1 LOS MACHOS TAMBIEN LLORAN: TELEVISA AND ... - CLACSO

LOS MACHOS TAMBIEN LLORAN:
TELEVISA AND THE POSTNATIONAL MAN
Scholars writing about constructs and practices of gender,
family and sexuality have concurred that male adultery and
polygamy have a long history in Mexico, as elsewhere in the
world. Contributors to the volume Presencia y transparencia: La
mujer en la historia de México give us a picture of the evolution
of the so-called "casa chica" over five centuries. Analyzing the
fragmentary but nonetheless enlightening texts left by the
Mexicas, María de Jesús Rodríguez finds that among Aztec
nobility, marriage was used primarily to form political
alliances, but that female concubines could be chosen across
class lines. While monogamy was more standard for the lower
classes, men, especially warriors, were still permitted to take
lovers and consort with prostitutes. Female chastity, on the
other hand, was enforced by both religious fear and severe
secular penalties, including death (28).
Polygamy, like human sacrifice, was abhorrent to the
Europeans who arrived bearing Catholic ideology along with their
other weapons of domination. Yet the church's imposition of
monogamy during the colonial period, argues Pilar Gonzalbo, meant
little more in practice than the economic abandonment of many
women; polygamous relationships continued to exist, but their
deinstitutionalization freed men from responsibility (44). In New
Spain, as Françoise Carner points out, adultery was considered an
"essentially feminine sin," threatening to the social order when
committed by women, but rarely condemned in men (98-99). This
view did not change with Independence. In their study of
campesina women and violence at the turn of the century, Soledad
González and Pilar Iracheta found that the law was easier on
women in regard to capital crimes, but harsher in cases of
adultery, sexual offenses and abandonment (120). In the home,
women were often beaten for adultery, but also for denouncing
their husbands' infidelity, and betrayed wives were more likely
to confront their rivals than the husband himself, implying the
essential innocence, or invulnerability, of the male perpetrator
(132).
Although the double standard may not be so pronounced today,
recent ethnographic studies, such as those Ruth Behar and Sarah
LeVine conducted among poor women in San Luis Potosí and Morelos,
attest to the persistence of polygamous relations in contemporary
society. LeVine writes of newly married couples in the Cuernavaca
community of Los Robles that "both take the wife's fidelity as a
given," whereas "even teenage husbands bragged about extramarital
affairs, real or imagined" (87). At the other end of the social
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