Right now, there are two very popular series that try to warn us that old machismo is mutating into new forms. Adolescence, a global Netflix hit, tells the true story of a boy who stabbed a high school classmate, and School Stories, which airs an episode every Wednesday on 3Cat, documents the reality of Catalan classrooms with a special emphasis on the emergence of new intolerant discourses. Both are very good and revealing; however, precisely because they avoid falling into moralism and facile judgment, rather than investigating the intrinsic logic of this new machismo and how to combat it, they show it with a silent fascination that leaves you with more questions than answers.
What must be understood about the shift in the new right-wing discourses is that they are inspired by the identity-based emphasis and the logic of redistribution of the new leftist movements that preceded them. The old machismo described women as intellectually inferior, irrational, weak, perpetually underage beings. Therefore, male domination was seen as an inevitable result of natural competition. From that perspective, the feminist cause was socially pernicious because it interfered with the free market of meritocracy, granting privileges to women that put them in positions of power and responsibility for which they were ill-prepared.
On the other hand, the new machismo is based on victimhood and demands equality. Naturally, it all begins when it becomes clear that the theory of male superiority was an unsustainable deception. In fact, the winners and losers have completely reversed themselves in fields like academia, where, with the barriers lifted thanks to the feminist struggle, we see that women are increasingly outperforming men. Aware of this new reality, machismo has adapted with a complex twist. On the one hand, feminism is accused wholesale of not being a movement for equality between men and women, but rather a conspiracy that seeks to replace the old male domination with a new, equally unjust structure, simply with the sexual hierarchy altered. On the other hand, and this is what is genuinely new, a discourse is emerging that calls for collective measures to protect men from fierce competition with women in all areas.
The big problem is confusing the realm of economics with the realm of desire. This is clearly seen in a much-discussed scene fromAdolescence, in which adults begin asking the child killer the meaning of an emoji with the number 100 that the girl he killed had sent him to ridicule him. Well, this 100 refers to a very popular theory in the macho world that says that, according to statistics, especially those that analyze behavior on dating apps, 80% of women are only interested in the 20% of men considered most attractive, so that the remaining 80% of men have to compete for their rights with men, who are more generous in the breadth of their sexual preferences. This law, which has some empirical support, is used as a basis to portray women as a malevolent collective and men as victims, to blame women's liberation and to demand corrective measures. Michel Houellebecq put it well in a scathing and prophetic 1994 novel: "In a perfectly liberal economic system, some accumulate considerable fortunes; others wallow in unemployment and misery. In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some have a varied and exciting erotic life." The machismo that called for freedom now calls for protectionism. To add to the contradictions and paradoxes, it is often the same machismo that complains about positive discrimination in other areas of society.
No pedagogy can combat this new victimizing and redistributive logic, slyly applied to gender issues, if it doesn't teach us to radically separate the realm of desire from other social goods. Too often, the discourse that rightly criticizes the old machismo goes too far in presenting the erotic realm as a territory that, once freed from patriarchal tyranny, will become a paradise of mutual fulfillment and equality. But desire doesn't operate according to a logic of justice or equity, but rather through subjective preferences, fantasies, and arbitrary and unconscious structures that can never be regulated by egalitarian norms. And this applies equally to male, female, and non-binary desire. When you see confused and hurt adolescents, perhaps it's because the transition to adulthood demands an education that confronts us with this irreducibly frustrating and unequal aspect of the human condition and helps us navigate it with a certain irony and sportsmanship. The promise of a kind of egalitarianism applied to areas of life where it can not only never be fulfilled, but where its fulfillment would be downright dystopian, has opened a cultural void that should be plugged as quickly as possible if we don't want even darker alternative promises to creep in.
