ABSTRACT
Machismo is an attribute reserved to describe a way of organizing the world and sexual differences from the clear and rigid buttress of dichotomic thinking. Machismo has been linked to patriarchy, chauvinism, colonization, oppression, religious institutions, and persecution. A dichotomy between what constitutes masculinity and what constitutes femininity has provided illusory, pseudoscientific bedrock to a theory of psychosexual development which has at its end-point the attainment of heterosexuality and perpetuation of the species. The apparent male sexual liberation that took place in the New World, well away from the restrictive European mores, generated versions of machismo that still prevail in Latin countries, spanning socio-economic, educational, and generational barriers. Psychoanalytic theory affirms that the discovery of sexual distinction is a decisive and formative point in the development of both males and females. Representations of sexual differences are encoded in mainstream, commercial films, television sitcoms, fashion, and advertising that reaches the most remote corners of the world.
