March 8th is coming again, and many women will once more take to the streets to denounce all that remains to be done to achieve equality, and, above all, to highlight the unbearable violence of all kinds that, once again, seems to be escalating against us. How distant that March 8th of 2018 seems, when girls, mothers, and grandmothers flooded the streets, and for a moment, we thought that the path toward true equality was finally unstoppable!

We talk a lot about the violence that occurs in the intimacy of relationships, but very little about desire, about what happens to us women in the murky waters of sexuality. Like any other human experience, sex, love, and eroticism are also learned; they don't arise instinctively, detached from culture. From the available representations in literature, in the audiovisual world, in the stories told about us, we know very well what men's desire is like, what it consists of, how it is expressed, and how far it can go. Or rather, we know the desire of men who feel entitled to display their size, to put on a show of strength not only to impress their potential romantic conquests but also to compete with other men like themselves, to demonstrate that they are bigger, more potent, and more powerful. The sexuality that dominates the collective imagination is, therefore, the sexuality of predators who experience conquest as a hunt. To avoid appearing weak and helpless before their male counterparts, they pursue, harass, dominate, and sometimes even domesticate women to the point of annihilation, turning them into trophies.

The most commercially successful platforms have increased their productions focused on elite military units and have normalized an aesthetic of order, strength, and discipline. One of the latest examples is the documentary series Pelayo: Beyond the Limit on Prime Video. The protagonist is Pelayo Gayol, a veteran inspector with the Spanish National Police's GEO special operations unit who joins real anti-drug trafficking missions in Colombia. We already met the character in another documentary series, GEO: Beyond the Limitwhere he trained and selected the Special Operations Group, pushing agents to their limits to transform them into superhumans. Pelayo fosters a testosterone-fueled emotional immersion in military discipline. He plunges us into a context of violence and tension while constructing a cheap, pseudo-intellectual discourse about his work.

Cara Dagget, in her article "Petromasculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire" (2018), defines the term petromasculinity as a form of masculinity that associates the use of and nostalgia for fossil fuels with traditional masculine identities, authoritarianism, climate change denial, and certain sociocultural power dynamics. We already knew of Trump's unbridled interest in oil, but the attack on Venezuela to end the Maduro regime has further confirmed it, and for that reason, I maintain that it fits perfectly with that definition of petromasculinity, which, in turn, is fueled by a very American model.

Giant, you have a giant heart / favorite creature / solar revolution / Giant, you have a giant heart / you make life tremble / small nuclear bomb. After six albums, Xiulaland, is a return to the origins, to the reason that made us meet, to the reasons why we do everything we do.

Masculinity is not a given derived from nature, but rather from the social models constructed at each stage, which attribute different characteristics to men and women based on the social needs of each era, and also, of course, on who has more power. As societies change, models of masculinity and femininity need to change because they become outdated, and their maintenance ends up harming everyone, but especially people of the gender that clings most to the past.

Change is scary. Uncertainty can be distressing. When the ground beneath us is shaky, our survival instinct drives us to seek firmness. And when we find it, we cling to it without question. The illusion of stability is comforting, especially when we are young and in the process of defining ourselves. What do you do if the gender stereotypes that were meant to guide you are in question and new identities are yet to be defined? Well, look for certainty in the most nostalgic versions of virility.

Today, the 8th, will be March 8th, and this week, on behalf of the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation, I moderated a round table on how gender inequality goes beyond the famous wage gap. Three examples: 74% of part-time jobs are held by women, and in 87% of cases, it is men who interrupt their professional careers to take care of their children. There is less research and therefore less data on the adverse effects of drugs on women than on men. And, on average, women spend eleven hours more per week than men on childcare, and another four hours on housework.

One of the first executive orders Trump signed on Inauguration Day was titled: “Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Returning Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” An analysis of the title should make us wonder why it is assumed that only women should be defended from such (and perverse) ideology. But what interests me is that a topic linked to feminism is so important that it ends up being part of the concerns of the first day of the government of a US president. Something is moving, and perhaps in a dangerous direction.