With this new piece I inaugurate a collaboration with the precious blog Le Donne Visibili (The Visible Women): from now on I am their “fourth official editor”! I start it with something about women empowerment dedicated to the Swedish #metoo.

For many women feminism means in some way denying a gender diversity perspective, as if it stood for some kind of weakness; some women tend to categorize themselves using a masculine measurement and this was important when patriarchal culture was holding its professional doors shut to women. The situation is slightly changing and here in Sweden, for example, the number of women working as plumbers or electricians is increasing, and you can see these sometimes tiny but very cool Lisbeth Salanders going around with a piercing and a hammer.But having the option of choosing what one likes is one thing, while another issue is wanting to show that one is not only equivalent, but identical. I think that if we take the Game of Thrones female role model as the winning one, then we have lost. If our value is measured and competes on physical strength, unemotional sex and ruthlessness, we are back to square one. We are again adapting to something alien to us by putting our body and mind on scale 1:man. A betrayal to ourselves and furthermore an inability to see ourselves as complete and valuable just as we are, rotating on our own axis instead of being somebody else’s moon. I feel that it will take a long time to get there, set the right boundaries, fully appreciate our way of doing things, and experimenting how effective it gets when you can play on the differences with irony and complicity, finding the perfect balance between male and female ways. There are so many men now who are significantly adult and can − and will − be at women’s side to build a balanced, mature and interesting world. Men who problematize “gender” records and find it horrible to be physically homologous to the almost 100% of human beings who commit murder, rape, domestic violence, homicides, sexual abuse of children, incest, crime, war activities. Why, for Goddess’s sake, should women ever wish to simply resemble them? Just because in the history of the patriarchy the winning, heroic, dominant, strong characters are male? Because they are the ones with the statues in squares and the photos on history books?
Often to make a compliment to a woman we say that she is “strong”. But what does a strong woman mean, exactly? I know women who are weakened by trauma or depression, of course, but for the rest many of the women I know (nice or not) are strong, courageous, capable, executive, resistant, multifunctional, honest, civic, intelligent, capable of solidarity and empathy. They are not strong women, they are women, period.
So we must reverse this completely, in a Copernican way. We need to follow the female model to 100% by unfailingly using our constructive way to be in the world as opposed to a destructive one. Because our function should not be just to heal, repair, support after the hurricane of brutality has passed − as we have done for millions of years. We must be present and act before, this is to what having power means: not force, but power. To decide, lead, manage, speak out, prevent, oppose, take space, exist.

Like the hundreds of actresses that last Sunday alternated reading in different cities in Sweden, to bear witness to the violence, discrimination, abuse and manipulation their category was made victim of. The reading marathon lasted more than two hours and listening to it was almost insufferable, not because of the content itself but because it was immense. What the attending men told afterwards about their experience was how intolerable and painful it was to acknowledge for the first time the huge volume of this phenomenon. Mature and aware men who sadly wondered how they could somehow “allow this to happen” this for years, pretending in some way that it was not happening. And among those who perpetrated these acts were the men that everyone considered the Unquestionable Geniuses: leading film and theater directors, actors, producers. A wet blanket that changed the perspective forever.
The challenge of staying loyal to ourselves is now ahead of us: will we be able to get rid of chauvinistic models and empower ourselves from our own wisdom?