Last Thursday, October 24, in Madrid, the book Wolves in sheep's clothing. Thinking about the abuses of the Church (Encounter, 2024), by the French thinker Fabrice Hadjadj, at an event organized by the journal Omnes and the publishing house that brings out the essay.
There, HadjadjIn a brutal exercise of honesty, he went so far as to tell one of the attendees something like "I have never abused any woman, and yet I know that deep in my heart there are all the conditions needed to do so. That and much more.
While this was going on, a certain spokesperson of a parliamentary group that championed the feminist struggle resigned from his post, precisely because of accusations of sexual abuse of several women. He did so, moreover, with a statement that, in its postulates, wants to be just the opposite of Hadjadj's. Summarized a little to our air, but without missing a point to the original, his statement would come to say something like "I have abused a woman, and yet I know that deep in my heart there are not the necessary conditions to do so", which inevitably leads to the punch line of "the fault is outside me, not inside me".
Politics, patriarchy, the years of dictatorship, the aroma of machismo in which we have all been raised. Balls out, not in.
Of course, there will be those who today lynch those they admired yesterday, as well as those who praise the gesture of resigning, as if desperately trying to safeguard the reputation of the person they idolized and who, now, finds himself fallen from the altar that others -and not only he- had built for him. But to stay there would be to miss a precious opportunity for true reflection, which must begin with honesty with oneself and which is not so much aimed at saying what society is - or should be - like, what it lacks or what it lacks, but what we are like, what is inside each one of us, what our true nature is.
And only from there, knowing the humus, the mud that we all carry inside, will it be possible to start building something that does not crumble at the first change.
