Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
"Women are irrational beings.
As they are always prone to outbursts,
they need the custody of a man, the rational one in the family.
At the beginning of their lives, they will be reassured by a father.
And if they learn properly,
they will get a good husband to take care of."
(Laughter)
This phrase was found in a manual's introduction,
a marriage manual for girls and young ladies,
that was distributed around the world in different languages,
in the 1930s.
But the idea itself is five thousand years old,
in the whole planet, in all cultures, at all moments.
In 1915, women couldn't vote in any country in the world.
In 2015, that is today, 100 years later,
65 countries are run by women.
(Applause)
In 1910, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize.
The only woman who was awarded the Nobel Prize twice.
(Applause)
But the French Academy of Science
said her merits were not enough to be an academic.
And in 1979, the first woman was admitted in the French Academy of Science.
36 years ago.
Many of you here had already finished elementary school.
Harvard University has a very prestigious business school
that just in 1965,
they are celebrating that 50 years ago,
admitted a woman in its masters programs.
Yale University began to admit women in 1972.
Princeton University, in 1974.
And we can go on and on.
This was, this idea,
that women are only useful to rise kids and take care of their husbands,
that are irrational and hysterical beings,
was the truth, a century ago.
Women believed that.
There were 1.8 billion people in the world at that time
and almost all of them, take away 5,000 perhaps, believed that.
It was the truth of the matter.
Why did the world change so much in a century?
In fact, it's the last 50 years when it changed.
Because we are living
the most amazing transformation in the history of human culture.
We're shifting from one conceptual paradigm to another conceptual paradigm.
It's a revolution,
that all the revolutions we lived, the political, economical, etc.,
are meaningless compared to this one.
We are leaving aside the idea that the truth is true,
to the idea that the truth is a lie.
Facts don't exist, only interpretations exist.
Human beings don't have a direct relationship with the world;
we relate to the world through language.
That is, we don't see the world, we see our idea of the world.
2500 years ago, Pindar expressed this in a poem.
Now, neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists are studying this.
We can see the world our mind lets us see,
not any world, not the objective world.
Nowadays, there is a big discussion
on whether we will be able to understand
the world that exists out there or not.
When someone says there are no facts, just interpretations,
many people think that the interpretation is somewhat a personal delirium,
that the interpretation is subjective.
Interpretations are strong social arguments,
are the basis of ideas.
We don't have any human idea
that hasn't emerged from an interpretative framework.
What is an interpretative framework?
What day is it today?
September, 24th.
Does anybody doubt this?
What day is it today for you?
Well, we agree that it is September, 24th
because all of us here,
agree with the Gregorian calendar.
But if we used the Chinese calendar,
the Jewish calendar, or any of the 500 existing calendars,
September 24th would make no sense.
Everything we say, everything we think, every milestone we reach,
is part of a really arduous social construction
that we have automated and naturalized.
Cats live without a calendar.
My dog, Chiap, who I love and is now at home alone,
misbehaving,
doesn't know the time, he doesn't know when I will arrive.
He doesn't look at the watch.
If humans didn't have these conceptual frameworks,
we would have a relationship with the world
that would be more like a stimulus-response one.
But surely, the world we would live in would have no sense.
Every idea is the result of its age, not of a brilliant mind.
We have been told that Newton was sitting under a tree,
he saw an apple fell and wrote about the Universal Law of Gravitation.
What a genius!
But this is not the way ideas appear; ideas arise in an age.
If Darwin had lived in the 14th century and been as genius as he was,
he would have never been able to develop the theory of evolution.
He would have missed the journeys he made, the animals he saw,
the whole British Museum collection, the fossils, etc.
Besides discussing investigations
accumulated over 500 years
through books and the printing press.
In the 14th century, the printing press didn't even exist.
It doesn't matter how great a man can be,
if he doesn't have a context, he can't think of an idea.
Wise people, geniuses, are those who are able to synthesize an idea,
but the age generates it.
The theory of evolution could only be born in the 19th century
or never be born;
but if it were to be born, was in the 19th century.
The same happens with the theory of relativity,
quantum mechanics,
and with what we are thinking now.
And the same, with what we see in scientific movements,
in technological innovations,
that are more developed due to this new paradigm,
that facts do not exist, just interpretations do.
When we see economics, politics and social fields,
the change is revolutionary.
As we have seen, over thousand years,
women were the ones who were in charge of the house and raised children.
However, in less than 100 years, they ended up ruling countries,
now half of the scientists in the world are women,
half of the professors are women.
See all the creative energy the humanity missed
by thinking that women were only useful as diaper wipers.
Humanity missed so many things! So much medicine!
So much intelligence and creativity!
Wrong ideas are monstrous.
There is an idea that we can track back
because it was created 150 years ago and it's a model to study this process,
which is the creation of homosexuality.
