Gender in Spain and Italy

Here's a very good BBC article by Danny Wood contrasting Spain's and Italy's gender policies: Diverging paths on gender equality.

One quibble, though, with the phrase, “Spain - the land that coined the word "macho" -”. The Spanish word macho (from Latin masculus, masculine) has always meant a male animal, usually a mule. It's application to overbearing male humans seems to have started in Mexico, and has only in recent years become widespread in Spain. Its introduction is a sign of moral progress: if people earlier didn't have a specific word for this behavior, it was because they didn't see it as a problem.

Catching up on continuing issues

I'm in Madrid this week, again using the connection available to anyone at the Casa Encendida, where things have been -- well, if not exactly "encendidas" (burning), at least hopping, literally. A rock-rap group was performing, and the main hall was filled with people about a third my age, jumping up and down along with the band. It was fun to see such enthusiasm.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to give some thought to two persistent issues in Spain: violence against women, and the peculiarities of the housing crisis, or more accurately, crises (plural), because several different things are at work here.

I start from two assumptions, one modern and the other very ancient. The modern one, still resisted by theocrats and other believers in magic, is that "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." (Which I got from biologist D'Arcy Thompson via Daniel Dennett.) Like Charles Darwin and every other serious scientist since him, I am firmly convinced of this.

The older assumption is that everything is connected to everything else. The connections may be distractingly trivial (the butterfly's wing in one place and a traffic accident somewhere else, for example), but for large-scale social phenomena, probably useful.

Saying that women in Spain get beat up or killed by their partners because Spanish men are especially "machista" (an argument you sometimes hear) doesn't explain anything. Even if it were true, that is, if Spanish men were especially prone to such violence (which they aren't: check out the UN International Violence Against Women Survey), we'd have to ask, What made them that way? And in fact, about half the men involved aren't even Spanish but immigrants from as far away as Russia, or Bolivia, or Morocco, or the Ukraine. So how did THEY get that way?

Part of the answer is no doubt the stress on traditional family structures and expectations that occur in immigration. Great article on this: "No reconocí a mis hijos, ni ellos a mí" by J. J. Áznarez.

Casa Encendida is about to close down my computer (time's up), so I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks. More on this later. Hasta luego. I still owe you a comment on the housing problems, too.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

Madness seen from within

Bond, Alma H. Camille Claudel: A Novel. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2006.


"In my humble opinion, a woman who hasn't been made love to by a sculptor hasn't been made love to at all." (p. 119)

Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is remembered for her exquisite and emotionally disturbing sculptures, for her passionate 10-year love affair and complex professional relationship with Auguste Rodin, and the utter insanity of her last three decades, when she was persuaded that Rodin was out to destroy her and steal her work and ideas. This treatment of her intense, tortured life is very effectively written from her own, increasingly paranoid point of view. She is supposedly writing this account herself, in the last months of her life, on scraps of paper supplied her by a sympathetic nurse in the Montdevergues Asylum for the insane. The reader must accept the impossible premise that someone who has been so mad for so long could write so coherently, but will probably do so willingly; this is a literary device for understanding a brilliant, paranoid woman's world as she herself sees it. She is a classically unreliable narrator, but her paranoia did have some basis in fact. She clearly was a victim of stultifying anti-erotic and antifeminist attitudes, including those of her provincial mother and her super-Catholic reactionary brother, the writer Paul Claudel. And Rodin no doubt did steal some of her ideas, though on the whole he seems to have treated her better than most of the men she dealt with. Alma Bond's experience as a psychoanalyst and her deep familiarity with the Parisian artistic milieu of the period make the fantastic premise a tool for uncovering what feels like psychological truth. And it's very sexy, as was la petite Claudel.

For examples of her work, see Some Beautiful (If Tortured) Works
of Camille Claudel and these shots of L'age mûr (The Age of Maturity)

For more biographical details and chronology (with photos) in French, see Biographie de Camille Claudel. There you will find images of Oeuvres graphiques (sketches), Sculptures, Liens (links) and much else. There is also a musical about her.

Readers may also enjoy my story about another artist in Paris, exactly 10 years before the 17-year old Camille got there: Courbet and the Red Virgin.

At top: Photo of Camille as a young woman; her bust of Rodin

For women: Healing the cuts of the Bush administration

"From the moment Bush was sworn into office, his administration sacrificed international family planning to the farthest tip of the right wing of his party," writes Ellen Goodman in a scathing article in the Boston Globe. Read it to see what the costs to women have been, and what some women are doing about it.

Vagina Dialogue

For me, the most memorable scene in Pedro Almodóvar's wonderfully kooky, sentimental "Hable con ella" -- "Speak to Her" -- is the vagina. Not the real vagina of the comatose girl whom the nurse Benigno massages lovingly, but the huge, hoky inflated rubber vagina in the black-and-white silent movie (invented for this film), "El amante menguante" -- "The Shrinking Lover." The lover, shrunk down to the size of a man's middle finger, first clambers all over the lovely breasts of his sleeping girlfriend, then slips between her thighs to peer into the dark mysterious opening. After some nervous, excited probing, he strips off his skivvies and plunges in. Ah! And there he disappears! It was great fun to see the literalization of this common male fantasy -- I mean, guys, Almodóvar and I aren't the only ones to have such dreams, are we?

Unlike some of Almodóvar's other films -- "Mujeres al borde de la histeria," to cite one of the most hilarious -- "Speak to Me" is not really about women at all, but of the effects of women on men. In particular, it's about how two men -- Benigno and the Argentine travel writer, Marco -- can communicate with each other only through their relations to women who can't respond. It's almost the opposite of Eve Ensler's funny and effective concept in "Vagina Monologues," where the vaginas do the talking. Here, it is the men talking to each other through the vagina. Yes, Almodóvar is on to something here. We guys do often relate to each other in this indirect way. Maybe because we're too shy to talk to each other, we have to tell each other to "Speak to Her."