Brief History of Machismo
Women have always been exploited by men. If there is a truth that no one doubts, it is this. From the solemn Oxford auditoriums to the CNN programs, from the Collège de France to famous artists, the world reaffirms this certainty, perhaps the most unquestioned one that has ever passed through the human brain, if it really passed through there and hasn't left the intestines for the academic theses.
Not wishing to oppose such an august unanimity, I propose here to list some facts that can reinforce, in the believers of all the existing sexes and its inventors, their feeling of hatred towards the adult heterosexual male, this execrable type that no subject to whom has happened the misfortune of being born in the male sex wants to be when he grows up.
Our account begins at the dawn of time, at some inaccurate point between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. In these dark ages, the exploitation of women began. Those were hard times. Living in dens, human communities were constantly plagued by attacks of beasts. The males, taking advantage of their dominant class prerogatives, soon tried to ensure for themselves the most comfortable and safe places in the social order: they stayed inside the caves, the bastards, making food for babies and combing their hair, while poor females, armed only with clubs, went out to face lions and bears.
When the collection economy was replaced by agriculture and livestock, again the men were smart, assigning women to the heaviest tasks, such as carrying the stones, taming the horses, making furrows in the land with the plow, while they, the little layabouts, stayed at home painting pots and playing with weaving. Disgusting thing.
When the great empires of antiquity dissolved, giving way to feuds that were perpetually at war with each other, they soon constituted their private armies, formed entirely of women, while men took shelter in the castles and stayed there relaxing, enjoying the poems that women warriors, in the intervals of combat, composed in praise of their manly charms.
When someone had the extravagant idea of Christianizing the world, making it necessary to send missionaries everywhere, where they risked being impaled by infidels, stabbed by highwaymen or slaughtered by the audience bored with their sermons, it was again on women that the heavy burden fell, while the males were machiavellically praying novenas before the domestic altars.
A similar exploitation suffered the unfortunates during the crusades, where, armed with extremely heavy armor, they crossed the deserts to be cut by the edge of the sword by the Mouros (or rather, by the Mouras, since the machismo of the followers of Muhammad was no less than our). And the great navigations, then! In search of gold and diamonds to adorn the idle males, brave women navigators crossed the seven seas and fought against ferocious indigenous people who, when they ate them, were in the strictly gastronomic sense of the word.
Finally, when the modern state instituted mandatory military recruitment, it was women who formed state armies, with a guillotine penalty for runaways and recalcitrants, all so that men could stay at home reading La Princesse de Clèves.
For millennia, in short, women have died on the battlefield, carried stones, erected buildings, fought with beasts, crossed deserts, seas and forests, sacrificing everything for us, the idle males, to whom no more dangerous challenge remains than to get our hands dirty in our babies' diapers.
In exchange for the sacrifice of their lives, our heroic defenders have only demanded of us the right to speak loudly at home, and sometimes, to drop a pair of socks in the middle of the room for us to pick.
[Translated from here]