Everyday microaggressions
1. If today is Monday, March 9th, it means there's one year left until International Women's Day. I wonder how we'll get there in 2027 if, locally or globally, we continue to take so many steps backward at such a rapid pace. Equality—if it is true equality, it must be without nuances or footnotes—still seemed a long way off, and suddenly, regression is more than just a palpable threat. It's a stark, bitter, and daily realization that the gains we've made are in danger. The far-right wave sweeping the world and the fundamentalism common in religions rooted centuries ago are striving to subjugate women once again to limits that seemed to have been overcome. Irrelevance, dependence, complementarity transformed into inferiority, being told "don't say much" and "you have an opinion, but not much" are the new social condemnations. This is what Katherine Graham, the editor of the Washington PostWhen her husband made her feel, at all times, like she was the tail of a star. The nucleus of the comet that shone, of course, was him. Always him and only him.
2. At one of yesterday's demonstrations in Barcelona, MP Jéssica Albiach, speaking to reporters, called on the far right to stop using feminism and women's rights as a pretext for starting wars. She's right. In the last week, we've heard how the discourse surrounding the liberation of Iranian women has been used as an argument to justify the war in the Middle East. We don't have to look that far. In Spain, feminism and what the right wing calls women's "false privileges" due to equality policies have served Vox and its allies to grow and spread their ideology. It's heartbreaking that antifeminism wins votes, just as it openly spreads its rhetoric against immigration or Catalanophobia. It's all quite sad, extremely dangerous, and has devastating consequences. Who, with even a modicum of culture and common sense, can possibly think that half the world's population is superior and has more rights than the other half?
3. This week, Óscar López, the Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Administration, warned that "a brutal wave of sexism is coming to schools." His prediction was already too late. This wave is already overwhelming us, as demonstrated in Sunday's report by ARA. The algorithm also discriminates. Social networks, search engines, and apps provide information based on biased data, in which women—unprotected as they are—do not fare well. Artificial intelligence systems reproduce and amplify gender stereotypes. And it all adds up. Or rather, it all persists as long as the male establishment profits. The minister warns that "today, the battlefront is digital" due to the large number of hours teenagers spend on social media. And many of these platforms, if not all, reward misogynistic, sexist, or humiliating content against women. Let's say Pedro Sánchez succeeds in banning social media for those under 16. Fine. And what do we do about the microaggressions we experience every day, from age 16 to 102?
4. Paternalism, the mansplainingA slight, a joke, a playful remark, a comment about someone's hairstyle—these often go unnoticed as sexist because there's no ill intent, because they're subtle, and because—this is the crux of the matter—they're deeply ingrained in our culture. That's why they're called microaggressions, because they seem harmless but they're not. And let the ARA reader who hasn't recently been in a group of men where someone made a sexist joke and another said, "Let's take advantage of the fact that they can't sit right with us," raise their hand. And almost always, we all laugh knowingly without anyone saying, "Hey, you, that was really unfortunate." Right?