March 8 often arrives accompanied by flowers, tributes, and well-intentioned phrases. Women are celebrated for their strength, their sensitivity, their capacity to carry the world on their shoulders while the world itself so often insists on pushing them to the margins. There is something legitimate in this gesture. After all, every right women have gained throughout history was wrested from structures that, for centuries, were designed to keep them in a secondary position. The right to vote, access to education, autonomy over their own bodies, presence in positions of power. None of these were freely granted. They were the result of struggle, persistence, and a courage that has crossed generations.
Yet perhaps it is necessary to go a little beyond celebration. Violence against women rarely begins with the extreme events that make headlines. It begins much earlier, in quieter corners of culture. It begins when boys learn, from an early age, to treat anything associated with the feminine as lesser. When being sensitive, caring, or gentle becomes equated with weakness. When tenderness becomes something to ridicule, and hardness becomes proof of masculinity.
This is not merely about individual behavior. It is about a deeply rooted cultural code. For centuries, virility was taught as a synonym for dominance, vigor, and emotional distance. Loving too openly seemed suspicious. Showing tenderness seemed dangerous. Respecting a woman as an equal often appeared incompatible with the model of manhood society itself had helped construct. Within that framework, desiring women became acceptable, but admiring them did not always follow.
Perhaps this is why discomfort with women in positions of power still persists in so many environments. Not because women lack competence, but because the culture that shaped many men has not yet fully learned how to recognize authority in the feminine. The issue is not only legal or political. It is also symbolic and psychological.
Celebrating March 8, therefore, means recognizing important achievements. But it can also be an opportunity to look more honestly at the structures that still organize our relationships. The story of women in society is not only the story of a struggle for rights. It is also the story of how an entire civilization learned, over centuries, to think of the masculine as the center and the feminine as the margin. And some of those ideas, even when no longer spoken aloud, continue to circulate quietly beneath the surface.
When force becomes ideology
Throughout history, this structure was not sustained by force alone. If male domination had depended exclusively on physical strength, it likely would not have endured with such stability for millennia. Physical force can impose obedience for a time. But for something to last across generations, something more sophisticated is required. Force must be transformed into norm, habit into morality, and inequality into the appearance of natural order.
For centuries, religions, philosophies, and scientific discourses helped sustain this symbolic architecture. In many ancient texts, the feminine appears associated with disorder, chaos, unstable matter that must be governed by a supposedly higher masculine reason. Pythagoras, in an epigraph cited by Simone de Beauvoir, summarized this worldview brutally when he wrote that there is a good principle that created order, light, and man, and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman. The phrase may seem distant in time, yet it reveals something profound about how Western culture organized its hierarchies.
This was not merely an isolated opinion. It was a system of thought that endured for centuries and taught men and women to occupy very specific positions within society. Philosopher Olivia Gazalé notes that male domination was sustained not only by biological advantage but by a true cosmology designed to place man at the center of the world. Physical strength, when it existed, was only the starting point. What ensured its persistence was the transformation of that strength into ideology.
Once inequality is presented as natural, it no longer appears unjust. It simply becomes the way things are. And when this narrative repeats itself across generations, it eventually becomes internalized even by those who are harmed by it.
Perhaps this is why Simone de Beauvoir wrote one of the most incisive lines ever devoted to this subject. Everything men have written about women, she warned, should be viewed with suspicion, for they are at once judge and party.
This observation is not merely a literary critique. It is a warning about how the narratives that organize a society are rarely neutral. Those who hold the power to define the world often also define the roles each person will occupy within it.
When history begins to change
If male domination was historically constructed, it also began, at some point, to be challenged. And that challenge did not arise suddenly. It emerged through long processes, often quiet ones, led by women who refused the place assigned to them.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women began occupying spaces that had long been systematically denied to them. They fought for the right to vote, access to education, legal recognition, and the possibility of working and supporting their own lives. These achievements were not merely legal changes. They profoundly altered the way society imagined the place of women.
Simone de Beauvoir observed with precision that female autonomy could not be sustained by abstract rights alone. The vote, for example, was an important step forward, but it was not enough to transform women’s condition if it was not accompanied by economic independence. For centuries, many women were legally free but materially dependent. And dependence rarely produces freedom.
Work, in this sense, became one of the great fissures in the traditional order. When a woman begins to sustain her own existence, something shifts in the symbolic architecture that organized relations between the sexes. Between her and the world there is no longer necessarily a male intermediary. She ceases to be defined only through her relationship to a father, husband, or children, and begins to exist also as a subject of projects, choices, and responsibilities.
These transformations were decisive. They opened paths that today may appear natural but were once considered unthinkable. Yet history rarely moves in a straight line. Each achievement generates new tensions and new ways in which power reorganizes itself.
