8 March, let's move beyond

I am a man, I am a male, who works with women and interacts with women on a daily basis. I am a male who, like most other males, must learn how to move beyond. This annual occasion, born from tragedy, is a timely reminder that we must move beyond to make progress, beyond the day of celebration. Beyond the occasion, the festivities, the rituals.

We can do better than symbolic flowers and phrases of good intent. Let's move beyond the clichés of political correctness. It is pointless to celebrate when oppression, violence, and domination are the order of the day in a macho and patriarchal culture. Patriarchal, an obsolete adjective, referring to the Jewish patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others.

Does it make sense to celebrate when every week a woman suffers violence and is killed at the hands of a man? When women are still too often regarded as objects, saints, or whores? Let';s move beyond. Beyond our own island, as Wittgenstein said: "What I wanted to define were the boundaries of an island, what I discovered were instead the boundaries of the ocean."; Beyond the idea of woman as a creation to complete man.

To go beyond, we must act in the present, ensuring that respect, equality, and the protection of rights are daily practice and not stale words. Truths that must always be part of our everyday life. Beyond. It is essential that March 8th be every day of the year and that every day of the year be swallows, cyclamens, clouds, scents, sunrises, and sunsets that know how to embrace, caress, love the earth. And those who inhabit it.

Let's move beyond, together. Women and men. Girls and boys. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Beyond gruelling work shifts, even in the tourism sector. Let's look beyond together, especially us entrepreneurs, beyond the unfair choice posed to too many women between being a mother and not working, and its opposite: working and not being a mother. Let's push beyond the cliché of the pretty dress, high heels, and lipstick. It takes freedom to wear what one desires and the freedom for everyone to act according to how they feel. In mutual respect.

Let's go beyond. Beyond the unbearable "she asked for it."; Unbearable. Beyond insinuations and smirks and cowardly jokes and stereotypes. Beyond pink quotas, even if useful to fill gaps imposed by the male-dominated system. Beyond the tired and crude slogans of God, Country, and Family. Beyond imposed veils. Beyond rude gestures and smirks. Beyond standards that too often see the communication of products associated with a woman's body.

Beyond the aesthetics of glossy sexy. Sexuality must be free and not conditioned. And, as Dalla sang, let everyone do as they please. Again, in mutual respect. Let's move beyond: beyond slavery, commodification, abuse, imposition. Beyond violence and abomination. Beyond the obsolete logic of the possessive, selfish man who considers himself superior based on archaic, backward, outdated, and deceitful criteria.

It is now necessary to move beyond, and to finally do so, all men, all males, including myself, must take a step back. Long live March 8th: long live women, may it always be a day, day after day, of liberation for all human beings.

Michil Costa