What do men talk about? – 02/19/2024 – Vera Iaconelli

The recently released “Fair Game” and “Anatomy of a Fall” (both 2023) feature emancipated women confronting husbands who struggle with their place in the world. The remake in series format of “Scenes from a Wedding” (2021) also changes the usual gender roles to enrich the questioning about these relationships.

The general complaint, we know, goes in the opposite direction, pointing out the lack of equal opportunities between men and women, the salary difference for equal roles and children as a drag on their careers. More than creating strangeness in the audience, tired of knowing female suffering, the change in the usual gender positions in these works seems to answer more questions.

The “man providing financial services/woman providing domestic care” duo has never worked for the absolute majority of society. Women have always had to fight for their survival, first of all, out of pure necessity. This places them as part of the feminist movement, whether they agree or not. It is not uncommon for those who profess their anti-feminism to not give up the achievements that result from it: occupying public space, choosing a husband, having the right to vote, divorce, paid work…

Man, on the other hand, is the repository of “the illusion that being a man would be enough”, which gives him the fantasy of not needing to question his place in the world. Male work has always been arduous for those who were not born heirs, but it is a field that is not very prone to questions about itself, simply following the instructions of the men who preceded it.

If women have very different struggles, with very specific agendas, the same cannot be said about their direction. Being at the bottom, they can only go up demanding their rights.

Men, being historically on top, no longer know how to position themselves and imagine themselves necessarily coming down. Those who think of the relationship as a seesaw predict that the rise of one implies the fall of the other, after all, there is no dominator without the dominated. The prism of subordination makes the lives of couples governed by competition unfeasible, even homosexual ones.

The man, seeking to escape the relegation zone, uses familiar tricks — such as doubling down on gender violence, exemplarily represented in “Jogo Justo”, whose ending announces that the time for tolerating the intolerable is over.

In “Anatomy of a Fall”, we have the beautiful scene of the couple’s argument, in which we witness the old trick of trying to make the other person an alibi for their own failure. At the extreme of this logic of using one’s partner as an excuse for one’s own mistakes, we have the source from which those who believe that a woman’s power emasculates a man drink, typical of incell and redpill discourse.

In “Scenes from a Marriage”, mourning fulfills its function of helping the parties to work out the new places to be occupied in a relationship that is not based on hierarchy and subordination.

But there is an additional challenge for men, one of the biggest bottlenecks in this whole story, present in the comedy “What Men Talk about” (2012). Without asking questions about themselves and without the incentive to share their most intimate experiences with each other, man grows up in a subjective limbo. He is capable of going through the greatest torments without confiding in his best friend. Lacking an affective repertoire, all he can do is suffer and/or cause suffering.

Hence, in the game of life and love, contrary to what those who fear being emasculated say, the more flexible and honest the positions, the greater the shared pleasure.

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