The new forms of control
When certain structures begin to crumble, others quickly arise to occupy the space they leave behind. Domination rarely disappears entirely. It simply changes language.
If female submission was once justified through religious or moral arguments, modernity developed subtler mechanisms of control. One of the most persistent may be what Naomi Wolf called the beauty myth.
As women gained greater presence in public life, pressure on their bodies intensified. Beauty became a new form of social discipline. It was no longer simply about appearing attractive but about conforming to standards that were often unattainable. The female body became a permanent field of judgment, as if a woman’s value still depended, in some measure, on her ability to satisfy the gaze of others.
This mechanism does not act alone. It interacts with other cultural and institutional structures that historically paid little attention to the specificities of female experience. In medicine, for instance, the male body was long treated as the universal model. Many aspects of women’s health were neglected or interpreted merely as variations of a male standard.
Researchers such as Lisa Mosconi have highlighted how complex phenomena like menopause were, for decades, treated in fragmented or superficial ways. Cognitive, emotional, and neurological symptoms were frequently minimized or reduced to a supposed female psychological fragility, as if the female body continued to be interpreted through parameters that were never truly designed to understand it.
These examples remind us that social transformations do not automatically eliminate deeper structures of inequality. Often they simply shift the terrain on which those inequalities operate.
What do men have to do with this?
In the face of all this, many men still position themselves as spectators of an issue that does not concern them directly. Violence against women, persistent inequalities, and the cultural pressures placed upon the feminine are discussed as if they were external problems, something men merely observe from a distance. But that distance is illusory.
The culture that shaped the place of women also shaped the way men learn to be men. The same code that taught generations of women to accept secondary roles also taught many men to distrust tenderness, to fear vulnerability, and to confuse virility with domination. In this sense, the issue does not concern women alone. It runs through the very construction of masculinity.
For that reason, it is not enough for a man to claim understanding simply because women exist in his life. Having a mother, a sister, a partner, or a daughter does not automatically produce a deeper understanding of female experience. Genuine recognition requires something more demanding. It requires a willingness to examine cultural habits, to question silent privileges, and above all to learn how to listen without immediately turning that listening into defense or justification.
For a long time, many men learned how to speak about women. The challenge now may be learning to reflect more carefully on what, within male culture itself, helped construct certain forms of inequality. This does not mean assuming an abstract or personal guilt. It means recognizing that none of us is formed outside the symbolic structures of the society in which we live.
Thinking about the place of women in society also means allowing men to examine critically how virility has been taught, reproduced, and celebrated across generations. Perhaps we must ask more honestly what kind of masculinity we wish to continue transmitting.
This exercise does not diminish men. On the contrary, it opens the possibility of forms of coexistence less based on competition and more grounded in reciprocity.
March 8 — between celebration and awareness
March 8 exists to remind us of achievements that must not be forgotten. Political rights, access to education, participation in the workforce, autonomy over one’s own life. Each of these transformations reshaped the social landscape and opened paths that today may appear natural but were, for a long time, denied to women.
Celebrating this date therefore makes sense. It is a gesture of historical recognition. It is also a tribute to the generations of women who faced open and silent resistance so that others could live under somewhat broader conditions of freedom.
Yet perhaps the deepest value of March 8 lies precisely in reminding us that history is still unfolding. The structures that organized inequality between men and women for centuries do not disappear overnight. They transform, adapt, sometimes become more discreet, yet remain present in the ways we raise our children, in the expectations we project onto men and women, and in how we interpret power, care, desire, and authority.
Perhaps this is why the date should not be only a moment of tribute, but also an invitation to lucidity. A moment to recognize how far we have come and, at the same time, to ask honestly how much still needs to change.
Because in the end the question that remains is both simple and unsettling.
What kind of society are we truly willing to build when we speak of equality between men and women? And what is each of us willing to transform within ourselves so that this equality becomes more than a promise and begins to take shape as an everyday reality?
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (2019). O segundo sexo: Fatos e mitos (Vol. 1). Nova Fronteira.
Beauvoir, S. de. (2019). O segundo sexo: A experiência vivida (Vol. 2). Nova Fronteira.
Corbin, A. (2013). A necessária manifestação da energia sexual. In A. Corbin, J.-J. Courtine & G. Vigarello (Orgs.), História da virilidade: O triunfo da virilidade no século XIX (Vol. 2). Vozes.
Gazalé, O. (2017). Le mythe de la virilité: Un piège pour les deux sexes. Robert Laffont.
Iaconelli, V. (2024). Felicidade ordinária. Zahar.
Mosconi, L. (2024). O cérebro e a menopausa. Harper Colins.
Wolf, N. (2020). O mito da beleza: Como as imagens de beleza são usadas contra as mulheres. Rosa dos Tempos.
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