Male Honor as Metaphor for Male Power

While it is clear that the majority of severely violent domestic eruptions don't di­rectly involve issues of betrayal or adultery per se, the fact that nearly all of the fo- cus-group discussions revolved around these themes is significant.

As domestic assault itself becomes criminalized, alternative modes of washing or maintaining male honor are beginning to emerge. Like the man who threw acid into the eyes of the rival he found in bed with his wife, some men still employ explicit violence, but fall short of drawing blood and actual homicide. Another man per­ceived a visitor under his bed when he arrived home and called neighbors to the door to “see a lovely painting in his house.” Then, with witnesses at the door and revolver close at hand, he ordered the intruder to leave and to take the wife with him as his punishment. He was praised by the men in the focus group where the story was re­counted as having “more than” preserved his honor: He showed himself to still be in control and calling the shots, while brandishing a threat of violence that was believ­able enough that he did not need to use it.

In relating these examples, men expanded on the mandate to be in control. Men whose wives' leashes were too long, whose wives could be found constantly chatting in other people's doorways, or whose wives traveled alone without husbandly vigi­lance, were described as acomodados or conformados.

One case frequently mentioned in several different focus groups illustrates this point. In this instance, neighbors were certain that a woman had committed adultery with another man; of interest to onlookers was the fact that the husband failed to produce an adequate reaction—violent or otherwise—toward preserving his honor. The case was discussed in a group of older men, including three men in their late for­ties or fifties, all of whom had self-disclosed histories of violence of various levels (from “destroying the house” to a case my assistants and I knew involved chronic battery). This group, which laughingly dubbed itself “the gang of machos” [a turma dos machistas], produced an account representative of prevailing values around vio­lence and masculinity. Jorginho, a man known to be a wife-batterer and the only one who lived in the immediate area where the case occurred, began by telling about how the volatile information reached his ears.

Jorginho—... one day when my wife was there, a conversation arose about a guy who lives here that was being wronged [prejudicado], let's just say, corno.... I went to [the person who was gossiping] and I said, oi, I hope this conversation doesn't happen again here in this place, and especially when my woman is here....

situation got more and more heated, when on a certain day, he was coming home, arriving in the door, and he saw the banana [mess] there. He saw it, no one told him, because he was the type that for him, everyone else was a galhudo. “You’re a galhudo! You’re a galhudo!”

Sarah—What’s a galhudo?

Carlos (research assistant)—Horns [chifres].

Sarah—Ah.

Jorginho—[Tells in detail about the man arriving and seeing]... Because how is it that you are a married guy, you have responsibility with your family, how are you gonna find another guy in your bed... on top of your woman?

Helio—Ave Maria!

Jorginho—So, the people here were adding fuel to the fire... [but] God cooled it down, threw water and cooled it down. About fifteen days later, my youngest son calls me: “Jorginho, come quick, Fulano [so-and so] is going to kill Fulana [the wife] and the otro [the “other”; the lover]—he’s got a gun in his hand!” So I went... I told him to put the gun away. But in this interval he’d thrown the other guy out [of the neighborhood], the guy almost broke his neck...He tore this [indicates the skin at his neck] all apart.... [Goes on to explain how he wouldn’t let the guy inside his house (anymore?), how “friends” shouldn’t be allowed inside one’s house in general].

Although it seems that Jorginho is saying the man showed himself capable of a “re­action,” later he returned to the incident and made clear that whatever action the man had taken was inadequately resolute.

Jorginho—... He didn’t have any consideration for himself as an individual.... So, right away, the person should isolate [himself]... Because, in a case like this with me—I am a MAN!! With me, I’m not going to do anything to her, but I’m simply going to leave the locale. Not stay there, living, because it’s ugly for me if all the guys are looking at me and laughing in my face. He arrives here below and everyone’s psst-psst [gossiping].... Helio—The people here are horrible.

Carlos—And he’s still living here?

Sarah—What if he had avenged himself... ?

Helio—He had to be a man. He lacked the machismo [here: ability to be a man].

Jorginho—He was not a man! Sarah, it’s just like he said, he wasn’t a man!

Flavio (research assistant)—What do you think he should have done?

Jorginho—Anything! Anything at all. So that his name...

Sarah—For example...

Jorginho—Anything! So he wouldn't have doubted his own name! Even a shout, he needed to give, but he didn't do anything: he was paralyzed.

