In Australia we battle sexism, here in Nicaragua it’s machismo, much the same, but more prevalent and violent.

Normally it’s associated as the forward way with which men approach women and maybe make them feel uncomfortable, but it seems the women here are even more aggressive in their approach to win men.

Machismo gets a bit extreme when the guys start treating women like their property or as somehow inferior to them, essentially they think they’re better than women because they’re men.

It’s characterized by some men believing that women should act or serve them in a particular way, and if not they find it perfectly fine to beat or in extreme cases, kill the women as an act of retribution.

And then if another man sleeps or talks to another man’s wife, he kills him, it doesn’t matter if he’s a bad husband and the wife was looking for someone else, the man gets killed because he used the other man’s property.. the woman.

The government as a result has introduced laws to protect women against this, but as with any laws the problem is just as much the implementation as the law itself.

The general concensus here is that the situation is definitely improving, but the effective solution is actually one of education. Letting men know that women are equal to them and that they should respect them, whilst getting women to acknowledge that they are not subservient to men. So that everyone can acknowledge their equality.