New men, women of the same old

Perhaps one of the defining features of the 21st-century human experience is the discomfort many people feel (or we feel) in relation to our bodies and the anxieties that arise in the realm of identity. It is the "sufficiency of having a name, / the filth of having skin, / the filth of a womb struggling / with all the children they will not have," as Maria Sevilla says to Pulp teeth, and which rests on centuries of virtually unquestioned cisheteropatriarchal system, extremely rigid gender norms and a paradigm that has only just begun to change in decades.

We feel uncomfortable, yes, but lately (a 'lately' that stretches back over seventy years) we've dared to talk about it and say it. It's in this context that feminisms and the LGBTQ+ struggle have emerged, and it's also from there that some things have begun to change. Who has the right to a salary and who must work for others without pay? Who can marry, with all the rights that entails, and who cannot? Who can adopt and who must be kept away (it used to be called that, and there are still countries where this is used as an argument) from children? Broadly speaking, we've improved, or at least we've begun to confront some issues that affect us as the diverse people and bodies that we are.

However, every reform is accompanied by a counter-reform, and the first signs of this are already beginning to appear. Faced with the emergence of queer and trans identities in the collective conversation and the crystallization of the most basic principles of feminism, two trends have emerged to counteract this challenge to patriarchy: new masculinities and the reclaiming of the figure of the tradwifeThe traditional wife. Or, in other words, a highly idealized idea of 'new men' and the sublimation of the submissive women of always.

They have chosen the space they until recently completely dominated: television series, novels, the media, even areas of academia they thought they had lost. The 'new men,' more cultured, more sensitive, and more deconstructed, now claim, with an almost victim-like tone, to "have a voice again" in the collective debate, as if they had never been excluded. Women, on the other hand, defend a supposedly free choice from conservative values, those domestic and childcare tasks that the feminists of the seventies fought so hard to distribute fairly. Their space is the reelsTikTok videos and the feeds of the influencers, with content such as "how to prepare dinner for a family of eight" or disciplines such as ceramics or crafts.

Naturally, everyone should do as they please, and I won't be the one to interfere in the homes (or bodies!) of these good people. However, it's often important to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to differentiate new proposals for life and identity from the same old patriarchal ways. With a remarkable and well-developed rebranding, yes indeed.