Forced Kiss by Luis Rubiales. Why is the gesture minimized by some?

The scandal erupted the day after August 20, 2023, after the crowning of the Spanish footballers during the Women’s World Cup. That evening, Luis Rubiales, coach and former president of the Spanish Football Federation, kissed one of his strikers, Jenny Hermoso. Not seeing its harm, he defended himself like this. “These things happen.” Words contradicted by the chief executive, who explained in a press release days later that the impromptu embrace “didn’t please him”, backed by 81 footballers in calling for his boss to leave. After weeks of public fighting, Luis Rubiales resigned on Sunday, September 10, while continuing to say he was the victim of “extreme persecution.”

In the video, sexual violence in the world of sports. when the silence is broken

As in this case, it is not uncommon to see some men demonizing the actions they are accused of. As women’s voices become freer and awareness of sexist and sexual assaults grows, sociologist Véronique Le Goaziu, author of several works on sexual violence (1), sheds light on words or gestures that are no longer heard. :

Madame Figaro .- The case of Rubiales divides public opinion. Some consider it an attack, others an inappropriate gesture. What do you think ?
Véronique Le Goaziou: In order to use the term “aggression”, if we take the legal criteria, there must be an “intent to attack”. I think Luis Rubiales did not have that intention. Therefore, characterizing an act is much more complicated than what public opinion has given it. We often want there to be an aggressor and a victim, white and black, but this is not always the case. On the one hand, there is aggression, that is, an act of a sexual nature, which is not agreed by one of the parties, and on the other hand, a spontaneous, by no means premeditated gesture that occurs at the moment of mutual euphoria. . There is still a lot between these two extremes.

“These are things that happen”, “like with my girls”… You realize that this line of defense can make you angry…
Obviously ! But when asked if they are aware that they are minimizing their actions, I think most people actually fall off their chairs when they find themselves accused of certain facts. These are men who belong to an era. This coach, of course, thinks that he did not attack his player. Like many men, he says to himself. “I did not rape her”, “I was not violent”, so it is not an attack. In fact, what this case shows us is that we are still faced with “embodied” gestures.

Gestures that used to be perceived as machismo, and that we would never have questioned, become questionable gestures.

In other words.
I mean, a hand on a drunken ass (see the Nicholas Bedos case, editor’s note) or a kiss on the mouth at the moment of euphoria, are attitudes that do not go through the brain, but through the body, and that consciousness is almost an irrelevant issue here.

Are you saying that men don’t know they’ve made an inappropriate gesture, that their actions are almost a reflex?
I mean, this kind of attitude has been part of normal human life for centuries, decades, and up until a few years ago. Luis Rubiales did not say to himself “I force him to kiss”, but “I kiss him because I am happy and he will accept it with joy”. I can pretty much tell he didn’t think twice about what he was doing. It’s an entire centuries-old patriarchal structure that emerges in stunned moments.

Although that doesn’t excuse…
Of course not, but here we do not encounter “serious” sexual harassment, for example, rape. Interestingly, these “embodied” gestures, which were once perceived as machismo, and which we would not necessarily question, are becoming questionable gestures today. Without talking about aggression, the whole job is to inform both the perpetrators of these actions and those who suffer, that they can no longer be accepted today. On the other hand, we must also understand that patriarchal culture is an age-old culture, and even if there was a “Me too” movement, it is not in a few years that we will wipe out, despite laws and demonstrations, all of them. this daily behavior. It will take a few more decades to have truly “decayed men” if that’s what we’re looking for.

You say we need to “raise the awareness of the perpetrators of these acts as much as those who suffer”. Do victims minimize such actions?
I really don’t like the term “minimize” and I think there is a problem with the concept of qualification in the current system. Victims can also be lost in the case of an “attack”. Because you have to go in the direction of the wind. We saw it in the case of Rubiales. Jenny Hermoso initially said it wasn’t that serious, but then her feelings about the act intensified as she was told it was an assault.

But isn’t this useful in some cases to free the voice of the victims?
It can also be dangerous. Because there are victims who say and know, and then there are those who don’t know. And there are a bunch of these. Because the gesture was less clear, less obvious. It is often from the point of view of third parties that speech will be created. Many women in the Me Too movement said they became aware of what happened to them because of what other women said. It is very good. But this raises another question. just as we need to know how we qualify attacks, by degree, we need to know “who” is qualifying them. In his book Memoirs of a Girl Annie Erno, published in 2016, looks at her first sexual encounter, for example. Secret, painful intercourse in which her teacher ejaculated on her before leaving. It is a remarkable work because fifty years later he explains that he still cannot describe this event. He has the honesty to say “I don’t know” because at that moment his feelings were too ambivalent. As a woman she meant it because it was her first time having sex, but at the same time she was disappointed that it was almost surgical… It’s interesting because it was almost forbidden to say that.

Do you think the Me Too era has made us lose our sense of temporality?
Who had the legitimacy to qualify and investigate sexual assault cases just a few years ago? Justice. In the 1980s, he was entrusted with these cases, creating laws and the Criminal Code. Justice is criticized for its slowness. So during the Me Too movement, there was a kind of tsunami of very quick blanket condemnations, a moment of name-calling and so on. Next to it was this huge pachyderm that said “excuse us, but we have procedures, rules, customs, we need more time to understand what’s going on.” The issue of timing is fundamental. In the case of Rubiales, everything happened at the speed of light. The question of what actually happened ultimately no longer matters. And I understand that there is an urgency from women who feel they don’t have time. But sometimes it creates inconvenience. Because before we can know whether the aggressor is minimizing or not, we need to know whether there is “aggression”. And that is not the business of a public court.

Video: Lydia Thorpe’s Senate speech condemning sexual harassment