November 19th was International Men’s Day. Many of you probably didn’t know this, and are hearing about it now for the first time; it is normal, also considering that it is an unofficial day, which, unlike that of women, is not recognized by the UN and is generally ignored by governments and various associations.

It is easy to ask ourselves, in fact, what purpose such a day could ever serve: we are led to have the impression that the male gender has no particular problems, but rather is privileged, since it lives in a world built for its needs. . In reality, the day has excellent reasons to exist, even more so today, precisely because around men’s issues there reigns not so much silence, but rather a continuous mystification of the facts.

Being a man isn’t always a walk in the park

On this day, in fact, information and awareness initiatives aim above all to highlight those areas of human life in which being a man is a disadvantage. For example, in the reproductive field we always talk – rightly – about the woman’s right to abort or abandon the newborn, but never about the man’s right not to recognize a child when, for example, it is born from an occasional relationship, after which the woman chooses to keep: the man cannot and must not have a say in the woman’s choice, but should have the right to choose for himself.

Even in the workplace we are used to hearing about men as having an advantage, but it depends on the context: men are also the majority of deaths at work, because the dangerous jobs in which the rate of unrelated deaths is higher are carried out above all by men . In the same way, all this alleged advantage hardly explains why the users who turn to Caritas are mostly men, just as the homeless are mostly men (who sometimes become homeless following divorce cases). A similar argument could be made for school dropouts and university education.

A day of awareness that however becomes divisive

The objective of the day is therefore to raise awareness of these issues, as well as medical prevention (the month of November is dedicated to men’s health, even if this too is little publicised). Nothing worrying or disrespectful, in short; yet, talking about this day inevitably means finding oneself in the midst of controversy. Accustomed as we are to polarization and continuous conflict, as soon as we hear about men’s rights we are led to think that behind it there is the intent to diminish women’s problems: we struggle to conceive that both realities can coexist, that of purely female problems and that of of purely male problems. After all, we saw it when, a few months ago, in Naples there was an attempt to talk about violence against men: a unison chorus of thirty-one feminist associations, outraged at the mere idea that someone would dare to say that even a man can suffer domestic violence.

On the other hand, obviously, often those who talk about men’s rights cannot help but bring up women’s issues when they have nothing to do with them, again due to Manichean logic: if men have gender problems, then it means that what they tell us about women are invented. We therefore easily lend ourselves to those who say that, in turn, men’s problems are an invention brought out only to counter feminism, and the vicious circle never ends.

Given that both positions are not very intelligent, it is necessary to clearly say that if it is true that both genders face discrimination, disadvantages and difficulties, in different fields, it is also true that the discriminations, disadvantages and difficulties they face When I meet women, we talk about it constantly (often even making it up completely, as shown by certain delirious articles on phallocentric cities or on male-sized bus seats); those that afflict men, however, are never spoken of, and indeed the male gender is portrayed, in fact, as privileged and completely free from any problem.

Tensions, therefore, are difficult to avoid. The disappointment (if not anger) of those who experience disadvantaged situations firsthand and feel defined as privileged is understandable, like that of those who have perhaps been victims of violence, have not found help, and then hear from anyone on television that he must feel guilty as a man for the violence committed by others.

The solution can only be information

In general, probably, this obstinacy over categories, in the absurd obsession of defining every nuance of existence, does not help to see individuals as people, human beings, certainly influenced by biology as well as by culture and personal attitudes, but ultimately difficult to reduce to pre-established schemes. Also in this case, among other things, always because we are not capable of staying in an area of ​​reasonable balance, but we must necessarily place ourselves at the extremes: either we are defined entirely by the categories to which we belong, or those categories are useless and we should eliminate them .

But, even if we want to define all men as equal in that they carry the Y chromosome, the fact remains that they, like women, experience difficult situations linked to their gender, for which no interventions of any kind are foreseen and that indeed men themselves are often ignorant. Since it doesn’t seem very close to me that the day when the fashion for patriarchy will pass, in the meantime the only weapon is to inform. Not to foment hatred or feelings of revenge, but only to give a truthful picture of the lives of men and women.