Luis Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the medal ceremony after Spain won the Women’s World Cup in August 2023. Rubiales, at the time president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, said the kiss was consensual but Hermoso said it wasn’t and filed a criminal complaint.
Rubiales has now been found guilty of sexual assault and fined €10,800 (£8,945). He was also ordered to pay a portion of the costs and compensation of €3,000 (£2,484) to Hermoso. Rubiales has ten days to appeal the sentence. He and three ex-colleagues were acquitted on a separate charge of attempting to coerce Hermoso into changing her story.
Spanish feminists are outraged by the judge’s leniency (Rubiales could have received a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence). But many other Spaniards think it’s a shame that bestowing a brief, spontaneous kiss in a moment of euphoria and celebration should now be considered a criminal offence and sympathise with Rubiales’s claim that ‘False feminism is a great blight on this country’.
This clash of opposing views is not surprising. Since 2018, under a vociferously feminist left-wing government, sexual mores have changed at a bewildering speed in the country that gave us the word ‘machismo’ and the libertine, Don Juan. Adapting to new gender roles has not been easy for many Spaniards who grew up during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship when a woman required her husband’s permission to take a job, open a bank account, initiate legal proceedings and even to travel. Certainly a lot has changed since 1975 when, five days before Franco’s death, actress Carmen Maura was admonished by a military judge for not forgiving the soldier who had raped her.
Macho attitudes didn’t die with Franco of course and continued to manifest themselves, often in less serious ways. In 2006 José María Aznar, who until a couple of years previously had been prime minister of Spain, was approached by an eager young journalist, microphone in hand. He signed the book she’d handed him but instead of answering her question, popped the pen into her cleavage, smiled and moved on without a word. That incident passed largely unremarked at the time but – a sign of how attitudes have changed –it has attracted plenty of adverse comment since it recently resurfaced on national television.
There was nationwide outrage when five men accused of the gang rape of an 18-year-old girl in 2016 were only found guilty of the lesser charge of sexual abuse since she hadn’t been violently coerced. The men were sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment and freed pending appeal. In 2019, however, following mass protests across the country, the Supreme Court determined that the victim had been subjected to ‘a truly intimidating scenario’ and had ‘at no time consented to the sexual acts carried out by the defendants’. The court ruled that the men were therefore guilty of rape and imposed an immediate 15-year sentence. The case proved a catalyst for Spain’s ‘Solo sí es sí’ (Only yes is yes) law passed in 2022 which established that consent cannot be assumed and must be clearly communicated. It is this law that, the judge has now decided, Rubiales broke.
Rubiales will be back in court before long because of corruption charges centring on the deal that made Saudi Arabia hosts for Spain’s Super Cup tournament. He denies all wrongdoing. The Royal Spanish Football Federation’s long association with corruption is not unusual in Spanish public life where graft has long been endemic. Indeed the government is currently mired in several corruption scandals.
So while the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report now sees Spain amongst the top ten countries in the world for gender parity, in Corruption Perceptions Index, Spain has just dropped to 46th in the world – behind Botswana and Rwanda.
It seems a pity that the government can’t bring itself to fight corruption with the same enthusiasm that it shows in the struggle against machismo.
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