academic, legal and cultural institutions, especially in the journalistic media, in addition to the publishing companies that they already dominate, and in the world of work in which office tasks are increasingly important and less those that require muscular strength, is having negative consequences due to their proclivity to marginalize those who they believe violate the social rules they set. They do not usually tolerate the conflict that is natural for men and that, over time, makes material progress possible. The essayist describes the so-called “cancel culture” as something typically feminine and says that “everything we consider woke is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”
Indeed, freed from the home, women, with the help of laws intended to make illegal any attempt to thwart their aspirations, are putting an end to the until recently rarely questioned male supremacy. They are leading a revolution that, if consolidated, would have repercussions as profound, or more, than those based on political ideologies.
Although Andrews herself acknowledges that she has personally benefited from the social and cultural changes unleashed by the unconditional surrender of the “patriarchy” at the beginning of the current century – an event that opened the doors for a multitude of women to take over many spaces that for millennia had been reserved for men – she understands that the feminization of Western societies will make them much less dynamic. He expects that from now on they will be more conformist and therefore less willing to allow costly initiatives, such as those related to public and private space programs, which could be described as quixotic but which, in the long run, would give rise to positive innovations.
Yet despite her pessimism, Andrews overlooked the impact of the feminist revolution on the birth rate. The “empowerment” of women has brought it down to such an extent that countries like Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, Italy, Spain and dozens of others, including Argentina, risk being wiped off the map in the not-too-distant future. In other words, it is more than possible that the triumph of the feminist revolution is incompatible with the survival of the human race.
Be that as it may, at first glance Milei’s macho credentials look impeccable. He has angered local feminists by opposing ministries that were created for the purpose of consolidating the social gains they had already achieved because in their opinion they were discriminatory. He is a declared enemy of Wokism. He does not believe that “feminicide” is worse than “homicide” and, of course, he is contrary to progressive efforts to eliminate the sexism that is congenital to the Spanish language through the construction of the very strange and, for many, delusional “inclusive” dialect that has the approval of Kirchnerists fascinated by novel ideas coming from the hated American “empire.”
Still, while Milei gives the impression of being convinced that feminism is hostile to the highly competitive and meritocratic anarcho-capitalism of which he dreams, he does not seem able to resist the feminine wiles of his own sister Karina who have managed to reshape the government he formally heads.
It is a prize that Javier has awarded him for having bet that La Libertad Avanza would overcome Peronism and “paint the country purple” in the legislative elections two weeks ago, but it happens that virtually no one believes that that victory was due to the strategic genius of the first sister. The consensus is that the will of millions of people to ensure that the country did not fall again into the hands of the Kirchnerists had a much greater impact, a danger that, as Cristina knows very well, seemed imminent thanks to the disastrous result for the Mileist government of the Buenos Aires local elections. As for Karina’s contribution, there is every reason to suspect that, since it had a lot to do with the tribulations suffered by the milleistas in the months preceding the elections, it is feasible that, without her presence in power, LLA would have obtained even more votes than those it ended up obtaining.
In any case, because Argentina is an intrinsically caudillo-oriented nation, the fact that the president depends so much on his sister, whose opinions about the specific alternatives to the country, if she has any, remain a mystery, is a very significant detail. No matter how much Javier Milei is intellectually opposed to feminist theories, he feels constrained to adapt to the pretensions of Karina who, perhaps unintentionally, thinks and acts like a woman and does not hesitate to take advantage of the advantages thus assumed at a time when, for the first time since the world began, the barriers between the two sexes into which the human race is divided are being broken down.
