Violence against women, at the roots of gender hatred

Vviolence against women. Why do men come to hate women? Because she can’t find respite the angry fury of males still incapable of assimilating women’s freedom to exist independently of them? Where do those male resistances to change form which, bypassing individual stories, compose a more or less collective hostility which – of course, with different intensities – still pits men against women?

Today’s numbers International day against violence against womenthey say that the black hole of violence is in the family: 103 women killed in Italy since the beginning of the year, of which 82 in the family or within a romantic relationship (report from the Ministry of the Interior). The data on mistreatment are also serious: 75 percent of persecutory acts and 82 percent of mistreatment against family members or cohabitants concern a woman, as well as 92 percent of sexual violence, which is on the increase. Why all this? With four experts we will trace a thread that will lead us to the deep and often unconsidered roots of gender violence.

Violence against women: the circuits of survival

It must certainly be dispelled that there is a disposition towards aggression implicit in the male nature, linked to the hormonal structure, to testosterone in the first place. Let us follow, then, the explanation of Professor Gianvito Martino, professor of Biology and Pro Rector for Research and Third Mission of the San Raffaele University and Scientific Director of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, as well as author of the essay In an identity crisis, against nature or against nature? (Mondadori University). «In order to evolve, living beings, including humans, must inevitably maintain efficiency and use the so-called survival circuits, innate biological systems considered fundamental to ensure the continuation of the species. These circuits support our ability to defend ourselves from attackers, the need to feed ourselves and prepare us for reproduction.

From this it can be deduced that we are not biologically predisposed to violence: biology, however, tells us that in an environment perceived as dangerous the human being instinctively activates a defense reaction, which may consist of attacking or fleeing. What determines one or the other choice cannot be attributed to the genetic structure, but rather to the environmental/cultural context. Well, men’s attack on women is the cultural distortion of a primordial need, defense, precisely: it is the implementation of a cultural scheme that legitimizes male aggression as a response to a woman who puts her order at risk. Also because, upon closer inspection, nature favors and biologically protects the female, for the obvious reason that she generates offspring and, therefore, guarantees evolution.”

It’s not biology, but culture

Martino explains that male dominance over women is a product of the environment, especially of a cultural type «which has mostly established itself in the last ten thousand years of our evolution as human beings, starting from when, after having been wandering hunters, human beings invented agriculture and began to live in communities. By domesticating animals, homo sapiens the farmer-gatherer understood how intercourse was fundamental for reproduction, and therefore the males of the community, who had the task of procuring resources and feeding their offspring, they understood that by sexually controlling the female they could limit the number of children to feed. From then on, man begins to exercise a form of sexual dominance over woman which in the following millennia is strengthened and handed down by habit, by stereotype, a sort of community rule, unwritten, over time tolerated if not accepted. It goes without saying that this dominance has gradually degenerated into even violent forms of control, an aberrant modus vivendi capable of poisoning civil coexistence for millennia.”

Violence against women, the certainty of power crumbles

In short, it is in the rigid and stereotyped division of roles and in the attribution of roles of power to the male that the roots of violence can be sought. «Studies tell us that the more a society is hierarchically structured and with women in a subordinate position, the more male violence occurs; on the contrary, as women’s rights grow – emancipation, work, autonomy, power, equality – gender conflict decreases» explains Chiara Volpato, senior professor of Social Psychology at the Bicocca University of Milan and author of Psychosociology of chauvinism (The third). «It is now clear that violence against women arises from a double motivation: protecting men’s power first, male identity second.

The violence of men is unleashed, in fact, when the certainty of acquired power crumbles, when the roles once rigidly defined in favor of one and against the other weaken or diversify and when this loss of ground triggers the second spring : those who have lost positions feel that they have lost the advantages inherent in power, but also their identity role, their social image, the sense of their being in the world. Today we are experiencing a moment marked by these phenomena, where an obsolete machismo ferociously tries to deal with women who no longer follow its rules».

The breakdowns of the patriarchal family

After that, if it is true that it is in the family or in love relationships that women impact with the blindest violence, it is how the patriarchal family has been built over time that we can look at to understand. «According to much of the historical research of the last forty years, men’s violence against women is common where the patriarchal family has taken rootalso thanks to various legal institutions which have legitimized this violence: this is the case, for example, of the honor crime, abolished only in 1981, or the so-called ius corrigendi” he explains Laura Schettini, professor of women’s and gender history and Contemporary History at the University of Padua and co-author of Violence against women in history (Viella).

«The ius corrigendi gave man the power to correct, even using violence, the behavior of his wife and children: for some centuries there was discussion about what the limit of this power was, finally recognizing that it could be exercised until it produced serious injury or illness. The Supreme Court eliminated this rule only in 1956. Unfortunately, legal systems have often constructed frameworks of legitimacy for men’s violence against women, even when they did not explicitly legitimize it, starting from an idea of ​​citizenship that excluded women from public life, depriving them of subjectivity and reaffirming their complete subordination to male. It happened in ancient Greece, as well as at the constitution of the Kingdom of Italy, when the first Civil Code established the patriarchal family and with it the formal submission of women to the authority of the head of the family, the exclusion of authority over children, the authorization her husband’s notary in case she wanted to open a shop, rent a place or even have to appear in court. But the removal of rules pervaded by discrimination, if not actually explicit violence, it has not removed the cultural legacy that generated them and which, indeed, continues today to legitimize mistreatment, persecution and violence.”

From Aristotle to Hegel, passing through San Paolo

After all, philosophy and religions themselves, from Aristotle to Hegel via Saint Paul, have devalued women, degrading them to a position of inferiority. From the reflections of Silvia Romani, who is a professor of classical mythology and religions of the classical world at the University of Milan and author of Sappho, the girl from Lesbos (Einaudi), emerges very well as even the myths of the classical world already contained the plots of gender violence in the terms we know today: the contemporaneity of the experiences of the raped girls which is narrated is surprising and which coincides in a truly astonishing way with the stories of today’s girl-victims. «In myths» says Romani «women react to violence with a sense of guilt, as if they were responsible for it, and with the profound shame of seeing their bodies exposed and violated. It must certainly be considered that the literature of the ancients, apart from the one extraordinary exception of Sapphois written by men, which means that even the treatment of violence and what women can experience is mediated by male thought.

The body of women

The most specific and famous example is the Rape of the Sabine Women. As Titus Livy tells us, once Rome was founded, Romulus realized that the scarcity of women could jeopardize its expansion, so he organized a large religious festival to which he invited the neighboring peoples and during which he kidnapped the women and raped them. When the fathers and brothers march against the Romans to free them, it is the women themselves, who feel they cannot react, who stop them: they say they are now married to their tormentors, they do not want – they announce – their body to become an object of contention and start a war. For the ancients, the rape of a woman was, therefore, the positive event that made a civilization flourish». Some myths, then, offer an organic explanation of why it is women, and not men, who suffer violence.

«In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, it tells of the beautiful young Cenide who, while walking on the beach, is noticed by Poseidon, who falls in love with her and rapes her. The experience is so wonderful for the god that he is willing to grant the girl’s every wish and invites her to choose one. I never want to suffer such violence again, she replies, and while she says these words she is already changing her voice and becoming a man, very strong, invincible, impenetrable by spears. The interesting aspect, in this case, is that the only way devised by the myth to making a woman’s body no longer violable is transforming it into the body of a man».

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