News for all those who want to bring women back to where they have always been: soon even the dream of beauty queens docile to the desires and orders of men will no longer be realized. Him The Rubiales case It will be a joke compared to what you can expect. We see.
Many years ago the word “empowerment” did not exist in the usual vocabulary and was very strange, but it came hastily and settled among us. Its sound could pierce the ear, but we emerged from structural machismo (or at least that’s what we tried to do) and the word found its place as quickly as a Thermomix you didn’t know you needed until you tried it.
Today the word is so consolidated that even the beauty queens who compete in Thailand to be Miss Universe, the competition that most symbolizes the role of female object, use it. And very good. Empowerment means “making a disadvantaged individual or social group powerful or strong,” the RAE tells us. And this is what Fátima Bosch, the clairvoyant Miss Mexico, defended when a top pageant official in Thailand scolded and insulted her for not following his instructions. She’s gone. “We are empowered women, no one can silence our voice. I am not a doll,” she said as she left. Many others followed her to the plant, including Iraqi Hanin Al Qoreishy.
Another much more powerful Mexican, President Claudia Sheinbaum, just witnessed sexual harassment in the middle of the street on television, when a man touched her chest by sliding his hand from behind and tried to kiss her neck. “If they do this to the president, what will happen to all the other women in the country?” Sheinbaum said he explains the criminal complaint he filed against the attacker. Quick Answer: What happens to so many women every day.
It is impossible to forget the non-consensual kiss that Luis Rubiales planted on Jenni Hermoso’s mouth to celebrate the world championship in his own way or his team’s attempts to justify it without scandal. Maybe we have moved forward, we have raised our voices against the attacks and we have defended positions, but the worst masculinity is always “rallying its soldiers”, as the writer Alana S. Portero told this newspaper yesterday.
Machismo can be reborn and take shape in new young people who feel displaced and wish to regain the lost kingdom, but know that, for the moment, neither footballers like Hermoso, nor presidents like Sheinbaum, nor beauty queens like Bosch will admit male dominance without challenge. We just need millions more to be able to make their voices heard. Welcome.
