Venezuela

According to the cultural pattern, the world is divided into two halves: the feminine side, valued as good, and the masculine side, valued as evil. The woman is identified with the house, and the housewife is the good woman. The man is identified with the street, symbolically a no man's land. According to this pattern, if a man spends too much time at home he will become effeminate. His obligation is to play the macho with other women, who symbolically turn into mean women because they are exposed to the masculine libido. From this male-female pattern, three masculine types emerge (Hurtado 1998): the man who respects his home but has sex with other women on occasional basis; the crook who fails to respect his home because his sexual affairs with other women have been discovered; and the marico (effeminate) who is afraid of troubles with women and confines himself to his mother's house.

Living together in Venezuela does not coincide with concubinage or cohabitation without legitimacy. Civil marriage is the form with the highest degree of legitimacy and respectability, and reaches its apotheosis when blessed by the ecclesiastical rite. Here the woman is the traditional real bride in a wedding gown. This ideal form of the ecclesiastical marriage, or main marriage, is considered the "first" one by most people. Other forms of living together, however, are seen as legitimate, normal and respectable, even though they differ in degree. The second and successive women (those not married to the man, living in other households with their children), together with their respective families, are consubstantial with the multiple marital configurations, although from the legal point of view they may be linked to hidden concubinage, adultery, or other punishable cohabitation forms (Briceño 1994; Salazar 1985; Hurtado 1998).

The successive marriages show a general tendency to polygyny in men, and to polyandry in women, as characteristics of machismo (Vethen-court 1974). In spite of civil and eccesiastical codes and religious ritual, many people do not marry, but join in real significance. Machismo is not explained in its counterpart, hembrismo, but in maternalism and the mother-macho relationship. Both machismo and hembrismo originated in the mother-child dynamics. Machismo and patriarchy are not synonymous. According to the cultural system there is matriarchal machismo as well as patriarchal machismo.