Until 1860, there were no homosexuals in the world.
You would say, how come?
And the Greeks and the Romans and the penguins and all those things?
And yes, the relationships between people of the same gender,
both men and women,
or any other transgender you can imagine today,
always existed in all cultures and ages.
They are even documented
in many animal species beyond the human being.
But it was never thought before
that the sexuality of an "abnormal" person
-as it was called at that time-
determined how this person was as a whole.
Sexual identity was created.
It wasn't an innocent concept.
It was the moment of creation of the Victorian morality,
one of the biggest and strongest ways of social control for a century and half,
that ever existed.
The same as turning sex into a sin by the Catholic Church.
When we can't do something we want to do:
"Don't masturbate!"
You will do it with guilt,
I mean, you will do it, but you will feel guilty.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Right?
Guilt is a big form of social control.
(Applause)
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or husband.
You will feel guilty and maybe although you feel guilty, you do it.
It is a terrible form of social control,
because it dominates us twice.
On one hand, they know we cannot quit, as if we were forbidden from eating.
We can't stop eating. That's why we are all fat.
Through the prohibition of homosexuality, through censorship
a trash can was created
where all the things wrong in society, from the sexual point of view,
were thrown there.
Homosexuals, for a century, were terribly persecuted
in the whole world.
They couldn't speak out, couldn't stand up for themselves,
the same as women before, right?
Or the Jews, or the black people, recently liberated from slavery,
imagine when they were slaves.
The situation of homosexuals also changed,
black people's and the Jew' as well.
None of those situations is ideal, but we all live much better,
more free and in an environment much more tolerant than a 100 years ago,
50 years, 20 years ago.
10 years ago,
homosexuals in Argentina not only didn't have the right to get married,
but also didn't have the right to give blood,
now this has ended.
In many parts of the world,
homosexuals are still condemned to be executed.
But in many other parts of the world, they are totally legal today.
This was possible due to the change of paradigm
and because the change of paradigm allowed
the fight of gays, Jews, women, black people, etc., etc.,
-all the oppressed-
to assume their identity, earn respect and then, make the rest understand
that they are also human beings, with full rights.
But there's a problem with social struggles:
you have to put yourself into the prison that discriminated against you.
To be respected as a Jew, I just have to be a Jew.
To be respected as a woman, I just have to be a woman.
To be respected as a black person, be a black person and the same with gays.
And gays, women, Jews, black people, white people, everybody,
are complete, complex and contradictory people.
Maybe, I don't want to go to bed with a guy, I don't know!
But, however, I have to assume that.
Identity is a prison, perhaps the most terrible one.
(Applause)
50 years ago, see how old I am, I was a homosexual kid.
I had no idea what was it like to be a homosexual kid.
In fact, I didn't know the word homosexual and I wasn't called this way.
My classmates would say, "We are going to kick your ass, you fat faggot."
(Laughter)
"Don't look at me, queer."
(Laughter)
I had no idea what being a queer, a fat faggot or a homosexual was.
And at the same time I knew that this put people off,
that it was something I had, I didn't know what it was.
I'd come home from school and notice my father, who adored me,
looking at me, making me feel: "What did I do wrong to have a son like this?"
What was "like this"?
I had to learn what it was "like this," I had to learn to be a homosexual.
I had to become homosexual and insist on being homosexual.
To assume the gay identity; it had its bright side,
I learned to earn respect.
Jews and women here, and if we have black people too,
they have learned the same.
I learned that I had to know ten times more than the rest,
do everything better than the rest,
not to be awarded a prize, a position, or to be praised,
just no to be rejected.
I had to work really hard, and I learned a lot.
But at the same time, I put myself into a terrible prison,
which was being gay 24 hours a day.
I stopped being a person, and I am a person,
like any other person in the world, I am contradictory, complete and complex.
It took me 50 years to convince the rest of acquaintances,
at public interventions,
to convince other people
that homosexuals are people, and we are human beings.
And it took me 50 years to learn that I am a person too.
That means I am complete, complex and contradictory,
and I don't have to be gay 24 hours a day, I have to escape from the identity.
20 or 30 years ago, this idea I had,
after understanding that facts don't exist --
(Applause)
interpretations exist --
I wanted to say facts don't exist, contradictions exist.
Because that's the point, we are contradictory.
Facts don't exist, contradictions exist.
And contradictions are interpretations.
Facts do not exist, interpretations do,
that means
I was put into a prison, into a place,
I had to assume it and stay there to defend myself.
"And now I want to break free," I said, and when I incarnated that,
because when that happens, it triggers something in us,
when it's only in our heads, it's not useful,
when it was part of me, I got out of prison, of my own prison.
And it was so wonderful.
Have you thought about what prison are you in?
(Applause)