By Mauricio Ariza Barile,
President of the Council of GENDES, AC

Gabriel Morales Hernández,
Institutional Strengthening Coordinator/ GENDES, AC

Men and caregiving? We have all been cared for, and it is our turn to care for others. It is becoming increasingly clear that men need to be more directly involved in caregiving.Not only because it is one of the strategies to move towards co-responsibility and equality between women and men, but also because of how rewarding caring is for men and that perhaps many of us have not yet experienced it, as a personal development experience that helps us to free ourselves from the burdens imposed by the mandates of machismo.

With the growing discussion around caregiving on different fronts, men find themselves with an opportunity to to move from the habitual “neglect” of our well-being towards healthier and more fulfilling lifestyles for ourselves and for the people around us, leaving behind the belief that being a man means remaining emotionally detached.

Once we consider entering into the logic of care, The first perspective that arises is the domestic sphere.; to care at home because we have been cared for at home; to look after the elderly because we have received care from them; to take care of children because they trust us to start their lives; to collaborate with other caregivers—mostly women—because they are the ones who almost always bear the greatest burden of all these tasks.

Realizing how closely our daily existence is linked to having received and continuing to receive care shows us how caring is rooted first and foremost in reciprocity, in gratitude for having received the possibility of living and growing. There cannot be social models where we have not been cared for and need to care for someone else.Recognizing that one has been cared for leads to the realization of the need to reciprocate by caring, whether to those who have cared for us, to others, and of course to ourselves, thus giving rise to a network of relationships built on care and bound by mutual gratitude. This would be the foundation of an ethics of care.

In this sense, according to Joan Tronto, care is a “generic activity that encompasses everything we do to maintain, perpetuate, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. This world includes our body, ourselves, our environment, and the elements we seek to link in a complex network of support for life.”

Thus, caring is about keeping our world habitable and enabling us to live as well as possible in it. This encompasses and completely transcends the initial notion of care as survival in the home environment, assimilating it with everything we need to achieve a full life, according to the aspirations of each person or community, such as playing, living together, traveling, but also social, economic, and political participation that allows the full development of the capacities of each person and community.

Reviewing this approach from a human rights perspective immediately reveals that The distribution of these tasks has been profoundly unequal.Thus, most caregiving activities have historically been undertaken by women, perpetuating the inequality gaps between women and men at the expense of their opportunities to enjoy life more and to engage in professional and political activities, while the field of these activities has been dominated by men, who have often engaged in irresponsible leisure with regard to their own well-being, that of their families, and that of their communities.

Hence the importance of to promote a care practice aimed at strengthening equality between women and men, which fosters increasing active responsibility for men, as well as opportunities for women to lead a more diversified and enjoyable life.

It is true that the content of care is not prescribed; it is about what each person or group identifies as necessary in each context, not what the "caregiver" wants to provide, as this would entail a risk of authoritarianism even with the best intentions. Here, the transformation of masculinities comes into play again to prevent the search for control and dominance inherent in machismo from being masked under the pretext of care. The ethics of care, then, also presupposes attentive listening, a dialogue of care, to respond appropriately to the care needs of those around us and to understand that no two caregiving processes are identical.

The individual actions we can take through caregiving do not replace the urgent need that has been highlighted by organizations such as GENDES, from the creation of public policies that provide real conditions so that all people can be cared for and care for others by having violence-free spaces in childcare and senior care centers, but also in spaces for coexistence and recreation, as well as flexible work schedules and the availability of efficient public transport, among several others, so that there are no impediments to the full human development of women and men.