If Will Smith had hit a woman at the Oscars, he wouldn't have been able to stay for the entire gala or go dancing afterwards.
He may even have walked out of the Dolby Theater in handcuffs.
This is because man as a political subject continues to be a violent subject consented to and encouraged by the State and the market.
That is why one man hitting another is a matter that requires explanation rather than sanction.
If Will Smith had hit a woman, his career would be cancelled, but we will see how the star system
behaves
with sexist violence against another violent political subject, because he is a man.
It goes without saying that if the person who got up to hit had been a woman, the explanation would have been unequivocal: “she is crazy”.
But Smith is not crazy, he is just a man.
“The body of women belonged to men;
on the other hand, the body of men belonged to production, in times of peace, and to the State in times of war”, wrote Virginie Despentes in
King Kong Theory
back in 2006. Then she thought that this difference was beginning to be overcome by another injustice: polarity based on social class.
“The most famous soldier of the Iraq war is a woman.
(…) Armed conflicts have become mixed territories”, she added.
But here she was optimistic, I think.
Because poverty has become one more layer of injustice that has not replaced the structural violence exerted through the body of men.
Today we have been invading Ukraine for more than a month and Volodymyr Zelensky has decreed martial law according to which all men of military age (between 18 and 60 years old) are obliged to stay to fight and die in the name of the State.
A way of instrumentalizing violence through the male body that has gone almost unnoticed by male victims of machismo around the world.
However, many Ukrainian men do not want to stay and die in the name of the state: they are being the ones plagued by the invasion.
They are considered deserters and the Polish government hardly accepts applications for their refuge.
What would happen if a State forced women between the ages of 18 and 60 to kill and die in its name?
Can you imagine the reactions of support,
the columns in this same newspaper by other women in defense of the legitimate right to decide about their own bodies?
However, men remain docile with respect to the violence that the State confers on the male body.
I have only read one text here denouncing this sexist violence and it was signed by a woman: Sabina Urraca.
In recent years, women have unequivocally and universally denounced the fact that our symbolic body belongs in one way or another to men.
The objectification of the female body for the use and enjoyment of the male body is today denounced and pointed out wherever it happens (although there is still a way to go since the abuse is systemic).
Meanwhile, the male political subject is violent and kills and rapes and does it systematically as well.
That is why the political subject of feminism has been for a long time (and still is) that of the victim woman, that of the dead woman, that of the abused woman and that of the raped woman.
And I wonder.
What do men do about it?
What are you thinking?
It is hard for me to understand the reasons why many do not rebel against the machismo that besieges the female body with the determination with which we women do it.
But I am more surprised by the male docility regarding the violent alienation of their own bodies.
I see Will Smith get up with his badass gesture and shout the phrase of a high school, neighborhood, town, city, bar, baptism, disco pimp: "Keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth."
And I realize that it's not even his, that Smith is just a puppet, a mask he's not even aware he's wearing.
How many times have we heard this phrase?
How many times has a father, a friend, a boss, a lover,
Will a colleague put his body at the service of violence without questioning himself and without anyone else questioning it on his behalf?
We have heard Smith say such words and deliver such blows in fiction hundreds of times.
He is a macho, a cop, a hero, the one who saves the girl, the one who delivers his violent body to fame, to the market and to the State.
In fact, male violence is so utterly internalized that Chris Rock takes Smith's punch with astonishing normality.
He makes a joke about Will's "woman" and Will hits him accordingly.
She is part of what is possible, what is reasonable.
The unthinkable would have been that Jada Pinkett Smith herself got up to shake him, not only because it was deplorable but because it was impossible.
She would have to be crazy to do it.
She would have stopped the gala,
show
that many people thought was a joke.
Deep down, violent men are still funny (or reasonable) for many.
For the rest, the fact that the body of men entails a duty to be violent is interpreted as a privilege and it is assumed that they do not complain in order to enjoy it.
That is, to continue raping, beating and killing.
I say (and hope) no.
I think that men are alienated by male violence.
And I also believe that they have less control over their identity than women.
I maintain that it is more difficult to erase a body that bleeds, that gives birth, that gives milk, that manifests itself even without asking permission and constantly demands to be thought about.
Instead, men have renounced their legitimate body in blind and patriarchal obedience.
And this is how they turn him into a violent subject in the name of love and the State every day and everywhere, without anyone denouncing him.
It is worth that recently it seems that Hollywood men can not rape actresses without being canceled (the advance is not minor), but everything else is allowed and encouraged.
In fact, Hollywood is a tireless generator of male violence and Will's slap is nothing more than a direct consequence of an industry that generates machismo in 90% of its productions, shooting from the bottom up.
There is a mythical phrase in one of the many sexist and violent films that Will Smith has starred in.
"We walk together, we die together, rebels forever."
It is the motto of
Two Rebel Policemen
, a saga that must already have three or four parts and in which Smith seals the honor of him and his partner with this phrase.
Policeman Mike Lowrey pronounces the sentence and Will Smith, the actor behind it, believes it.
And with it, too many boys (and men) around the world grow up convinced that violence through their bodies is a form of rebellion.
When the truth is that violent men are nobody, they lack identity and have no courage to defend anything, not even themselves.
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