“ANIMALS PROTECTION: THE VIRILE CHOICE”
The relevance to educate male children to respect, protect and care who is weak. Animals, children and women (and not only they) are the everyday victims of the myth of insensible virility.

Parrino Alessia
University of Padua

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working on my graduate thesis I started to study the important link between animal cruelty and interpersonal violence with the real hope to develop in my country, Italy, a new kind of education which will be able to develop in children the awareness of the importance to protect every form of life, both human and non human. Animals as victims are in the same position of women and children because they are in the group called “weak subjects”.
Perpetrators of violence, in the major number of cases think that they are strong in abusing the weaker.
In the last years in Italy the “Femminicidio” crimes increased so much that italian society can’t continued to ignore the influence of gender informal education on children and teens.
Macho men are not the future, they must become the past. We need a new model of man, and to develop it, we need education of new generation of boys and girls.
Many clues gave me an intuition: if we want to break the circle of violence we must to introduce a new model.
The storical idea of virility in men prevents them to show empathy toward other living creatures and this improve the skill of violent attitude.

A violent person is violent against every subject weaker than him, because violence is not strenght, violence is an habitus and as habitus we have as educators the resources to change it and to improve the social appeal of some values: protection vs prevarication, care vs damage, real man vs violent man.

My research confirmed my intuition about the need of construction of a social shared idea of a real and strong man as a man who is compassionate toward the weaker and who feel the moral imperative to protect the weaker, but also a man who is ready to fight for the good of a weaker life as animal life is.
If ours children grow up thinking that kiling or abuse of an animal is a funny or not relevant thing, also the violence against other humans will haven’t the seriously that it must have.
For this and many other motivations I am researching about the link between social shared Virility idea and cruelty on animals, children and women.
My first data confirm this supposed link and its evidence the need to educate boys to become “kind men” and girls to want “kind man” as partners.
To realize this ideal man we must starting from the childhood, this is the only way to develop the social acceptance of this new kind of masculinity.