Existe um jeito certo de ser homem
Translator: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I have a very strong and specific
childhood recollection
from when I was about ten years old.
I was in a very traditional
Catholic school in Rio de Janeiro,
and in one of the weekly soccer
training sessions we had,
a friend of mine played a joke on me.
During our break time to drink water,
I was leaning over the drinking fountain,
and he came up next to me and said,
“Bernardo, I think you stepped
on something. Look at your foot.”
As I had my hands
resting on the drinking fountain,
I did what seemed most logical to me:
I bent my knee so I could see
the sole of my foot over my shoulder.
I moved like this,
and I heard everybody laughing.
I realized I had fallen for a joke.
People laughed and said,
“Oh, your little ballerina foot,
sissy foot, queer foot,”
things like that.
This game that kids
may still play nowadays
was a kind of manhood test,
and the way I looked at my foot
was the wrong way to look.
The right way would be like this:
flexing my knee in front.
In other words,
this was a man’s way
of looking at his foot.
At the time, like any child
used to these games,
I was embarrassed, but I also
found it funny and laughed.
But it was also from that moment,
still very young,
that I understood
that, depending on how I spoke,
how I moved, how I looked
at my hand or foot,
some judgment would be made
about my masculinity.
And that was a huge concern for me.
I was the youngest child
of a simple, conservative family,
mostly engineers or military men,
and from a very young age,
I knew that I was different.
I just couldn’t understand
at the time that I was gay
because it had never been taught to me,
and I didn’t have any references.
The internet was still a new thing,
and TV shows and movies
that touched on this subject
were always in the form
of tragedy or mockery.
So I could only associate
the fact that I was different
with some irreversible flaw in my manhood
which I had to hide at all costs
and compensate by being
as macho as possible.
But to this day,
I’m pretty convinced
that when people meet me,
they probably think I put on my voice
and control my way
of gesturing and moving,
even though they’re things
I can’t change naturally.
I recognize that I do all these things
because from when I was a child,
I learned to micromanage my movements
to fit in with what
I understood as masculine.
It didn’t take long
for this strict behavior
that I had throughout
my adolescence and adult life
to go beyond the physical
and begin to influence my way of thinking,
my way of making decisions
and my way of dealing
with difficult feelings,
such as vulnerability and fragility,
which are part of any man’s maturation.
We talk much more about it nowadays,
usually under the name
of “toxic masculinity,”
this idea that a man
needs to be macho, be tough,
have a deep voice,
be always under control.
These are all codes that define
what the so-called “man’s way” is.
These codes started
to get really difficult for me
when I was about 20 years old,
and I couldn’t manage not to talk
about my sexuality anymore.
From that time, I started
to live openly as a gay man
for my family and friends,
at college, at work.
I had the privilege of having a family
that respected me in the process,
but as for those around me,
this was not something normal.
Friends of mine stayed away,
I started to be less well-received
in the places I frequented,
I started having difficulties at work
that I’d never had before,
and from then on, I learned
to live with prejudice in my life.
Only this prejudice didn’t come
just from the outside;
it came especially from inside.
That demand I had for masculinity
continued even after
I came out of the closet.
And there came a time
when I had to stop and face it head-on:
stop to try to understand, for example,
what made me think for such a long time
that the simple act of asking for help
was a show of weakness,
or that being sensitive
was an imperfection in me,
or that to be a real man,
I had to suppress everything
in me that could be feminine.
When I stopped to recognize
this toxic masculinity
that I clearly had inside of me,
I understood the role
it ended up playing in my life
and how important it is to talk about it.
I don’t know if we can, for example,
really understand and confront machismo,
homophobia, misogyny,
or any other form of discrimination
without making an effort to recognize
that we ourselves probably
have several of these prejudices,
sometimes without realizing it,
and most likely, without also noticing
the harm that not talking about it
does to our own health.
To give an example of how
this is a very serious problem,
a study carried out in Brazil,
in 2019 with men and women,
revealed that for almost half
of the men interviewed,
depression is still seen
as an exaggeration, or even a myth,
even though in Brazil,
the suicide rate among men
is four times higher than among women.
This same study also shows
that forms of support
for emotional issues, such as therapy,
are still undervalued by men.
And then, without having
a safe place to talk about it,
they are attracted more easily to violence
or different forms of addiction.
