How to attract young people to feminism?

Polls have been indicating for some time now a disturbing social phenomenonThe shift of young men towards right-wing ideologies in both political and social aspects, and the consequent increase in the discrediting, ridicule, and rejection of feminism—both trends that Xavier Bosch discussed in an article from this newspaper.

I don't have enough training in sociology to venture an analysis of the rise of right-wing political positions in this group, but I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember, and the appearance of terms like feminaziAnd others as unpleasant as this one, makes me suffer, even more so after reading that 60% of these young people consider feminism "a problem".

Over 30 years ago, Amelia Valcárcel, one of the most important voices of the feminist movement during the Transition, pointed out that the feminist agenda included three basic notions: equipotency (equal social power), equivalence (equal social value), and equiphony (that women's voices have the same strength and credibility). It seems clear to me that none of these three parameters has been fully achieved, although there has been undeniable progress. Access to power, to real power, is still a long way off in politics and economics. The social value of women remains highly relative, and as for their voices, they are still not heard with true equality. I would add a fourth concept: equisecurity, the right to occupy public space with the same possibility of maintaining physical integrity as a man. A purely utopian parameter if we consider that 30% of these young people consider male violence, and I suppose femicides, to be a fabrication.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who thoroughly studied the mechanisms by which hierarchies are perpetuated in society, stated that the responsibility for this perpetuation lies with the family, the state, and the school. I have no doubt that the family, and often the women within it, perpetuates a patriarchal and androcentric hierarchy. State structures bear, at the very least, responsibility for the hypocrisy, for the chasm between words and actions. However, schools have been trying for over 40 years to educate students in values of equality and respect, and I don't believe they instill patriarchal values. Why, then, does their discourse fail and provoke rejection from its intended audience? I fear that one of the reasons is that it has become a bland, somewhat watered-down discourse, a bureaucratic discourse delivered from the (now diminished) symbolic power of teachers. And this discourse is neither credible nor appealing to adolescents, generating rejection and rebellion in them. To make matters worse, the school's discourse, fragile because it lacks the support of the family and society, must compete with the powerful, colorful and eye-catching discourse of the networks, which go in exactly the opposite direction.

What to do? The problem is so large and structural that I don't think it has a solution, but at least we can try to slow the trend a little. I think there are two things that must be done urgently. One would be to explain things clearly to boys and girls, without simplistic ordisclaimersWhat happens to women simply for being women, the forms of discrimination, violence, and contempt they suffer; explaining to them that this doesn't happen "to other women," that it happens to them and to the women they love. And for this to have any effect, it shouldn't be women doing it, or not only women: men must do it too. I think they are still too passive a link in this chain. A boy who thinks "feminism is a problem" will never listen to a woman, but perhaps he will to a man he respects. The value of example remains essential, but we are short on ethical examples. When Hannah Arendt speaks, in On violenceThe student revolts of the 1960s, he argues, have a very high symbolic and ethical value because they were revolts of privileged people willing to renounce their privileges or at least share them. No powerful group easily relinquishes its privileges, but if a part of that powerful group believes its privilege is ethically unjust, it must do something to remedy it. Another thing that seems urgent to me is explaining to these young people that patriarchy is not only bad for women, but that it is a corset that also limits and coerces them, imprisoning them in archaic roles that will make them unhappy. Perhaps in this way feminism will cease to be "a women's issue" and we will begin to reverse the data from these terrifying surveys.