Women Begging for Love
In my country, modernity seems to pass us by, while women continue to live under the tyranny of male dominance.
I don’t know if men and women are actually from two planets, some from Mars and others from Venus. Nor can I say — even more so these days — that we see and think about the world in different ways.
But if all these clichés in the eternal sexes war can increasingly be challenged, while the world clearly moves on to so many other stages, echoes of the past are still experienced, felt, and vented by so many women I talk to and live within my present life.
For them, there is no modernity, nor is there a group of local feminists who can empower them. In fact, nor do they know what that really is, honestly.
These discourses, ideas, and progress only exist in books that they will never read. They can only be found in university lectures that will never actually leave the university walls or heard in urban circles that have turned their backs on rural women.
But anyone who thinks that this modernity was slow in coming here to rural Portugal but that it did come eventually, let me tell them how mistaken they are.
I don’t see it. At least not in this area of rural Portugal. A place where someone born some thirty years ago is long overdue to shake off the webs of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, or the role one plays as wife and husband— well, whatever you want to call the oppression felt in women’s breasts, swallowed, repressed and remaining there in our blood, DNA, genes and passing on forever. Yet, it is still here!
Modernity is slow in reaching these whereabouts. It’s not just women who are in their fifties who have suffered from their husbands’ sexist minds all their youth. The same story with women in their thirties— and I would dare to say still in their twenties— continues now, in 2023.
I see all the mistakes and old patterns being repeated, echoing the sinister stories of their parents, the sufferings of their mothers, and this strange role that so many wives have incarnated to be a kind of second mother to their own husbands.
In this last role, they are sometimes seen both as protectors — following that beautiful and cherished figure of the nurtured mother — while simultaneously seen as weak, incompetent, and unable to make an accurate decision, where their jobs are almost merely decorative and unimportant.
Every woman and every man is a story; I know that. But even though many of the stories differ in content, the moral and the conclusions are almost always the same.
Women complain a lot about loneliness, not physical, but spiritual companionship.
We complain about the words we don’t say for fear of an exalted reaction from the other side;
We complain about the inability to share the same way we see life, in how what they find important is put on a pedestal, while so often we see the same thing as not what really matters in life.
It feels like this classic “war” between men &women is almost one between the transcendent and the tangible. As humans, we need a minimum of comfort to have a decent life—a stable job and money in the bank that ensures our comfort.
As such, many professions are important and are indeed noble trades that sustain life. However, when we get beyond that and start to question why we live, transcendence or spirituality — whatever you want to name it— comes in.
As it is said in Dead Poets Society: “Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Of course, these two ways of seeing the world are genderless, but the women around me, and of course the men in their lives, fall into this cliché.
Their men fill their minds only with work. In turn, their women fill their minds both with their own work and then with everything else. Men forgive me, but we do seem to carry more things on our shoulders, and the worst part, we seem to carry it all alone.
Surely every story is a story.
Each one lives in their own way. Still, the common ache is always there, shared by all of us: either it’s oppression or being treated as quasi-adults whose decisions never seem to be legitimate or legitimized, coupled with our constant deep breaths so as not to reveal our supposed insanity, and our will of start slamming doors and God forbid, being called the classical hysterical.
This shared pain unites us like suffering always makes groups of people come together because they can relate to and understand each other.
This is why I have been lately being so connected to women. I can more and more relate, understand, and empathize with my group.
One of these days, a woman who could be my mother vented her soul out to me about the fact that she has everything but nothing in the end.
In her case, she doesn’t lack money but lacks the most significant value of all, freedom.
She told me her story about how for years on end, her husband was (and is) tremendously jealous of anything about her.
Since she owned a beauty salon, no matter what she did, there would always be a reason for her actions to be labeled as incorrect. One example she told me was about the salon’s doors. If they were closed, her husband would walk by and later ask her if it meant she was hiding someone inside.
If the opposite happened, she was seen almost as a whore, as someone who wanted to show off her body, to make herself be seen by every man in the neighborhood.
Not a single gesture seemed to escape his control, and as such, even a simple trip to a café would have to be warned, with her calling his phone saying she was going to leave the salon to have a coffee at the café next door.
She also told me about the loneliness of not having the support of her only daughter, who told her in bitter words that her job was not really important — how unfair, I immediately thought, to carry a baby in the womb and, in her case, almost die in the postpartum period to hear all this, years later!
I immediately wondered how another woman, albeit an 18-year-old, is falling for this mistake; these pathetic clichés I see embedded in an eternal dispute of, shall I say, the physical world versus the more abstract world.
You see. Her father, a house builder, has, in their daughter’s perception, an actual job, a real contribution to society. Whereas her mother’s occupation, a hairdresser who also takes care of aesthetics, is not seen as really essential, valued, or even desired to be done by anyone.
