Not only did I grow up in the United States, where machismo has come to be far less socially acceptable than in Peru, but I was raised by parents who taught me that all forms of discrimination are wrong and assured me from day one that I could be anything I wanted to be. That is the lens through which I see the world, and the result is that I look at certain Peruvian social norms and want to get on the radio and shout about how unjust and unequal they are. For example, the fact that women are expected to not only cook lunch 100% of the time, but that it is then those same women who serve every course while their male relatives remain seated at the table - the idea that an extra pair of hands would make the process easier on everyone, which to me is blatantly obvious, does not fit into such traditional gender norms.
However, these gender norms are deeply ingrained in Peru's culture, and I want to avoid any sort of "your-way-is-unjust-and-my-way-is-better" sentiments - for one, that won't help bring about positive change, nor is it fair or right to pass such judgement. Nobody's culture is perfect, especially from an outsider's point of view. So I remember to bite my tongue when I'm about to say, "it would be better if men and women both washed the dishes," or, "cat-calling women in the street is horrible and offensive behavior," because I know that every woman in my audience is in charge of washing her family's plates, and every man listening has whistled at at least one woman in his lifetime. They were raised in a culture that sanctions and normalizes those practices, and my workshop is possibly the first time they have heard the inequalities inherent in machismo culture be named as inequalities.
So that's what I try to focus on: simply raising awareness. We do an activity to highlight the difference between sex and gender, and highlight that most of the things we associate as being "male" or "female" (i.e., pants, blue, and soccer vs. skirts, pink, and volleyball) are not actually an inherent part of being a man or a woman - women can play soccer too!
Once that basic difference is established, I raise questions about why doing laundry is a task associated with women, or why decision-making falls into the man's realm. By the time I get to the question, "are men and women's roles equal?" no one has ever said yes. But enabling participants to arrive at that conclusion on their own, rather than getting on my soapbox and preaching about the vast gender inequity in Peruvian society, is a better method for so many reasons.
In the gender-equity training I led today, I was also reminded of two oft-overlooked points: that machismo culture can unfairly affect men as well as women, and that while machista norms dominate Peru on a societal level, they are by no means promoted by every individual. My friend Alberto told a story about how his grandma-aged landlady once found him washing his clothes on the patio: she asked him, "what are you doing? Don't you have a wife to wash your clothes for you?" He replied that he did not, and that seeing as he had two hands (and the option of local laundromats), he didn't plan on getting married based on the need for a washerwoman. But the landlady insisted: "no, joven, you don't want to have to go to a laundromat, you need a wife!" This anecdote, while amusing, is proof that men who break traditional gender norms often meet with just as much resistance as do women. Hearing Alberto tell this story also made me smile, because the fact that he recognized it as gender inequity and responded as he did means that there are Peruvians whose examples will help gender equality really take root here, more than my workshops ever could.
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