Notes on the May 12 GloboNews debate about men, discomfort, and responsibility
I watched the debate aired by GloboNews on May 12, about education and the role of men in today’s world, and I came away unsettled. Deeply unsettled, to be more honest. Not because men are willing to discuss masculinity. That is necessary, urgent, and, in many cases, long overdue. The discomfort came from somewhere else: from the difficulty, still so visible, of turning criticism into thought without immediately converting it into self-defense. And, more seriously, from the ease with which false information can be stated on national television as if it were an argument.
At one point in the debate, the claim was made that women kill men in greater numbers than men kill women. This is not a controversial opinion, a bold interpretation, or an uncomfortable point of view. It is false. And falsehood, in this field, is never neutral. When a statement like this appears in a debate about masculinity, violence, and education, it does more than get the data wrong. It reverses the scene, scrambles responsibility, and offers the public a distorted version of a brutal reality: the lethal violence that affects women, especially within intimate and domestic spaces, remains deeply shaped by gender, power, and domination. According to data from UNODC and UN Women, in 2024, about 60% of women and girls intentionally killed worldwide were killed by intimate partners or family members; among men who were intentionally killed, that proportion was 11%.
This point matters because femicide is not just any death. We are not talking about a woman murdered during a robbery, an attack, or some random dispute. We are talking about women killed, often, by men who belonged to their most intimate circle: husbands, ex-husbands, partners, former partners, boyfriends, relatives, men with whom they shared a home, affection, dependence, fear, children, or plans for the future. The brutality of femicide also lies in this perversion of intimate space: what should offer some form of shelter becomes a territory of threat. For many women, the home is not merely the setting of everyday life; it can become the place where control is organized, where fear repeats itself, and where violence finds fewer witnesses. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly one in three women worldwide has experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by a non-partner, during her lifetime. In Brazil, the recent data are also devastating: in 2024, 1,492 femicides and 87,545 rapes were recorded, according to the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook published by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security.
That is why, when someone shifts the conversation toward a false equivalence between men and women as agents of violence, they are not merely making a statistical error. They are producing a dangerous discursive operation. Male violence stops appearing as a structural issue and is diluted into a comfortable formula: “everyone suffers, everyone kills, everyone is capable of the worst.” Of course men suffer. Of course women can also commit violence. The problem is using this obvious fact to erase the brutal difference in scale, context, and consequence. Men and women do not appear in these data in the same way: they do not kill in the same proportion, they do not die for the same reasons, they do not exercise violence within the same structures of power, and they do not receive the same kinds of cultural justification. In this context, the statistical lie works as a narcissistic defense because it protects the masculine image before confronting reality. It does not clarify, complicate, or broaden the debate. It simply changes the subject. Instead of asking why violence against women is so persistently committed by men, a false equivalence is produced to ease male discomfort in the face of its own implication.
At another point in the debate, a phrase reappeared that often functions as the emergency button of masculinity under interrogation: “not all men.” Yes, not all men assault, violate, humiliate, or turn resentment into doctrine. That caveat is true, but it often arrives too soon, as a form of escape. Because the question is not whether every man is individually guilty. The point is that when we look at violence against women, at the disqualification of women’s speech, at male camaraderie, at the protection among peers, and at the benefit of the doubt so generously granted to men, what returns is not “every man,” but almost always “a man.” A man who assaults, a man who minimizes, a man who explains, a man who covers things up, a man who asks everyone to calm down, a man who turns a report of violence into an exaggeration, a man who rushes to defend the exception before facing the rule.
Male privilege does not always appear as explicit brutality. Very often, it appears as interpretive generosity. A man makes a mistake, but he was under pressure. He assaults, but he lost control. He humiliates, but he was provoked. He controls, but he loves too much. He interrupts, but he is intense. He overexplains, but he is rational. A woman, on the other hand, reacts and is quickly described as excessive, resentful, hysterical, vindictive, difficult, too emotional. It is in this imbalance that the phrase “not all men” reveals its poverty. It tries to save individuals before examining the structure that protects us.
