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Chile and a New Chapter in the “Culture War”

The retrograde words of Senator Vanessa Kaiser

By Andres Kogan Valderrama

HAVANA TIMES – The recent intervention by Senator Vanessa Kaiser in the Senate’s Commission on Women and Gender Equality has sparked strong controversy (1), as if the statements made by her two brothers (Axel and Johannes) were not enough. All of this is happening in a context where the so-called “culture war” of the far right continues to gain ground.

In that intervention, Vanessa Kaiser proposed eliminating the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality in order to create, in its place, a Ministry of Men in Chile. She argued that men are at a greater disadvantage than women since, unlike them, we go to war, carry out the hardest jobs, and commit suicide four times more often.

It is true that men live fewer years than women, commit suicide far more frequently, and often expose their lives to extreme risks. However, that is precisely the result of patriarchal mandates and a masculinity of death that Vanessa Kaiser ends up normalizing........

© Havana Times