2023-09-09 23:17:13
Naturally shy, I blushed until the day before yesterday, so my first and last street compliment to a woman is lost in the mists of time. When I was a 17-year-old teenager, one morning I decided to do this, let’s say oral deflowering, envious of the naturalness with which my friends lavished them, generally listened to with indifference by the compliments, as was the norm. That unforgettable morning I was walking with a couple of them along Alcalá Street, crossing an island that coincides with the streets of Hermosilla and Alcántara, when we crossed paths with a girl who was walking in the opposite direction to the one we were taking. “It’s time”, I said to myself, and I limited myself to a “Pretty!” admiring, putting myself a little in front of her. “Take it away, asshole, they’re going to run us over!” She told me. Like to try again… Or forget it.
I have told it from time to time in other texts, because writing what embarrasses me seems like a way of exorcising it (then I will tell you another case related to racism). But in current women’s affairs, Lucía Taboada’s illuminating reflection in these pages entitled “Have I also done a Rubiales?” has reminded me and made me reflect. And although the journalist avoids generalizing so as not to give more bait to the ‘rubiales’ – those who begin their tirade by describing as unpresentable the attitude of the former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation to commune, devoutly and applauding with their ears, with his affirmation of the “false feminism”, an antonym of “true masculinity” (they reject, of course, the authentic term: machismo) – the realistic thing is, precisely, to generalize.
And it is because it is in our roots: there are centuries of heteropatriarchy and decades of sexist education in vein. Those of us who are no longer, have been and it takes a real effort, believe me, to stop being: it goes against what is ‘natural’, what we have been taught, what we have learned, all our lives. And my father instilled in me absolute respect for women.
In line with Taboada’s insightful question, I have reflected on my own history, already excessive, to humbly assume that my answer is that of the male generality – there will be some angelic exception, without a doubt. “Have I also done a Rubiales?” Yes. I can only boast that I have never raised my hand to a woman – that’s what my poor (all my dead people are) father said – or that I have never discriminated against her in the workplace. Regarding everything else, sooner or later, not now, I have to intone the mea culpa, without the subsequent and necessary palinodes, which have a certain merit for recognizing the harm caused, of course, annulling the facts. One (many, all) has caused too many tears, has demanded excessively, has sometimes abused (never with violence) to ignore that we have made too many Rubiales over the years. With some admirable exceptions, we are products of our society and we have not exactly lived in the best of possible…
But if those who educated us in machismo were also women, mothers and some partners, it has been women who later re-educated us, educated us, in that new masculinity that weakens the machistas (and some reticent ones) who fight it, a useless fight. , with the clumsiness of fascism: calling some and others ‘panty irons’, ‘feminazis’ – the ‘fine’ “supremacist neofeminism” that Joaquín Leguina says, the stupid “false feminism” of Rubiales or “the hypocrisy of feminism” of Frank Cuesta: great contemporary thinkers…–. And, above all, the empowerment of the feminist movement, which after centuries of advancing at a snail’s pace is taking giant steps in recent decades, throughout the world and, especially, in Spain.
There is a new sensitivity called equality and respect and from the first education our behavior must be observed; Thus, in a few years, we and those who follow us will be able to answer the question “Have I also done a Rubiales?”: no. Without this new attitude and will, what is intended to be ‘innocent piquito’ from Rubiales to Jenni Hermoso would not have become a new, immediate and devastating #MeToo: #SeAcabó has not stopped at criticism from “asshole” journalists – he said the quidam – nor in RR.SS. incendiary but has unleashed an unequivocal social reaction, has jumped to the front pages of the international press and has garnered refutation from personalities and institutions, even the United Nations…
And in this matter, as in so many, there is no shortage of reflections, even those that at first seem thorny. Like that of Woody Allen, who, without knowing the moral character of the subject or his background in court, advocates equating facts and punishments so that the viscerality does not get out of hand.
The same thing happens with racism as with machismo. Although the nationalist narcissism of Franco’s regime boasted of being the least racist country in the world, the reality is that we carry a heavy backpack of centuries, of persecutions and pointing out the difference, especially the Jews, who were accused of ritual crimes as children. or men were blamed for expelling menstrual blood or being born with tails like animals (those that have one), as the immoral Dominican moralist Friar Andrés Ferrer de Valdecebro maintained, who added in his successful Philosophical and Moral Considerations on the Why of all things (1668): “Question 63: Why are men not born with tails like other animals? Because they sit and could not sit if they had one. There is a lineage of Hebrews that they have, and they are born with tails” .
