Gentlemen say things

Hello,

How are you? First of all: I think last week’s newsletter arrived cut in half 🙁 I don’t know exactly what happened, but since it came with a lot of things I’m going to recover some of them in today’s newsletter so they don’t get lost.

Today I could title the bulletin as ‘gentlemen who say things’ or ‘offended against the world’. El Hormiguero has long become a forum in which (especially gentlemen) they launch complaints and rants about the world in which we live and the terrible drift that makes it impossible to say anything anymore, and in which they naturalize behaviors and sexist gestures.

A few weeks ago, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, told Pablo Motos what he considered a romantic gesture: pick up the clothesline that they put in the middle of their kitchen so that his wife doesn’t have to do it. “I’m going to remove it and let him be surprised,” he said. Around him, laughter and no questions. Obviously, I couldn’t help write about the matter.

Because it’s hard for me to think of a woman who considers taking clothes off the clothesline as a romantic gesture toward her partner. Or scrub the pots, I don’t know. Because they are daily care tasks that are the basis of our lives and that society continues to internalize as something more typical of women. So much so that, for many people, if they are in charge of these jobs they are doing something extraordinary, a gesture that honors them, an attitude that should be appreciated. So much so that there are those who consider it romantic to behave like a functional adult.

Last week it was the singer Dani Martín who appeared on Pablo Motos’ program. Martín made it clear that he considers himself a super feminist and went so far as to say that he was raised “in the most feminist education in the world.” Nothing more and nothing less: here we feminists ask ourselves all the time how to raise from feminism and navigate contradictions and it turns out that Dani Martín received the most feminist education in the world.

The thing is that the singer made that statement to explain why his lyrics are not sexist and why criticism that points out biases and sexism in his songs does not make sense. Those criticisms came with his song ‘Ester Expósito’, in which a 47-year-old guy (him) tries to flirt with a 25-year-old aunt (actress Ester Expósito). Now he has released one in which a man keeps picking and shoveling insisting a girl to listen to him and meet up. But neither he nor Pablo Motos understand the criticism. What’s more, they claim that we now live in an “invisible mode of forbidden things” and that an artist should not “feel coerced.” ¿Is it coercion or is it bothering them? not live in that world in which they are the only ones who can give their opinion, criticize, point out, define?

It is curious that those who show themselves to the world as champions of freedom of expression, paradoxically, promote the idea that feminists, LGTBI groups, minorities or, simply, people who point out stale or discriminatory practices, ideas or customs, go too far. .in their freedom of expression. If Pablo Motos treats his guests questionably or if Dani Martín writes lyrics that normalize male insistence on women, this is freedom of expression. If we say what we think or talk about their biases – and they don’t like it – then we are not using our freedom of expression, but we are coercing them. Here I leave you my complete analysis on the matter.

To finish the list of gentlemen who say things: Jaime Mayor Oreja as an exponent of that tremendous anti-rights congress which was held this Monday in the Senate (insert your favorite swear word here). Mayor Oreja was pleased, he said, among other things, that the “main problem” of society is the attempt to “replace a social order based on Christian foundations with an implacable social disorder” in which “abominable fashions” prevail. Let’s see, if a relentless social disorder means having rights and freedoms and treating women and LGTBIQ+ people as first-class citizens, well, how good is the relentless social disorder.

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I found out a few days later, but it turns out that he died a couple of weeks ago LGBTI writer and activist Dorothy Allison. Allison is the author of ‘Bastarda’, a book in which she tells of the sexual violence she suffered from her stepfather since she was little. But I discovered it with ‘Two or three things that I am clear about’, a book that Errata Naturae recently published here and that I loved.

“There are two or three things that I am clear about, and one of them is what it means that the only version of your life that you appreciate is the one that you yourself have created”

Until next week

Ann.