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Javier Royo, aka Javirroyo, likes to go into gardens. He recognizes it and shouts his Instagram account, in which you find the same joke with Ecce Homo de Borja that a classification of pussies without any orthodoxy or a satirical vignette about the hidden place that Vox reserves for women in The priority pyramid. Spoiler # 1: the last one accumulated the highest number of haters . Spoiler # 2: it was exactly the theme chosen for his new book.

The immense garden in which he went was not known by the illustrator except by hearing before plunging deeply into the mud of everyday conversation with women. «You ask them: 'Have you experienced any situation of harassment or abuse?' And almost 100% have a story to tell, ”he says, still not out of his amazement.

From intuition, Royo went to the fact checking , and from the reeds with friends and family to an open survey of femininity in general that only confirmed what he already saw: «In 24 hours I received more than 300 stories», he says, « there were people who had never told anyone, or their closest circle.

That kind of Spanish #MeToo were deeply intimate confessions, more or less serious, more or less common; and they followed patterns: "I could classify them in piles, I promise you . " A conversation with his daughter Lola, 16, confirmed that machismo does not understand generations, and also that the normalization of certain behaviors is not spared even the most advanced of the Homo machus that give name to his book.

«A friend told me that one day, in a bar, an uncle came in and sucked his face. Can you imagine it would have been a black? "Royo asks," you stop to think and say: there is a real problem. I think I've made the book because I don't understand anything, I have no idea.

The most widespread reaction when talking about feminism with a man is a bit defensive. Have you felt attacked because someone suggests that men have sexist behaviors? I, like all men, will surely continue to have many traces of what you have learned. I have always believed that women are equal to men, it seems very perogrullo. It is true that right now women have moved, they are repositioning themselves with respect to social relationships and self-analyzing. However, in the meantime the uncles give me the impression that they are in the same place looking for the sides without knowing very well what to do. And have you recognized yourself in any of those macho behaviors that you have discovered? [Ponders for a while] Listen to myself more than aunts, that mansplaining. In that I do recognize myself because I am a little anxious. It also happens to me with men, but with women it has happened to me for sure. One of the most striking cartoons of 'Homo machus' is a gigantic "sorry" (sorry, in English). Do you think men should apologize as gender? Yes. When La Manada happened, you think: I am ashamed to belong to the same genre. I think that men should say: sorry, because so far we have done it very badly, it has been all crap. We have to do it and then align ourselves.

Javirroyo's cartoons remind us of the graphic humor of Forges , that customary irony of when he wants to help at home and asks what he can do. "Think," she replies. Short and at the foot. "The illustration is a much more direct tool, in fact all we do is join a couple of ideas and translate them there and, suddenly, pum," he explains, "when you write you can fall a little more into dogma, but with the drawing you leave the message open, because the image is polysemic. It's a good language for speed, like a shot. And you can also put it with a magnet in the fridge ».

His reflection as a man goes beyond the relationship between men and women to get into that branch of feminism that only affects them. Come on, another garden. "I am heterosexual - to date - and my parents have already been quite liberal in our education," says the illustrator, "but in my environment I have lived this environment that you have to like football, cars ... and there I have never been comfortable ».

Back to the self-analysis, that's what catharsis of Homo machus is about , right? «It is true that sometimes in conversations I have not cut anything that would have deserved a punch on the table. Things that are not jokes and denigrate women ».

Javirroyo does not fall, and it is to be appreciated, in a habitual metamachism that is that of the allies that explain things, paraphrasing Rebecca Solnit. His is more «ask, help, listen. For now, listen to the women around you ». And in the face of the "world emergency", evolution.

Not surprisingly, Homo machus comes with a bomb subtitle: "From animals to men." There is that.

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