The good boys of the patriarchy | Opinion

On November 11, on the outskirts of Padua, Filippo Turetta, a 22-year-old engineering student from a placid middle-class family, decided to kill his ex-girlfriend, Giulia Cecchettin, because he couldn’t stand her being smarter. that he. The idea that Giulia, with whom he shared a degree, would graduate after a few months, while he did not, was too humiliating. So much so that he stabbed her twenty times in the head and neck just four miles from her father’s house, him setting her up after begging to see her one last time. Giulia felt sorry for Filippo, whom she had already left twice, tired of her unhealthy jealousy, even towards him. her friends from university whom he was prohibited from frequenting. It was her first love, the only relationship she had had to date and that is why she went to meet him. He didn’t have any mercy. Giulia was his.

The drama had a bombshell effect on Italian society. The confessed murderer of the young student had no criminal record, nor did he come from one of those broken families in which violence reigns. Filippo was not a monster, nor mentally ill, but something worse: “a son of the patriarchy in good health,” as Giulia’s sister, Elena Cecchettin, expressed on Instagram. Her murder was part of the permanence of a system of male domination that continued to normalize physical and psychological violence against women in a country where the Me Too wave had had an impact in the professional sphere, but failed to enter the houses. For months, it was impossible to open a social network without coming across Giulia’s shy smile and her calls to eradicate that toxic masculinity responsible for a femicide every 72 hours. Even Giorgia Meloni posted on Facebook a photo in which she appeared surrounded by the women of her family to defend herself against those who accused her of legitimizing the patriarchal system in her speeches and policies.

Despite this gesture and the toughening of the penalties against the aggressors, Meloni surely did not convince anyone, and even less so the women who today try to have an abortion in Italy or those who saw how, as soon as she took office, the neo-fascist leader reduced 70% of the funds allocated to the fight against sexist violence. Even so, what the reaction of the one who calls himself president (and not president) of the Council of Ministers is the tremendous shock that this case has caused to a society that is laboriously trying to get rid of 20 years of fascism, 30 of Christian democracy and 20 of Berlusconism. A late awakening that has not only made Giulia’s case possible, but also the intervention of another woman, Paola Cortellesi, with a wonderful black and white tragicomedy about sexist violence inspired by pink neorealism that premiered a month before the murder and that has just arrived in Spain. Although the action of We will always have tomorrow is set in 1946, it is impossible not to see a parallel between the character of Delia, a working class woman surrendered to daily violence, ritualized by a husband portrayed as the archetype of the cretin, of the frustrated mediocre who needs to humiliate and beat his wife. to feel like a man, and Giulia’s story. Or even with the character of Delia’s daughter, Marcella, about to marry an upper-class abuser disguised as an ideal son-in-law.

Cortellesi, protagonist and director of a film in which he ridicules male domination with originality and subtlety in the script and dialogues at the antipodes of the Barbie by Gerwig, has become the new heroine of the feminist movement. Proof of this are the thousands of messages of gratitude on Italian networks for having addressed this social scourge. “If you are born a woman you are already part of a movement. This is a movie not to forget our rights”; “A film that must be seen with our children to understand all the path that still remains to be traveled”; “A work that will go down in history,” could be read on Instagram. The filmmaker has achieved the feat of attracting more than five million spectators – of which 45% were men – and that teachers from all corners of Italy took their students to the cinema as if it were an object of study. He Corriere della Sera He even says that a businessman from Lodi in Lombardy bought 400 tickets to give to the young people of his city. He understood, unlike Meloni, that education was the only way to achieve real and lasting awareness, capable of preventing others from children of the patriarchy in good health Protected by the survival of sexist discourses in the highest spheres, they feel they have the right to murder and destroy entire families for being incapable of managing their small frustrations.