That’s how we have become as a society, isn’t it? Services are increasingly devalued and as seen as taken for granted and, as such, not worthy of real money.
Yet I see this woman there, always ready to do her job, forgetting her problems and helping everybody else. But she does not do only hair. She is the hairdresser-psychiatrist that can only be found in these areas.
She is the one who receives all the people who need special attention, be it men, women, or children who spend their days in a local association that assists people with Trisomy 21.
They all knock on her door, accompanied by social workers who cannot cut their hair or do their feet because those people don’t let them even touch them. But not with her! She is a sweet woman, who welcomes all of them with a big smile and a calm heart, and they love her for that.
She cuts their hair, wipes their feet, and takes care of their nails while trying to do everything without them getting too agitated, which, sometimes, I have seen myself, is a challenge.
And then they leave, already making an appointment for next time; she takes a deep breath, smiles, and gets more clients, mostly older women whom she helps into the chair, chats with, and puts a smile on their faces.
She is also a social-superwoman-hairdresser fighting against the loneliness of our elderly population. I see many women who don’t need anything aesthetic but just a good conversation or a hug going there for that.
I see some men, too, some widowers who I know are looking for female companionship and want to make a good figure for the older women at the local old nursing home.
But I see mostly her there, spending her life in that tiny salon and so many hours prostrate on her feet, crouched on the floor, filing nails, sweating, and working all day.
And I can picture her at the end of the day, going home and not feeling that her day was worthwhile, neither for her husband nor, unfortunately, for her daughter.
Only the man’s business is valid when she gets home because his work is palpable, seen by the eyes, and touched by the hands. One can feel the cement in his clothes. One can see on the screen of his cell phone a picture of yet another floor built, another building finished.
But, on her part, there is nothing apart from the stories she could talk about, but she realizes are better left unsaid. I see my mother in her, too, not the same story, but with the same conclusion that it is better not to communicate or share. That it’s better to leave it behind, just so as not to feel the disappointment of not being heard, or worse, feel that whatever she has to say is irrelevant.
My hairdresser went on to complain about her lack of freedom, about wanting to do things but only sticking to that mere desire. One story, in particular, caught my attention.
The three of them went on vacation to the south of the country, where there is sun and sea, which she loves so much. When she got there, she wanted to walk, cross a few blocks of buildings, and put her feet in the salty ocean water. But she was stopped and was told that they would do it the next day.
The episode was repeated for three more days, and only on the fourth did she manage to get onto that beach and run to put her feet in the sea.
You may ask me why she didn’t go before, but if only life could be that simple, at least the adult ones, we would be so much happier, it’s true.
Well, her husband didn’t feel like going, and according to the views of old male visions, she could not just simply go alone.
It’s absurd, ridiculous, unbelievable! I know!
She is a more-than-grown-up woman who needs to be allowed to simply exist on her own terms. It doesn’t help either that her daughter doesn't take her side. How lonely that must feel!
I don’t know which feeling of anger and loneliness is greater, feeling uncomprehended, not seen, not heard all the time, or the pain of not feeling the tiniest bit of being loved.
“It’s been like this all my life, his unbridled jealousy, this deprivation of my freedom, and of course, the lack of affection. There were never hands held on the beach, a hug by the sea, a kiss without ulterior motives. It’s been a life like this, always begging for love,” she lastly told me.
I retained that last sentence, and after grooming my hair, I gave her a huge hug. She did what she always does, almost erased our conversation mere seconds ago, smiled, and said, “That’s life.”
Of course, I vented all this with my mother. Different stories but similar aches.
I finished this text while my playlist, almost as if by irony, began playing “Unstoppable” by S.I.A.
Perhaps all these lives, or her life, would be different in another culture, English, American, or northern European.
Who knows?
Around here, in Portugal, feminism seems to be just a wave from somewhere else’s culture. It’s not something that was born here, and it’s tough to get into our own blood.
While in the early seventies, Helen Reddy sang in the English language words as important as in the song “I am a woman” and made sure we heard her “roar.” However, in Portugal, at the same time, during a fascist dictatorship, a man could murder a woman and not even go to jail for it!
At the same time, a woman did not even wear physical or metaphorical pants!
Now, in “my time,” these days we live in, it is still in English that you guys have S.I.A singing clearly at the top of her lungs, another modern feminist anthem roaring too about how she and all of us can be unstoppable.
It’s a song that empowers us women and that it plays on our radios too! But it’s a foreign language, this one I’m typing these words.
For Portuguese women, for most of them, they are only sounds, vain foreigners words that most still do not understand, or if they do, they don’t actually grasp their meaning.
The fight goes on, but this battle is hard.
Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal. I like to write about my country, Portugal. But I also enjoy politics, economics, and issues concerning the climate crisis I’m witnessing in my life and where I live.
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