What a time to be alive!
This week, we’re talking about sex, and about gender, and about Women’s Day.
We’re talking about Kamala Harris as a croissant, and a famous politician’s “miembro”, and about a real-life “Pretty Woman” story right here in Spain.
March 8th, of course, is International Women’s Day, and women all across the country are celebrating… although some people seem to be confused about what, exactly, makes someone a woman.
(I was just kidding about Kamala Harris as a croissant. But my local bakery has this inspiring display of Nutella croissants with purple frosting next to a picture of Kamala. I don’t know who the other two ladies are.)
Turns out, Spanish feminism has a bit of a problem. Well, maybe several problems. They seem to have lost the plot entirely. And we’re going to talk about it.
But first, the most popular articles on this site are about sex and dating.
I guess that’s natural.
People love love – or, in its absence, at least a pleasant exchange of bodily fluids. I’ve got such classics on here as Dating Spanish Girls, all about Sex in Spain, and an article about the current Prostitution Debate.
More on that later. For now, let’s look at the recent sex scandals in Spanish politics.
The Minister and the Escort
I’ve written before about the Caso Koldo corruption scandal in the Spanish socialist party.
It’s a long story, but part of it revolves around the former minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, and his relationship with Jessica R, a young woman he claimed was his girlfriend.
Well, Jessica R turns out – according to an investigation by The Objective – to be a prostitute he found online. And according to what I’m reading, for around 6000€ to 12000€ a month, she formed an “exclusive” relationship with Ábalos that lasted for a couple of years.
It’s like a real-life Pretty Woman. Wow!
Keep in mind that prostitution is legal in Spain. So there’s nothing illegal about paying a girl you found on an escort website to have sex with you. There’s nothing illegal about putting her up in a luxury flat in Torre Madrid, either.
What might be illegal is the allegation that Ábalos also got his “friend” Jessica jobs at public companies, where she didn’t have to interview or even show up for work.
The newspapers are calling that (alleged) activity tráfico de influencias.
And the whole Caso Koldo started because it looks like Ábalos may have been receiving kickbacks on contracts for surgical masks back during the pandemic.
Government Ministers are paid well, of course, but not enough to support the lifestyle Ábalos was living.
After Jessica, he (again, allegedly) dated a woman who’d been Miss Asturias – a beauty pageant winner from the north of Spain, in other words. He then got her a job as an administrative assistant in a public company, but in this case, Miss Asturias actually showed up to work.
High-ranking officials using escort services is something I think literally no-one in Spain is surprised by. Still, it’s not a good look for a member of a highly-feminist government like the one we’ve got.
Iñigo Errejón and Elisa Mouliaá
Another case is that of Íñigo Errejón, one of the original founders of the far-left Podemos party, who abruptly quit his job and left politics last October when allegations of sexual misconduct began to appear against him.
His resignation letter, interestingly, blames the patriarchy for his behaviour, and claims that he descended into a “neoliberal way of life”. It’s not clear what he’s admitting – he’s not responding to any specific allegation, but he seems to be saying he behaved inappropriately.
In a roundabout way, I think he’s saying that the fame went to his head and he thought he could get away with doing whatever he wanted.
A few days later we had the DANA – a giant winter storm down in Valencia, in which 224 people died. That took over the news cycle for a couple of weeks.
Íñigo Errejón moved to the back burner of the collective consciousness. But he’s now on trial for sexual assault, accused by an actress and TV presenter named Elisa Mouliaá of pulling out his “miembro viril” in a locked room at a party back in 2021. She claims she told him that Solo sí es sí – “only yes is yes”, a slogan about the importance of “affirmative consent” that Spanish leftists use a lot.
Errejón says that in real life people don’t talk that way, and that Mouliaá is lying about pretty much everything.
Of course, I wasn’t there. Presumably we’ll have a legal verdict at some point. But in the meantime, it looks pretty bad when one of Spain’s top male feminists goes on trial for sexual assault.
(Personally, I have little sympathy for politicians, but I would imagine that being famous, powerful, and constantly in the public eye does some weird shit to your brain – and probably the brains of everyone around you. So if Errejón says that the fame went to his head and made him do things he wouldn’t get away with as a broke grad student with a job at Starbucks, well… yeah. I agree that it sounds plausible.)
