Sarah Harte: Will this be the kiss of death for sexism on and off the football pitch?

Wed, 23 Aug, 2023 - 02:00

LAST Sunday morning, watching Luis Rubiales, the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, kiss Spanish midfielder Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the post-match FIFA Women’s World Cup celebrations, I blinked and concluded they must be in a relationship. But, no. The kiss sparked outrage, as it should have.

Hermoso, soon afterwards, said on a live stream on Instagram, “Hey, I didn’t like it, eh,” adding, “But what can I do?” Later, she downplayed the incident in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse by the Spanish football federation.

Rubiales’s first response was to criticise “idiots” who spread “b*******” about a kiss that was “friendly”. Under pressure, he modified his response on Monday, saying ,“We saw it as something natural, normal, and not in bad faith, but there are people who have been hurt by this and I have to apologise, there’s no other way, is there?”

During the post-match celebrations, Rubiales reportedly promised the team a holiday to Ibiza, where, he joked, he would marry Hermoso. The incident is a reminder of the sexism that has plagued women’s soccer and many other sports.

Spanish Equality Minister Irene Montero, from the Podemos party, cut to the heart of the matter. She said: “Let’s not take for granted that kissing without consent is something that ‘happens’. It is a form of sexual violence that we women suffer daily and, until now, invisible, and that we cannot normalise. It is the task of society as a whole. Consent at the centre. Only ‘yes’ is yes.”

Ione Belarra, secretary-general of Podeomos, made another excellent point, “What we all think, if they do that with all of Spain watching, what won’t they do in private. Sexual violence against women has to end.”

Some of the comments online about the kiss were illuminating. One man wrote, “After such a dramatic win, can’t a guy just be a guy for a few hours?” Actually, no, you can’t if that’s how you define being male.

Men and masculinity

As an aside, in my column last week, I touched on what it means to be male. My point was that in addressing women’s patriarchal reduction, we needed to bring young men along with us (otherwise they would be prey to online uber misogynists, like influencer Andrew Tate.) This view displeased two groups, for opposite reasons, with the split on gender lines and best encapsulated by the following two comments.

A man said (diverse views are welcome) that, in the interests of balance, I ought to write an article on high-profile misandrists. I was taken aback, because I thought the article was balanced: I had written that we must avoid supplanting the term ‘toxic masculinity’ with just ‘masculinity’, precisely because I believe that the drive for women’s equality shouldn’t tip over into misandry.

But I haven’t come across any well-known misandrists. An online search under various terms threw up no such women. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. If they exist, they are not high-profile in the way male misogynists are. Feel free to enlighten me.

A message from a woman shed light on why some women were distinctly lukewarm about bringing boys along with us. She pointed out that it was astonishing that women still had to tiptoe around the issue of gender equality in case they wound up aggrieved males. She said that the problem with men was similar to that of the British and Brexit. Men were used to being powerful and were unable to deal with the new situation.

Do women still have to tiptoe around male sensibilities about gender equality? Many women who work in domestic, sexual, and gender-based abuse, particularly in the policy area, would say they do. They get browned off that they constantly have to mind the sensitivities of men by pretending that the statistics don’t show that an overwhelming amount of domestic and sexual violence is perpetrated by straight men against women. In other words, to pacify men who feel aggrieved, they have to go along with a false gender symmetry (that women hurt men just as much) that simply isn’t rooted in reality.

Jenni Hermoso hugs president of the RFEF Luis Rubiales during the FIFA Womens World Cup 2023 Final between Spain and England at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia.

Anyway, Luis Rubiale’s unsolicited kiss of Jenni Hermoso, his angry justification of that kiss, and his qualified apology showing zero insight into why the kiss was wrong, had it all: The male entitlement to do as he wishes, and the male aggrievement at being called out.

'The right battles'

Nor is Rubiale some lone wolf. Last Friday, on the cusp of the World Cup final, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, having one of his customary rushes of blood to the head, told women to “pick the right battles” in the fight for equality in sports, saying that they had “the power to convince us, men, what we have to do and what we don’t have to do”.

Unsurprisingly, female athletes who have not been given the elite treatment and equipment that male players automatically get were unhappy and Infantino got roasted on social media. The elite male and female football players still don’t get the same money, although FIFA has said that they aim to have equal prize money in place by 2027. Some people will definitely say that women don’t deserve the same prize money as men and, I’m sorry, but I’m not being sexist when I say that many of them will be men.

On that note, Orange, the French mobile network, had a super clever advertisement where they showed zinging scenes from the men’s football game, only to reveal at the end that the footage had been manipulated by AI and that, in reality, it was the women who had been playing. It ran with the caption, ‘Only Les Bleus can give us these emotions’, referring to the French national men’s football team.

An Orange spokesperson said: “For the majority of soccer fans, the general consensus is that ‘men’s soccer is better, faster, more interesting than women’s”.

“It was essential that, during the first half of the video, viewers would think they were enjoying male actions and the only way to make believe that was to … reshape women into men.”

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What an ingenious way to confront gender bias in sports. The upper reaches of soccer have been plagued by many ‘top-flight’ minds. The disgraced Sepp Blatter, former president of FIFA, once suggested that female players should wear “tighter shorts” to promote the game. These attitudes aren’t siloed off in football.

But we are making progress. It was the most-watched Women’s World Cup ever, with sold-out stadiums. The tournament was a catalyst, both on and off the pitch, for the young women watching. It was also covered extensively by the media, and full credit to RTÉ for their excellent coverage, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The kiss was a bum note, but Rubiales was heavily criticised and the world’s media has also come out in force against it, signalling changing attitudes. Spanish newspaper El Pais ran the headline, ‘Jenni didn’t like Rubiales’ kiss, neither did we.’ They got that right.

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