A major controversy has broken out in recent days against the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio, who, speaking of violence against women, said that men are genetically violent; in fact, according to what he states, the many millennia of oppression of women to which men have become accustomed have resulted in the consolidation of a “male” mentality, which is now difficult to remove. As a result, men today struggle to accept gender equality because their own genetic code resists it.

We have long been accustomed to the absurd or disconcerting statements of members of the Meloni government, so these words do not surprise us much. It is clear that the minister, necessarily having to say the same things about violence that everyone else says (namely that it is a patriarchal legacy that men cannot get rid of), has simply reworked them by adding the question of genetics. In short, they are the same words that we hear on TV and in the newspapers every day now: patriarchy shapes men by making them violent, it is difficult for them to understand that they shouldn’t be because they have become accustomed to power.

Depending on who says them, the words are right or wrong

Yet, these same words, said by the minister, have a completely different sound, apparently: the world of the left, in a broad sense, has risen up, defining Nordio’s statements as unacceptable and very serious. There are even those who have defined them as chauvinists, like Cathy LaTorre, according to a reasoning that sees chauvinism even in insults to men. It would therefore seem that, suddenly, saying that all men are intrinsically violent has become wrong.

Or maybe not! Because, in fact, much of the controversy centers on the accusation that the minister wants to dismiss the issue by blaming biology, thus implying that education is useless, and that therefore affectivity and sexuality should not be addressed at school. In short, yet another government plan to maintain the status quo by telling us that, anyway, men are like this and remain like this. Few people are interested in talking about the fact that saying that men are genetically violent is offensive and discriminatory.

Education is also necessary every other day

But this criticism is also curious, given that the minister said, verbatim: «This is why – he added – in my opinion it is necessary to intervene with laws, with repression, with prevention. But above all it is necessary to intervene in education.” We may not like repression (even if we demanded a law that would provide life imprisonment for femicides!), but what would we have to say about prevention and education? That his idea of education is different from ours, certainly, but does this make Nordio’s words unacceptable?

It seems more than anything that the world of the left is bothered by the fact that the right, every now and then, says what “has to be said”, and therefore having no way of actually contradicting it, invents controversies that are ridiculous to say the least, just to continue to reiterate that they are evil and misogynistic and don’t want to change things. What should the minister have said differently? If he hadn’t said ‘genetically’ would everything have been fine? Is this really what we have been reduced to?

Hypocrisy and carelessness towards men

The hypocrisy of such reactions is almost funny, but above all it is incredible. Evidently we are convinced that people have not a short memory, but a non-existent one, and therefore do not know that the day before yesterday some woman at some cultural event was saying the same thing – for example Serena Dandini who goes around saying that all men kill women and therefore men should be ashamed because they are men. That woman was applauded and celebrated for her courage to denounce oppression, while this man, who is in government and therefore against feminism, is inundated with accusations.

And therefore, as always, we don’t really talk about the real problem with these statements; that is, the fact that it is normal, ordinary administration, to speak of men as a separate species, a curious animal tending towards depravity and violence, whether by nature or by culture or for both reasons. A dangerous animal which as such must be captured at birth and subjected to a rigorous education that can tear this horrible germ of masculinity from within it.