Italy: Turetta handed life sentence but patriarchy is not the problem

Filippo Turetta, the 23-year-old confessed murderer of Giulia Cecchettin, was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment by the Venice High Court. In the whole affair surrounding this heinous crime, including the trial, not only Turetta but also the so-called patriarchy was accused. A term that, far from its classical meaning, has taken on a new connotation: the heterosexual man is by nature violent towards women. It is a genetic defect, an anthropological fact confirmed by history and confirmed by current events, an inestimable tendency inherent to masculinity that must be acknowledged by the masculine herd, which must be prepared to undergo treatment in order to mitigate this innate deviance.

For this reason, not only Turetta, but also the patriarchy, and therefore all of us XY chromosome carriers (transsexuals are exempt) were put on trial. And so the verdict could only condemn the defendant and, in his person, machismo, the toxicity of man as man.
Question: but is it an honest, legitimate mass media operation to superimpose the condemnation of an individual's behaviour on the condemnation of a whole anti-values establishment, of a whole anti-culture? In short, and to come back to our case, is it right to see in Turetta a paradigmatic example, a symptom of the social phenomenon in which some men take advantage of women to the point of killing them? And is it therefore right to condemn the latter by condemning the former?

There is no doubt that some criminal convictions, while punishing individuals, condemn entire social systems or phenomena or cultural orientations. Think of the Nuremberg Trials: not only the Nazi hierarchs were put on the stand, but the whole subculture of Aryan supremacy, racism, neo-paganism, which aimed at world domination. Then there was the Palermitan maxi-trial celebrated at the turn of the eighties and nineties, in which dozens and dozens of mafiosi were sentenced. It was rightly called 'maxiprocesso alla mafia' (maxi-trial against the mafia) to emphasise that, in addition to the mafiosi, a whole system of corruption and violence was being condemned.

Finally, let us recall the murder of Saman Abbas, who was killed with the complicity of her relatives, including her parents, because she refused an arranged marriage. The condemnation of the relatives was also the condemnation of a system of 'patriarchal, authoritarian and gerontocratic' social norms, as Anna Bono wrote for the Bussola at the time.

There is no problem, therefore, in the abstract hypothesis that, together with Turetta, we want to condemn something else, something that goes beyond the single news case and encompasses many other similar cases, united in a prevaricating trend to the detriment of women. But what is this other? For the media and social media, it is patriarchy. But we have seen that this meaning of patriarchy is purely ideological, at the service of feminism and the counter-culture awakening.

More specifically, the fact that Turetta killed a woman does not mean that all men are potential murderers. It is trivial even to write that down. So the equation 'condemn Turetta' equals 'condemn all men as equally guilty' does not hold. Moreover, as Bono wrote, "people continue to speak, quite wrongly, of the patriarchy as responsible for the feelings that led Filippo Turetta to kill Giulia Cecchettin. Our society has nothing in common with patriarchy, a social system whose decline in Italy and Europe began with the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, even in patriarchy a boy would not dare to kill anyone for personal reasons, let alone a woman, a resource too precious for a community to deprive itself of in order to please him".

Could Giulia's murderer embody another kind of anti-culture? It can, and paradoxically the feminist one, which has made men less virile, less responsible, less able to bear disappointment and failure. It has undermined their social roles, made them more insecure, more uncertain, more cowardly. So the problem of Turetta and many other real or potential Turettists may not be patriarchy, but effeminacy. Not in the sense of external poses reminiscent of the movements of the fairer sex, but in the sense of the fragility of today's man, who rejects the idea of sacrificing himself for a woman, not least because she is so emancipated that she no longer needs a man; in the sense of the weakness of not knowing how to accept one's own limits, one's own defeats and the "no" of others.

All this culture of fluidity has watered down the man, diluted his natural characteristics and prerogatives, which are strength - not violence, which is the bullying of the weak - courage, responsibility, resourcefulness. A virile man, and therefore a true man, does not kill a woman, but lets himself be killed to defend her. This is what Saint Paul writes: "Husbands should be ready to die for their wives, just as Christ died for his Bride, the Church" (cf. Eph 5:25). This is a point of reference which, before being a point of faith, is an anthropological point of reference, that is to say, a natural orientation in the heart of every man.

Turetta, then, if we really want to clothe his act and his condemnation with a symbolic value, represents the man who has been chewed up by massive thinking, emptied from the inside of his character and finally spat out because he is now insipid. More than a man, a homunculus who demands everything and is always offended when he does not get what he wants, because that is how he has been brought up since childhood. Who has exchanged moderation and gentleness for intemperance and anger, healthy self-loathing for contempt of those who do not appreciate him, gift for possession. Love for hate.