Actor and former Ciudadanos MP Toni Cantó has now steered his erratic career toward television as the host of a debate on the Valencian public broadcaster À Punt. It's the latest publicity stunt by the Valencian public broadcaster to discredit itself. The show premiered Friday night. The debate Asking herself, "Is feminism in crisis?" Obviously, Cantón couldn't care less about feminism. Rather, it fuels her anger, which was evident in the charade she staged. With her ego inflated before the cameras, she orchestrated a fallacy that only sought to discredit and ridicule feminism. The four panelists participated in this farce, because it's the typical program where you're invited to be used, not listened to. Cantón's cynicism became immediately apparent when, after her introduction, she wanted to make it clear that "this program will not deny violence against women." A very strange and biased preemptive strategy, which betrayed the deceptive nature of the debate's premise. They warned that they wouldn't deny the number of murdered women (of course not!) only to then proceed to attack feminism. In the midst of the chaotic show, with an equally manipulated audience, they staged a face-to-face debate featuring a commentator with sexist, ultraconservative, and xenophobic theories. They incorporated, via video link, the intervention of Juan Soto Ivars, who presented a book in which he claims that the official low rate of false accusations of gender-based violence is a lie and that the real statistics are higher, with many men falling victim to the abuse of a biased feminist system.
What Toni Cantó did on public television was an act of legitimizing sexism masked as a subtle form of pluralistic discussion about feminism. First, by portraying it as a problem rather than a framework for analyzing social inequality. The mere presence of four women debating created the image of a fractured space. The simple staging confirmed the program's thesis: that feminism is in crisis. They turned disagreement into a spectacle, showcasing supposed internal conflicts when feminism has never been monolithic and its internal tensions have been part of its political engine. Having women at the "feminist dissenting" table was a way to validate the clearly anti-feminist stance of its presenter and normalize sexist arguments. It's a manipulative approach. The program presented itself as a space for curiosity, concern, or interest in feminism when, in reality, the intention was to carry out a simple media operation to disparage it and portray it as an instigator of social division and a radicalism that leads to regression, inequality, tension, and chaos. A classic television tactic: presenting certain debate programs as supposed spaces for neutral discussion and absolute freedom when in reality they are ideological platforms serving a preconceived idea and legitimizing reactionary discourses.
