“The daughter still has the flu, have you seen the neckline?”

2023-09-19 07:56:47

The president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has justified his comment about a young woman’s cleavage because it was “cold” and has denied that it was sexist. “The daughter still has the flu, has she seen the neckline she is wearing?” was the comment he made to a mother and her daughter during a visit to Canada.

Asked about his sexist comment by the Portuguese journalists accompanying him on a state visit to the North American country, Rebelo de Sousa seemed surprised. “It was not a sexist comment, nor did it occur to me, neither for that young woman nor for the old ladies. It was not sexist at all,” Rebelo de Sousa added in statements to the press in Toronto.

The scene, captured by television cameras, occurred when Rebelo de Sousa was taking a walk to meet members of the Portuguese community in Canada. There was a point when the Portuguese president stopped to talk with a mother and a daughter, and he said sardonically: “The daughter is prettier than the mother. The daughter is still going to catch the flu, hasn’t she seen what her cleavage is like?

#Portugal ????????: The President of the Republic provokes great controversy after commenting on the cleavage of a compatriot in Canada ????????.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa: “The daughter still has the flu. Have you seen the neckline she is wearing?”https://t.co/EqNRLwPZK9pic.twitter.com/hNrfd18eaV

— EM-electomania.es (@electo_mania) September 18, 2023

Rebelo de Sousa, 74, said this Sunday that at the end of his walk through the Portuguese neighborhood of Montreal it started to rain and it was cold, so he alerted “several elderly ladies, one of them with white hair, and others younger”. “I told several people, but apparently only the young woman was recorded, ‘be careful, because they can still catch a cold, I caught a cold,'” he argued.

“Sexism kills us. It is not a joke”

Several political parties have criticized the incident this weekend in Portugal. One of the founders of the environmental party Livre, Rui Tavares, said this Sunday in statements to the Portuguese newspaper Publico that these comments do not represent the duty of a president of the Republic to “defend the right of people to their autonomy and to respect the elections of their fellow citizens.”

He considered that with his words Rebelo de Sousa “ends up placing a fellow citizen in a position that she has not chosen and that is most likely uncomfortable.”

The general secretary of the socialist party Isabel Moreira has joined the criticism: “We are in 2023. You don’t treat a woman you don’t know making a ‘joke’ about her weight. There is no ‘joke’ about a cleavage. Whoever has not understood this, let him learn. And apologize. Sexism kills us. “It’s not a joke,” Moreira concluded.

It is not the first time that Rebelo de Sousa has been involved in a controversy of this type. Last weekend, some of his words during a visit to the Alentejo region already caused a stir when he offered a seat to a woman and asked, “Does the chair hold?” At the end of August, Rebelo de Sousa said about the case of the kiss of the then president of the Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, to the soccer player Jennifer Hermoso, that it was “a minor issue” if compared to the war in Ukraine .

At the moment the president’s political party, the PSD (center-right), has not commented on this controversy