It’s not very hard to imagine
the negative impact
in a country where every seven minutes
a woman is a victim of domestic violence,
and we have around 22 daily crimes
motivated by homophobia,
virtually one per hour.
In other words, this macho culture is not
only toxic, but it can also be dangerous.
Everyone pays the price for it.
This was bothering me to the point
that I felt like
I needed to talk about it,
I needed to study this subject,
and I needed to connect with other people
who also wanted to talk about it.
This exercise ended up
having a much greater positive impact
on my life than I imagined,
so positive that I committed
myself to make it a habit
and go after anything that could help me
in this “detoxification” process.
For example, I’ve always loved
playing soccer,
and I don’t even need to comment
on how sexist the world of sport is
or how especially hostile
soccer is to gay men.
But after some time here in São Paulo,
I had my first contact
with the growing movement of gay men
who get together to play soccer.
Just like I used to do
in school or college,
I started showing up at practice,
even knowing that I didn’t play that well
and I virtually didn’t know anyone there.
Only this time,
instead of going on the field
worried about what the guys
would think of me,
I was in a place where we were playing
in hot pink uniforms,
the team mascot could be a faggot,
the championships
were narrated by drag queens,
and practices were a lot more fun
because no one was teasing
the way you were, the way you talked.
The idea was precisely
to make fun of the strict behavior
that, for me, had always been the norm.
And this very cool experience
with gay soccer
that I only had when
I was almost 30 years old
made it clear to me
how my constant concern
with the judgment of my masculinity
had ended up leaving me closed
to so many things for so long.
I didn’t want to close that door anymore.
Even though I wasn’t very skillful,
I trained with different teams,
participated in national
amateur sport championships
and eventually established
my own LGBTQ soccer and volleyball teams
here in São Paulo,
where I wanted to further expand
this place for women, trans people,
other groups of people
who wanted to practice sports
in a free-of-prejudice place.
I enjoyed this work so much
that I started to use my spare time
to help NGOs in São Paulo
with projects aimed at welcoming
victims of discrimination.
I started to participate
in debates, seminars,
public hearings, and lectures,
where I could talk
about my experience with machismo
and learn a lot about others’ experiences.
This was also becoming a bigger part
of my professional life,
projects with a focus on creating
an increasingly inclusive job market
that is more aware of the effects
prejudice can have
in a professional environment -
conversations I personally never had
in my family and in my career,
and that I didn’t think I could have.
It’s really cool to see
that this is a growing debate,
and it’s clear that
something has to change.
In recent years, it has become
very clear to me
that this change, for me,
only happened in practice
when it went from the inside
to the outside.
My exercise in detoxifying
toxic masculinity
only began when I recognized it in myself,
understood the impact it had on my life
and could have on the others’ lives,
and I committed to fix it.
And I know that, like everyone else,
I still have a long road
of self-knowledge ahead of me.
But if I could share some of what
I’ve learned in recent years
for those interested
in doing a similar exercise,
these three practices
have helped me a lot,
and they could be a good starting point:
The first is to really stop to think
about what we understand as “masculine.”
And that can be several things,
but if they are somehow
still associated with the concept
of the serious, tough, macho man,
as it always was for me -
what helped me a lot
was to learn that, in real life,
this is neither sustainable nor healthy.
It’s part of every man’s life
to feel insecure, fragile,
needing to ask for help,
and just as it’s OK to talk about it,
it’s OK to feel that too.
The second practice
is to start paying attention
to what we say or share
so as not to end up perpetuating
this toxic masculinity,
sometimes unconsciously,
with some comment, a joke,
or a compliment we make
that, deep down, ends up imposing
those codes of behavior
as a condition for a man to be a man.
Or when we still think
there’s a man’s way of doing things,
like looking at the sole of your foot.
The third and final practice
that has really helped me in the process
is to try to go in a direction
beyond simply tolerating or accepting
something that isn’t what I’ve learned
to be right for myself or for others.
I think the coolest thing here
is to recognize the value of that,
because from the moment we start to value
and feed the freedom of another man
to express himself and be what he wants,
we start to feed
that same freedom in ourselves.
By respecting this freedom in me,
I came to understand after so long
that this irreversible flaw
in my masculinity
which I always thought I had,
in practice, was just my own prejudice;
it was just my own toxic masculinity.
And that although it has always been
part of everything I was,
it’s no longer part of the man
I seek to be from now on.
(Applause)