A LONG WAY STILL TO GO

To lighten the hearts of those of a cer­tain age and mu­si­cal per­sua­sion I will start this month’s col­umn with a quote from the leg­endary Eng­lish 70s pop group Hot Choco­late, “It started with a kiss”. How­ever, this kiss was not some in­no­cent peck stolen by two young­sters at school, but rather a very pub­lic kiss on the lips of a sports­woman who had just reached the pin­na­cle of sport­ing achieve­ment: be­com­ing a world cham­pion. The scan­dal that fol­lowed was not so much about the kiss it­self, or even the fact that a mar­ried man would make such an in­ti­mate ges­ture in front of mil­lions, in­clud­ing, pre­sum­ably, his own wife and fam­ily – did Ru­biales´ wife think this be­hav­iour was OK? Or had she be­come ac­cus­tomed to it, just as pa­tri­ar­chal west­ern so­ci­ety has con­di­tioned us all to dur­ing our life­times? – no, the scan­dal lay in the re­ac­tion to the kiss.

That is, Ru­biales’ own in­credulity at there being any­thing wrong with what he’d done, and then the sup­port he re­ceived from cer­tain mem­bers of the Span­ish Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion, in­clud­ing ap­plause at his adamant re­fusal to re­sign. What strength! What a show of male dom­i­nance! How proud his wife and daugh­ters, whom he has men­tioned as the main rea­son for his even­tual res­ig­na­tion, must be of their macho hus­band/fa­ther, telling the world where to stick it when ac­cused of wrong­do­ing.

One of my bug­bears is and al­ways has been peo­ple in power act­ing with im­punity and a lack of ac­count­abil­ity. From a school teacher to a par­ent to a foot­ball coach to a politi­cian to a mem­ber of a royal fam­ily… It’s sick­en­ing to watch peo­ple act with com­plete dis­re­gard for the con­se­quences of their ac­tions on oth­ers. Re­cently, for ex­am­ple, I think of the role Trump played in the Capi­tol riot or the nu­mer­ous ex­am­ples of his re­volt­ing sex­ism caught on cam­era or his mis­han­dling of top se­cret doc­u­ments and his un­fal­ter­ing be­lief that as pres­i­dent he was above all laws. Ru­biales’ and Trump’s at­ti­tude to­wards power is ac­tu­ally the op­po­site of what one would rea­son­ably ex­pect of any­one in such a po­si­tion.

For­tu­nately, west­ern so­ci­ety in gen­eral tol­er­ates such abuses of power less and less, and it’s good to see that Ru­biales’ ac­tions ul­ti­mately led to a huge so­cial back­lash over his be­hav­iour, in­clud­ing street demon­stra­tions and the cre­ation of a new slo­gan aimed at the ram­pant sex­ism that the Pres­i­dent of the Span­ish Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion had come to em­body: #SeA­cabó (It’s Over), now gen­er­ally viewed as the #metoo mo­ment in Spain. Hope­fully the crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion look­ing into whether the in­ci­dent amounts to a crime of sex­ual as­sault will bear fruit, al­though I’m not hold­ing my breath...

Sadly, Ru­biales’ own rea­sons for re­sign­ing ap­pear to have had noth­ing to do with ad­mit­ting wrong, but rather re­al­is­ing the ef­fects the af­fair was hav­ing on his fam­ily. And so I’m left with the feel­ing that, far from being con­quered, sex­ism and im­punity re­main a stub­born stain on our so­ci­ety, and that if all of this had ac­tu­ally taken place in Spain rather in the con­text of a World Cup held on the other side of the world and viewed by mil­lions, then noth­ing would have hap­pened. After all, when was the last time any­one in power re­signed after being ex­posed in this part of the world ? Cristina Ci­fuentes any­one?