All is not lost, come on, in our Italian TV today, ramshackle and a bit biased. There are moments here and there that remain and are worth highlighting. They stay because they pass through you, finally away from things Not said or said badly or said at one in the morning from the Sanremo festival.
On the last night it aired What’s the weather like on Nove, Matilda De Angelis said something as simple and as powerful: “Men must be educated to refuse“. The most uncomfortable truth of recent times, gentlemen. A collective responsibility which, perhaps, only Gino Cecchettin is reminding us of these days (if they hadn’t made him go up very late on the most followed stage in Italy in these last few days…).
The Bolognese actress, one of the most authentic voices of Gen Z, has shifted the center of gravity of the discussion on gender violence. Not just condemnation, not just indignation – which are also necessary – but a deeper question: where does all this originate?
Born into an education that does not teach how to lose. In a culture that confuses desire with possession. In a society that accustoms women to adapting and men to demanding.
Matilda De Angelis said it clearly: “men are often also children of a patriarchal system that raised them without emotional tools, without extreme literacy, without education to say “no”.
Yet, that is precisely where we need to start. Because if it’s no, it’s no and it’s not a maybe. It’s a border.
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The point is not to pit men against women. It’s not a gender war, many still consider the word feminism like a fight against the male. It’s not like that, it’s just a paradigm shift, and the battle against patriarchy is to ask men to take on part of the transformation. To be curious about feminism,”to understand where it comes from,” to listen to experiences that for women are not theory but everyday life.
How many times have women been asked to scale back, to “not provoke”, to “not exaggerate”, to “not delude”? How many times, however, have men been taught to manage frustration, abandonment, rejection?
There is a passage from Matilda De Angelis’s words that remains engraved: “the idea that there are men willing to lose their freedom in order not to accept a no. Behind that inability there is a lack of education.”
We are in 2026 and we still talk about patriarchy as if it were a distant, theoretical concept. In reality it is in the daily dynamics, in the languages, in the expectations that we assign to boys and girls from an early age.
Yet something is moving. A different awareness seems to be growing between Millennials and Gen Z. We talk about consent more naturally. More inclusive language is used. Privileges that were previously invisible are being called into question. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
Perhaps the revolution lies precisely here: in asking men to educate themselves on limits, on vulnerability, on the possibility of not being chosen. In understanding that rejection is not a humiliation, but a freedom.
Because the point is to build men capable of being in the world without transforming pain into violence. The change begins with a small, clear, very clear word: no.
