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Machist people: these are the 8 beliefs that characterize them

Machist people: these are the 8 beliefs that characterize them

March 29, 2024

Virtually everyone has internalized certain macho beliefs. From the feminists with more years of militancy to the most friendly doctors, passing through the philosophers with more academic experience behind them. However, this is not strange: you have to keep in mind that for most of the story, the human being has lived without questioning sexism .

However, when we speak of macho people we do not refer to the entire human species, but to those individuals who still conserve thought patterns in which the beliefs anchored in sexism are not only very evident, but also rarely questioned.

We'll see now What are the defining characteristics of macho people? and of his thought.


  • Related article: "Machist women exist, and these 5 attitudes define them"

8 typical beliefs of the macho people

It is clear that machismo is out, and that the concept of "macho person" does not have to refer to the inalterable essence of a man or woman. Although it costs, it is perfectly possible to go from embracing totally macho behaviors to reinforcing a much more egalitarian type of relationships.

However, to achieve this it is necessary, first of all, to know to detect which are the signs of machismo that can be seen in the day to day and on whose base are beliefs linked to sexism. Below you will find a list of the main ones.


1. A woman is not complete if she is not a mother

Motherhood is understood as the culminating point in which femininity expresses itself. That is why women who decide to be mothers are seen or disbelieved or with bad eyes by sexist people.

It is because of this belief that in some extremely conservative families young women they suffer great pressures to have children as soon as possible , before the danger of passing his fertile life stage without offspring.

2. The woman is made to stay at home

This is one of the most deeply-rooted beliefs in the mentality of macho people. It is not usually expressed literally, but is the idea that underlies other kinds of statements.

For example, it is common to assume that any woman, by virtue of being so, will prefer to abandon her professional career when she has children, or who knows how to cook well, or who knows how to decorate any home .


3. Women do not have leadership skills

Many people have so internalized the idea that the woman is submissive who see with disbelief the feminine leadership, the possibility that is not a man who is at the head of a work team, especially if this belongs to the professional field with high added value. Paradoxically, this belief causes women's ability to lead to be damaged.

  • Maybe you're interested: "The 10 personality traits of a leader"

4. Justification for street harassment

Under the belief that women like to receive compliments or feel desirable, macho people take it well that some people make approaches that are not only unwanted and have not been requested, but often are clear cases of street harassment.

5. Defense of traditional roles due to the fact that they are tradition

The simple fact that gender roles have existed for centuries is no reason to oppose their questioning when it arises. However, macho people they have an essentialist vision of what it means to be a man or a woman , and questioning these concepts generates in them anger and frustration.

  • Related article: "The 7 differences between liberals and conservatives"

6. Justifications for gender violence

Blaming the victim in cases of gender violence it is the definitive expression of machismo, since it reveals that even in cases where it is clear that a woman suffers from the simple fact of being so, the attacker is right and she is not.

Comments like "I knew what was exposed" or "not dressed like that", very common in cases of sexual abuse, are paradigmatic examples of how you try to turn the situation around to put the spotlight on who has been attacked.

  • Related article: "The 7 types of gender violence (and characteristics)"

7. The feminine belongs to the family

Another typical attitude of the macho people links the latter to the family, as if they were an extension of the family nucleus . The idea that there are independent women with their own capacity to generate the income they need to survive causes rejection.

This characteristic is, once again, a consequence of the fact that for millennia the woman has been confined to the domestic, the place where the family lives and reproduces.That is why it is natural that some parents want to decide the future of their daughters by deciding on them.

8. Disapproval of female sexuality

From the perspective of sexist people, the only way in which a woman can be linked to the sexual is as an object, not as a subject. It is rewarded that women accept their role as a sexual object for the consumption of others, but it is wrong for them to live their own sexuality as subjects , that is, people who perform an action instead of receiving it from others.

  • Maybe you're interested: "The mathematics of sexual pleasure in men and women"

The source of sexism is patriarchy

It must be clear that machismo is neither a political positioning nor anything like a mental disorder. Why? Because on the one hand, if we talk about machismo in individual people, we refer to habits and beliefs that go far beyond the political ideology that they may have, and on the other, it is a phenomenon too broad and complex to reduce it to mental problems. of patients.

The sexist people are not spontaneously , or because they have decided on political goals that, from a rational perspective, convince them more than the rest. They are because they have inherited a culture and a political, social and economic context that reinforces sexism and the supremacy of the masculine gender over the feminine one. This context that reinforces sexist discrimination is called patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a set of material, relational and psychological conditions that cause women to be victims of discrimination because of the sex to which they belong. It is the root of the existence of sexist people, and the reason why advances in favor of women's rights cost so much.

In short, believing that someone becomes macho is the same as assuming that the place where one is born has nothing to do with the possibilities of following one religion or another: it is necessary to take into account the context in which lives.


Why I Won't Call Myself A Feminist: It's Hypocrisy (March 2024).


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