To be a guest at an international hotel, one of this big gorgeous, fully equipped hotels with 24/7 guest assistance is making me always feel strange. The reason is quite easy, I am not usually a guest at five-star-high-security-profile-hotels.

In my own life I do everything by myself, well sharing with my partner.
In my own life there are not, at each and every corner, smiling men and women ready to open the door, to call for the elevator, to bring up the key for the room door that does not work.

And of course, it is not all about the magnificent hall, the great food variety but it is about the men. Their smiles, their kindness, their respectful distance. And why about them? Because of the contrasting reality of an abusive masculinity that has been depicted during these intense days of training. The overwhelming examples of  torturing, blackmailing, humiliating, denying and controlling over their female companions, wives, sister-in-law, daughters...

This is what make me experience ambivalent feelings each time I am passing trough the main-hall or walking trough the room corridor. Even if absolutely unjustified I find myself trapped in the loop  of the same query: “how this man is in his real life? … “Is he gentle? respectful? devoted?” “Is he a jailer? a tormentor? a detractor?”.

It is like walking into an alive Dorian Gray duality: the hotel represent the eternal young and beauty portrait of this society, while exposed, in the safe and close space of the workshop, is the distressing and sore one.

Than of course come the exception which probably represent just the top of the iceberg of a respectful masculinity, an engaged and sensitive one that refuse to be in control of, that is an allies for diversity and which battle and struggle against prejudice.

This masculinity has choose the road of equality with femininity and bravely declare himself as feminist. In some other time and space I would have smiled suspiciously. I would have questioned, I would have asked one more question to prove myself that this is possible and true. And of course it is possible and it is true. Men can be feminists as well as women can be the best defenders and promoters of patriarchal believes, the stronger and the most sophisticated warders and keepers of female victims.

The training is finished. Seventeen wonderful and intense individual digital stories have been screened. I feel enriched and transformed. I got a kaleidoscope of images, sensation, new depths and layers. My lenses are refined, perspective and prospective are joint and merged. Pakistan is not any-more a remote landscape but a real place where feminists activist, male and female, everyday work on changing the patriarchal notion of been a woman, a girl.

As amulets, together with the stories, a necklace, a ring, two pairs of earrings and a small magic colourful bag, gifts that just make visible the bond created among ourselves during the journey of the digital story workshop.

h-vale

Fichier attaché	Date	Taille
amalefeministperspective.JPG	11/06/10 3:12 pm	25.54 Ko