The Moriscos had better luck, for being baptized, but, like Moors and Semites, they also ended up being expelled. Black people, as slaves, were things, non-existent as human beings, and slavery was not abolished in Spain until 1880 and thanks to threats from Great Britain. As it was thanks to Isabel I of Castile, the Catholic, that the Western Indians, the Americans, were freed from slavery, well, fed up with the ‘philosophical’ and ‘moralistic’ disquisitions about their human or animal nature, she declared them subjects of Castile, free men, in its Instructions of Granada (1501), whose reception with great formal respect in the New World by the conquerors hid its cynical practice: “They are obeyed, but they are not fulfilled.” To the point that the British Hispanist Henry Kamen maintains that “racism was elevated to a system of government” in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. He even, he would add, a moral system.
And if during the dictatorship it seemed nonexistent to us, it was both because of the absence of migration and because we looked elsewhere, especially to where there were no gypsies, but also no internal emigration: the derogatory ‘maketo’ in Euskadi and ‘xarnego’ in Catalonia pointed to the outsider. –Andalusian, Extremaduran, La Mancha, Galician or Murcian–who abandoned their impoverished countryside in search of the relative warmth of capital concentrated in those regions: desirable as efficient and cheap labor, but socially undesirable.
As a Murcian, I know it well: it doesn’t matter if you are descended from Franco-Catalans and Basques: you were born in Murcia and all the clichés haunt you, starting with the famous and false Pragmática of Carlos III – La Premática, we Murcians say. That bad reputation that poverty automatically brings was invented a non-existent document in which the enlightened Bourbon supposedly ordered that “the tail of my armies will be made up of gypsies, Murcians and people of bad living”, where it was supposed – it is truly a black legend very elaborate (would someone from Cartagena invent it?)– that murcianos was the noun relative to the verb murciar, to steal. Voice of germanía this one that, according to Corominas, was already archaic when Cervantes used it (1605); therefore, non-existent in the reign of Carlos III (1716-1788). But, in addition, this king was, possibly, the Spanish ruler in all of history who tried most decisively to integrate the gypsies –without success–: he dictated three Pragmatics for this purpose and in one of them, voilà, he prohibited such demonym because it is considered pejorative and discriminatory.
And racism is as embedded in our way of being – and by saying ‘our’ I mean, I’m afraid, the human race – as machismo. Well, racism goes back and forth: Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), who invented the Index of Banned Books, the ghettos for Jews, who were forced to wear a yellow hat (the yellow star of the Nazis seems more poetic), and condemned the potato as “diabolical”, he branded Spain as “a hotbed of Moors and Jews”.
In the mid-70s of the last century, when there was a wave of Chilean and Argentine emigrants fleeing their respective murderous dictatorships, we immediately invented the term ‘sudaca’ to discriminate against them. In 1975, immigration in Spain was 0.36% of the total population. Today, which is around 14.44% and includes countless nationalities, we have had to stretch our imagination: in addition to the traditional gabacho for the French and Moro, which includes not only North Africans but all Arabs, we have a bouquet of derogatory names for South Americans: ‘panchitos’ or ‘panchis’, ‘tiraflechas’, machupichus’, ‘payoponis’, ‘pakis’ for those from the Indian subcontinent and, if we do not know where they come from: ‘guiris’. We even turned the acronym ‘mena’, for Unaccompanied Minors, into an insult…
I end with a personal matter, both to exorcise it and to reflect on the moral and intellectual woodworm that is racism. A short eternity ago he lived in one of Madrid’s 114 low-rise neighborhoods, in Bellas Vistas, where the Dutch embassy rented one of the most visible houses, which they called “towers.” A couple of homosexual men moved in, both very nice and handsome: one black, very elegant, always in a dark suit and white shirt, and another white, blonde, dressed in sportswear, as they said before – today casual: tweeds, wool, shoes with crepe soles…–. Well, I never doubted that the diplomat was the blonde and the black, his boyfriend. And that despite the fact that I always saw the white man riding a bicycle, doing the shopping, walking the dog… So when I found out that the diplomat was the black man and the white man was his lover, my heart sank. feet: if I harbor so deeply –I hope not genetically…– the prejudices against which I strive to be rational, fair, supportive, enlightened, humanistic and, above all, everything I can. What can we expect from those whose entire illustration is TV, and social networks, the harsh messages of Vox and, in a low voice, of the PP and, of course, of the nationalists?
When in 1982 I interviewed Chester Himes, a black master of the North American crime novel, he told me how angry he was at the curious glances he received because of the color of his skin from his neighbors in Moraira, Alicante, where he settled in the 1960s: “But if they were blacker than me!”
#Rubialada #personal #palinode