It is incredible how many things have changed in the last hundred years...in the last fifty years...in the last ten years. I am thinking here of how we think of gender and sexuality and how this relates to the collective trauma of Latin America.
One hundred years ago, women were just about to win the right to vote. Fifty years ago, during the swinging sixties the sexual revolution was in, well, full swing. Ten years ago, same sex marriage had been legal in this country already for two years.
Where have all the cowboys gone? (I will raise the children, you can pay the bills)
For many of us, normal has come to include, women with equal rights, gays and lesbians with equal rights, and trans-persons with, shall we say, re-engineered anatomy? What I am saying here is that what was once taboo has gone from being edgy to being normal and even rather boring. No one bats an eye at seeing a woman doctor or construction worker, just as no is put out of countenance by two men walking hand in hand, and if a biological male changes his name and his body parts you are not going to refer to him as James, you are going to call her Debby, or whoever.
This is one of many factors that can make it oh so difficult to understand, appreciate and comprehend the way people lived in the remote, and the not-so-remote, past. The sex roles in Medieval Spain were so clearly and starkly delineated as to make it dangerous, even a capital offence, to stray even remotely beyond the barriers between the sexes. The men were men, the women were women. And the sheep were scared!
Only the strictest binary of gender and sexual orientation were recognized as valid, as they were considered biblical (Yeah, just like burning people at the stake and publicly hanging them). The women married young, often at or even before puberty, and their role was to be sex slaves to their husbands, mothers to their twenty or more children, and keepers of the hearth. Men went out and worked, hunted, tended the fields, got drunk, gamed, fought wars and raped and abused women, children and animals. Adolescent boys were expected to lose their virginity to prostitutes, the most despised women in the community.
Nobody dared transgress these boundaries. The men, hardened from boyhood to cruelty and barbarism, were expected to go through life as strong, tough, unfeeling and quite capable of killing so long as it fell within the norms and expectations of church, state and society. Men were not allowed to feel or to weep. They were simply dysfunctional machines. They were actually traumatized from boyhood, their heart, their soul wrenched out of them by the brutal necessity of daily life in Sevilla or Toledo.
Trained by default to be psychopaths, these same young men, landing in the Caribbean, in Mexico, in South America, were more than ready to become killing machines. Their souls destroyed by the toxic machismo of Medieval Spain, without the slightest compunction of conscience they could massacre thousands and burn to ashes their beautiful cities and plant the flags of Catholic Spain and the Vatican in their zeal for gold, plunder, land and souls.
I don't know if there is any record of any closeted gays in their number. It would have been absolute hell for them. The boys from Spain, lacking women, had sexual needs, of course, and then the mass rape began. I don't know how many of those unions between Spanish men and native women were consensual in the way that we understand the word nowadays. Given the circumstances, I don't think that anything that happened in the bloody aftermath could have been even remotely consensual. The indigenous women were not equal bargaining partners. They were the conquered, they were booty, they were chattels, they were property. Accompanying mass genocide came mass rape producing the first Latino people, the Mestizos, and reproducing in them the trauma brought over the Atlantic Ocean from Medieval Catholic and murderous Spain.
The legacy of machismo remains strong throughout Latin America and still the culture is steeped in toxic masculinity. By the same token, Latino men tend to be some of the world's biggest and most pathetic mama's boys.
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