Not all the men in this group agreed that the cuckolded man should have left the neighborhood, just as not everyone thought that he necessarily had to react with vio­lence to preserve his honor. But there was a consensus over his need to do some- thing—anything—to preserve his name, his honor. This consensus was frustrated by the lack of an appropriate option, particularly in the face of violence becoming an in­creasingly delegitimated response.

Another group comprised of some of the youngest male participants, many of whom have been raised in female-headed households, discussed this same case. Most maintained that they would not need to “react,” or actively avenge their honor with violence. The unfaithful woman had already shown her morals to be beneath those of her man in the eyes of all, so he had already won: “My honor stays right where it was.”

Chico, the group's most outspoken member, begins by hypothetically placing himself in the betrayed man's place.

Chico—... from the moment I put her in my house, she changes. Her change is going to hurt [prejudicar] her, not me, because you know for the man, nao pega nada [nothing sticks; no harm done].... If she takes someone else: I accept it. You know why I accept it? Because this already happened with me, you understand? I'm going to pass by and the guys will say, “Ah, Fulano [so-and-so] is a corno.''' I'm going to say, “Not me,” I'm still going to have high morale, you know why? Because she’s doing something that everyone will always criticize, and I'm not.

If this happened with me... I'd break up with her. My personality isn't like just any man's: While they're over there thinking about making fun of me, I'm going to go about living my life.... Because of the gozaςoes [jests, mockeries], do you think I'm going to grab her, beat her; am I going to kill her? No: I want God to help her and not to abandon me... let her live her life and let the guys talk, make gozaςoes. If they think that to show them that I'm the maioral [the boss, the greatest], that I'm the machao [big macho],... no way!

Pablo—First, you're going to lose your freedom, so what's that going to resolve? You took away her life and also lose your freedom, and you can lose your life as well.

Chico—Of course! Why should I do anything to her...

Pablo—If you think of doing it to someone else, it can also happen to you.

Itamar—It could even hurt you....

Chico—Understand, Itamar,... if it got to the point where I killed her and her family afterward, what's going to happen? Maybe not with me,... but if he doesn't avenge himself with me, he'll get my brother, an aunt of mine, even my own mother, and then what?... I could stop, and analyze, and avoid all that, understand?... [They can call me corno]... and of course I'm going to be hurt by that, inside, but I'm not going to show this to him, because he's there talking, “Ah, man, aren't you going to do anything? What about your honor?” No. My honor stays where it was!

This important difference, where a man views his female partner's agency and sub­jectivity as disjoined from his own, seems to result at least in part from the effects of recent criminalization, as the risk of “losing my liberty” was always cited. At the same time, as members of the poorer socioeconomic classes, these men would per­haps never have been party to the same level of impunity before the law that their middle- and upper-class counterparts enjoyed.

That this assertion of “autonomous male honor” is a relatively new and precari­ous form of resistance to inculcated norms and scripts is evident in the very insis­tence with which these scripts still insinuate themselves into Chico's thinking, forc­ing him to engage in a dialogue with them. He claims his honor is immune to the aspersions of his circle of male friends and neighbors, and yet he has rather exhaus­tively articulated in his own mind how he will respond to them, and indeed, he iden­tifies the moment in which “the guys” are questioning his honor as precisely the juncture in which he would typically be compelled to use physical violence.

This research focuses on a case study involving an extended family that aptly demonstrates this generational shift. In fact, both Jorginho and Chico—the two fo- cus-group participants whose views are contrasted above—are family members. My familiarity with the family spans four living generations of an extended family, in which four distinct conjugal forms exist: matrifocal (single mothers, peripheral fa­thers), authoritarian couple (with domestic violence), nuclear couple (more egalitar­ian), and parallel (married men with more than one stable relationship). The family has lived in the neighborhood—once considered remote jungle but now fairly central as the city of Salvador has expanded—for six generations. A terreiro (temple) of Candomble (Brazil's most prominent Afro-Brazilian religion) has been part of the settlement since anyone can remember.

The backbone of this family is formed by the women: the widowed mae-de-santo (mother-of-saint, or Candomble priestess) matriarch; her only daughter who runs the household; her granddaughter; and great-granddaughter. Each of the conjugal forms given above are present in the extended family, affording an opportunity to compare corresponding styles of masculinity. As represented here by Chico, the sons of autonomous mothers (of matrifocal or nuclear couples) seemed far more disposed to view female partners as discrete agents than were sons raised by authoritarian fathers and subordinated mothers. Relatedly, younger sons of matrifocal and nuclear fami­lies were the most likely to subscribe to alternative models of male honor whose preservation did not mandate the use of violence.