Monedero gets touchy-feely
Finally, just a couple of days ago it came out that Juan Carlos Monedero, another of Podemos’ original founding members, had been accused of being very touchy with young women at protests, and generally inappropriate with some female politicians from his party.
It doesn’t sound like these are official criminal allegations. Maybe just creepy and weird behaviour. But it had been reported internally by various women, and the party leadership (also made up of women) had done nothing.
Of course, Podemos (and its splinter parties) all claim to take women’s allegations – and sexual consent – very seriously. But when things like this happen, it would appear that they’re less than eager to take action against “el machismo” and the men who practice it.
Maybe in the real world it’s impossible to find politicians who aren’t raging douchebags.
I actually don’t know any politicians, but I’d assume that a good case of egomania and a sense of entitlement is what gets most people into politics to begin with. The Monedero story may develop further in the coming weeks.
Either way, the political parties that were making such a big deal out of Women’s Day for the past several years are, naturally, keeping a low profile now, in March 2025.
The great feminist divide
I mentioned earlier that prostitution is legal in Spain, but a lot of people wish it wasn’t.
That’s one of the big issues dividing Spanish feminism these days. Some think that prostitution should be regulated and turned into a more dignified form of “sex work” – others think it needs to be abolished.
Another division is over the trans law, which allows people to freely decide the sex displayed on their national ID cards. I wrote about that at length in my Women’s Day article two years ago.
The trans issue seems to be increasingly unpopular of late. This is at least partially due to the fact that many trans activists don’t have much of an argument beyond saying “anyone who claims to be a woman IS a woman” and then screaming insults at anyone who has follow-up questions.
This week, La Vanguardia has an article about putting women back at the center of the feminist movement.
Make feminism about women again?
It’s catchy! But in real life, people don’t speak in slogans.
Anyway, the article doesn’t use the word “trans” at all, but suggests that biological women fighting for equality might be good for the gender non-conforming as well.
If I could make my brief statement here, it’s that I don’t much care what people do in their private lives. But ignoring biology in favor of ideology is usually a bad idea. Also, calling people bigots or nazis is not a good substitute for a discussion of the issues… but it is likely to shut down all good-faith discussion in the future.
I don’t see anything positive coming from the whole “either you agree with me or you’re a nazi” strategy.
But hey, I’m just a cis-hetero male from a traditionally “red” state in the US.
You probably could have guessed what I think.
What is a woman, anyway?
El País, meanwhile, has published an opinion piece wishing that feminists would put their differences aside for at least one day to make a show of unity.
But that seems unlikely. Today, in Madrid and Barcelona, there will be separate protests so that the two branches of feminism (trans-accepting and trans-excluding) don’t have to see each other.
A lot of regular people – weekend warrior feminists, as it were – seem a bit burnt out by the whole thing.
And I can understand where they’re coming from.
The last time I went to a Women’s Day march – out of journalistic curiosity, of course – there were were people standing around chanting “Con pene o con vagina, ¡mujeres combativas!”
I guess that statement is unintentionally hilarious: that women should be quarrelsome, whether they have penises or vaginas. I especially like the half-hearted attempt at a rhyme between vagina and combativas.
But I was at the protest, like I said, and I heard that, and I thought: maybe I’ll sit this one out.
As someone who’s fairly certain he’s not a woman trapped inside a man’s body, I’ve got nothing to add to this debate. I’ll let women decide who can be a woman, and once they’ve done that, I’ll check back in.
Cis-genderedly yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. I think there’s a lot to say about the fact that most people in the 21st century spend all day in air-conditioned spaces staring at screens, so gender (or sex) differences aren’t as important as they would be on a farm or a fishing boat. On the other hand, you’ve got guys like Richard V Reeves, who wrote a book about boys and men, in which he takes more than 250 pages to suggest that men can also be nurses. Well, okay. True enough. All this to say, it’s complicated. And we’re not living in our grandparents’ world. I expect more gender confusion in the future. How about you? Hit me up, right here in the comments…
P.P.S. After clicking “publish” here I went down to the two Women’s Day marches. The trans-exclusive one had a much smaller and older crowd, with a lot of CNT anarcho-syndicalist flags and signs against prostitution and pornography. The main one was large as always, and had a much younger and more diverse crowd. Fun times!
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