Ignacio, Claudio, Paul, Gera RDO, Ismael, Bartolomé, Matias, Tadeo, Thomas, Simon, John, Alberto and Maruan have different ages and cultural levels. They include entrepreneurs, inmates, professors, writers, filmmakers. They shared their stories, but they asked to hide their identity.
The Mexican author Lydia Cacho (1963) chose them a name and wrote ‘#ELLOSHABLAN. Testimonies of men, the relationship with their parents, machismo and violence”.
With extensive experience as a journalist committed to human rights, Cacho has researched and written about the abuse and sexual exploitation of children in his books “Slaves of power” and “The demons of eden”. Such complaints put his life at risk. For 12 years she was arrested and tortured to silence his work.
After decades of feminist thinking, he decided that it was time to listen to the men, who in “#ELLOSHABLAN” naked “the emotional scars that left them the education to become real men”.
Revealing testimonies
Ignacio when he speaks of his father says: “Sor hand was a fist”,”andnrojecia my skin until it hurt”.
“Began to secretly hate my mother for having me not protected the rabid anguish of his spouse”.
Claudio: “saw it blacken in front of my mother, who developed a stoic silence before the constant humiliation. something inside me admired him with franco azoro“.” The way they hurt us was to cross over to our side without looking at us…”
Paul: “Would have 10 years when I saw my father with a man”. “I think that my mother knew it. I knew that the families have agreed to marry them, but men liked him.”
Gerardo: “I knew what it meant to be real man the first time I saw my father beat my mother for disobeying it”.
“I was always glued to their skirts and to him quick to anger him. said I was going to turn into a weak, feminine“.”
Ismael: “perhaps had as nine years when I went by mistake in the room of my parents”. “My dad had it tied up with a thick rope hung from a beam”.
Bartholomew: “I was going to my sister’s bed and abused her. “Andor trying to stop him and he took me as a sheep to the back, to tie me to my bed and cover my mouth”.
John: “do the most important thing left me my dad’s child? As for take me heart of chicken, do you think that I was going to survive here in American prison with feelings? “.”
the testimony of John, who is imprisoned for sexually exploited women and girls, impacts to thank his father the physical punishment, because they removed “the chicken heart”.
That sentence left me so impressed as you and so many people that have read the book.
And he dares to say it in a very graphic and almost metaphorical way, but men of all socioeconomic levels say the same thing: my father was cruel, my father gave me blows me locked up or ignored me or let me speak, but he did it for my sake.
That we learn in childhood are projected in our way of life policy and citizenship.
When a ruler or a police officer makes us damage, we return to that image of the paternal in that we justify such violence. Millions of men in the world are subjected to tyrants and dictators.
What is the origin of this invitation that you men to enter their emotional memory of childhood and see who also were victims?
Women have done the work of tribe, socialize the emotional experience of the damage that has led us to the machismo. Some men have done so individually, but not in a collective way. I was wondering why don’t they dare?
How it operates the fear in children, and then at the men, to model them?
I am agree with something that the anthropologist Margaret Mead studied from his first works and the human need to belong to the tribe. The fear of exclusion, which implies death, famine, homelessness in our primitive memory.
They feel that if they are expelled from the masculine, power, they will not be validated in that tribal sense, nor are integrated into this world where governs the notion of successful man as “portfolio man”, which has resources to provide House, car. Without that, they won’t be able to find a partner. And not only heterosexuals, gay couples apply machismo identically.
What was the testimony that most touched you?
All, each in a unique way. All cried, several are desahogaron and there were some that I cried also.
It was impossible not to get involved with that emotion, because they had discovered something important. All moved me deeply.
One that you clear in a special way?
The Bartholomew, a man who was kidnapped. Because it is that experience that makes you remember episodes that had completely forgotten. And although one has experience and has been studied, in my case psychology, to make these types of interviews are never as sufficiently prepared to accompany the pain of others.
He began to talk about something very private and suddenly had an emotional Epiphany, took my hand, began to cry and collapsed in front of me.
During her abduction recalls, first, that his father abused his sister when children slept in the same room and that he was not able to stop them…
After the interviews, when I thanked him for everything what you told me, told me things that left me very marked.
I had the feeling of having met with someone who could mirror, that was not going to make fun of it, because had lived similar things.
He is a man of Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s most conservative provinces.
A businessman who never did a therapeutic search is for what happened to him, that I had never thought in sexism or feminism and suddenly had a brutal transformation, that impresses me so much.
Alberto is a writer and is rejected by their peers because their literature is delicate, put the label of schmaltzy. What happens with this dissenting voice?
This writer has readers around the world, has received awards and makes mass presentations where 90% are women and 10% very young men.
But his generation hate literature, despite being one of the best in Latin America.
They say that he writes for women, that romanticism has them up to the crest.
But it is not romantic, but a very feminist perspective of love, eroticism and sex, and that worries them, and even resent, many male readers.
Sexual violence is part of the testimony of Ishmael, that being a child is a parent in a sadomasochistic scene. Over time is dedicated to this practice in a professional manner, why does it?
Each witness is the portrait of how they narrated themselves.