This is one of the most sophisticated traps of defensive masculinity: speaking endlessly about oneself while believing one is speaking about the world. The “I” appears as testimony, but it can also become a trench. I lived this, I feel this, I think this, I suffered too, I was misunderstood, I also carry pain, I am not the kind of man you are talking about. All of this may be true. The problem begins when male pain demands recognition without accepting responsibility; when it asks to be heard but cannot bear to be displaced; when every challenge is immediately experienced as a personal accusation.
Speaking from a particular place should not become a hiding place. A standpoint can be a starting point, but never a narcissistic free pass. To say “I speak from where I stand” can be an honest gesture, as long as that place remains open to what exceeds it. Otherwise, it becomes a fortress: from here I speak, from here I defend myself, from here I demand to be understood, but I do not necessarily allow myself to be unsettled by what someone else is saying. And when that same position authorizes itself to use false data in order to sustain an argument, we are no longer dealing only with weak reasoning. We are dealing with public irresponsibility.
Lately, I have been trying to think of virility as a defensive construction, a kind of armor built against anything that might evoke fragility, dependence, tenderness, hesitation, or femininity. But we need to go one step further. The problem is not only the armor itself. It is also what happens when someone touches it. When criticism comes too close, many men do not hear a question; they hear a threat. They do not hear an invitation to think; they hear an attempt to humiliate them. And to escape that disturbance, they may resort to almost anything: biography, good intentions, “not all men,” forced comparisons between profoundly unequal forms of violence, distorted data, a calm voice, a reasonable appearance.
The problem is that today there is an entire market promising men a kind of rescue mission back to themselves: courses, conferences, mentorships, communities, speeches about honor, mission, strength, direction, and leadership. None of this is a problem in itself. Men can, and should, create spaces to think about their own experience. The real question is whether these spaces invite responsibility or merely restore authority. Do they help men listen more carefully, or do they simply offer a more polished version of the old fantasy of command? A serious space for thinking about masculinity should not begin by reassuring boys and men that there is nothing wrong with them. It should begin by asking what kind of world taught them to confuse masculinity with domination, control, defensiveness, superiority, and the fear of losing their place.
I write from a place that also implicates me. I do not watch this scene from the outside, as if the problem were always located in some other man: more brutal, more conservative, more resentful, easier to criticize. I was shaped by a culture that grants men advantages that are hard to notice precisely because they often arrive disguised as normality: the right to take up more space, to be heard with more patience, to have one’s words treated as reasonable, to be read as well-intentioned even when interrupting, overexplaining, or defending oneself before listening. That is why recognizing sexism cannot become a certificate of innocence. Criticism only begins to have any value when it forces me to ask where the very thing I condemn has also found shelter in me: in my gestures, my silences, my defenses, my vanities, and the discreet ways I may still want to be seen as reasonable.
The May 12 debate made visible a question many men would rather leave in the realm of silent obviousness: what happens when the male position stops being perceived as a natural place of authority and begins to be treated as what it is: a historical position, socially produced and symbolically protected? Defensive masculinity emerges precisely at this point of instability. When what once operated as tacit privilege begins to be named, many men do not hear a critique of the structure; they hear a threat to their own identity. They react by trying to restore the innocence of the individual before questioning the conditions that favor him. They ask for balance without examining the inequality that made such balance impossible. They claim good intentions without asking about the concrete effects of their gestures. They try to prove that good men exist before recognizing the network of complicities, excuses, and protections that continues to shield men when they cause harm. A masculinity less imprisoned by its own self-image will not come from promises of rescue, nor from pedagogies designed to return men to the comfort of their former centrality. It can only come from a more difficult break: the willingness to bear the fact that what once seemed like nature was privilege; that what once seemed like identity was also a position of power; and that what once seemed like personal defense was, very often, a refusal to listen to the world that this very defense helped produce.
Sources:
Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. (2025). 19º Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. https://forumseguranca.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/anuario-2025.pdf
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, & UN Women. (2025). Femicides in 2024: Global estimates of intimate partner/family member femicides. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/femicides-in-2024-global-estimates-of-intimate-partner-family-member-femicides-en.pdf
World Health Organization. (2024, March 25). Violence against women. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
World Health Organization. (2025). Violence against women prevalence estimates, 2023: Global, regional and national prevalence estimates for intimate partner violence against women and non-partner sexual violence against women. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240116962
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