He recognizes that you have problems to understand their own reality. He saw his parents in a scene of pure violence, and gave terror have seen that.
The way that was processing it throughout his life, was to turn it into an act of consensual sadomasochism between father and mother, although she could never confirm it with them.
It then enters the world of BDSM (bondage, sadomasochism) because he wants to heal something that does not quite understand how it heals. He is on a quest and at the same time more deeply entering this traumatic memory, leaving no exit.
All the evidence shows a father strong, in the center of power. What happens with the mothers? Many of them blame them for not defending them.
This is what men want to tell us, what you are feeling and how they lived their childhoods.
The way in which they narrate the presence of these submissive mothers or complicit in some cases, is the way they see the world and it was important to leave as is. There isn’t a single my value judgment.
How was that resentment and anger towards them?
It is the technique of violence against women.
Man is the one with money, you can have fun, enjoy freedoms away from home and the son wants to be like him.
The life of the mother, even if it is a woman who has two or three jobs, that of motherhood and their profession, do not like boys. They think that it is a form of slavery, they don’t want to devote himself to meet and take care of others, without free time; It is much better to be a man.
But they also feel that the mother has the power of the affective and emotional, and therefore that it should protect them in this universe, but they are not capable of understanding that there no power against violence.
These men, while they open their lives and emotions, they dare not face and ask you to hide their names, how do you explain it?
It happens something very curious and takes place in the whole world, because it has happened to me in Sweden, in Iceland, most advanced countries in feminist issues. Against women, men are able to say momentous things of his emotional life, but if they know that other men of the same educational group or power will read it, you realize the fear that men are men.
I’m impressed. I think there is a sense of insecurity. At hands who will get that book? They will be how judged in silence by someone else?
And this fear of courts and live in the dichotomy of the “you aplastas or you’re crushed”… do they recognize?
Maruan, another writer, who insisted that he use his own name, say it clear: “all men are sexist and which does not admit it is lying”.
I think that they feel fear, because you’re going to be judged also by ‘hembrists’ women, educated in machismo, which rewards with access to traditional power.
There are young people who say they feel presionados by the girls, if they do not meet the expectations of being sexually superabiertos, interact with all those who want to be with them. They are immediately qualified as sissies.
It is incredible that 20-year-olds say this, when we thought it surpassed.
Do you define how this woman that you call “hembrista”?
The “hembrista” learn to act with a double standard. It has an attitude of submission against the man, but simultaneously charged it is constantly.
Submit gives you the privilege of living in the perfect conditions for a Princess. But when she is trapped in the ivory tower, you can not leave.
It is an ideological Tower and all the time is taking revenge from this man. They mistreat them and themselves, suffer from bulimia, anorexia, or obsession with appearance, by their condition of female to conquer the male.
But you still hear “he is male and her female” as something positive…
Clear and as a result of the topics I cover happens to me all the time, both in everyday life and in social networks, people say to me: what barbara, what eggs you have, you’re stronger and braver than a man.
And what answer to that?
Only eggs that I have are those of hens of my house that my courage has nothing to do with my gender, or with my intelligence and principles
Say me that there should be more women like me, then I give them the data of UN women, saying that women are 99% of those who have founded and directed the organizations of human rights around the world. I tell them that there should be more men like me.
After reading the testimonials, it seems that there was a layer of pain under the skin of these men, much to heal…
Absolutely, even one of them speaks of a dark well.
Talking to an actor, told me explosively: I tired of being a man! Referred to the type of man that took much advantage, because it is attractive, with incredible male facha, which allowed him to make many film and television.
He felt he had become ill from inside, as a kind of infection that hurts and suddenly decide to go to the doctor, so that you remove everything you need inside, to be able to heal. That is the part that touches them. Only to them.
How then would the release of men?
They must confront themselves with a personal search, with the audacity and courage to realize their privileges. When they behave in a different way, machismo close to a door, but opens a window to.
Come to marches with women, we saw them in Argentina, calling for the release of reproductive rights, but again when they are judged by the clergy or other men.
Then they have to take a look in the mirror and know if they are able to have the congruence of survival in a new world, that they have to build, on the basis of equity.
In the book you also tells that you were against the police that tortured you, willing to forgive him if he gave the name of their masters. But I didn’t know it, “as the most violent men, had not looked in the mirror”…
A few days ago it left the ruling, closes a cycle of 12 years.
He could have been regarded himself as a victim of the system, which puts it as the weakest State and violence against women, sexualized violence that uses sex as a punishment.
You should have seen that you had to pay to receive orders to kill a journalist first, and then, of torturing her, to speak of crimes against children. But I don’t know if in these years in prison will have understood it or if it will do so.
Can you forgive the own torturer?
He fulfilled orders, but decided to enjoy it while serving the sexual violence. I forgave him, but would be unable to tell anyone that has to forgive.
For me, forgiveness is a form of spiritual transcendence. It is to get me out of the body, the voice, breath, any brand of my abusers. Let them go, I no longer live.
Came a time in my therapy when I took it out of my emotional life, of my nightmares.
And when I had to confront me, I cried opposite him, my lawyers and judges.
It was a very important moment, because I count that was crying out of necessity, but that did not suffer for what they had done to me.
