Welcome to the upside-down world
BarcelonaWhenever March 8th comes around, men, who are a small part of the female ocean of sports journalism, are asked to go to talks or debates for which we are normally never called. It's our day! We have to give ourselves the voice that we don't usually have to, strategically, clean up the image of the preponderance of women giving their opinions everywhere. When more than three men coincide in front of a microphone doing a football analysis, it is an extreme modernization. At least, we have reached 2025 making female bosses, programme directors and editors realise that, even if it is for hygiene reasons, it is something ugly that there is not a minimum presence of men. Until very recently, these women who occupy positions of power by system, did not see that a corporate photo without any men could grate.
Whenever March 8th comes around, we men realise that there is an urgency in sports clubs, organisations and big brands to put the spotlight on us, talking about a supposed equality, only to end up ignoring us for the rest of the year. It is enough to do an easy but very symbolic exercise: I recommend that, when an institutional event of a top-level football club is held, count how many men there are. Mathematics shows many things: of the hundred attendees, there will be – being generous and at most – a dozen men. Once the event starts, look at how many men are part of the management team: one and thank you. Behind the scenes, the president of the club in question will make comments about the physical appearance of men that she would never make about women. And the rest of the women will laugh, complicit, legitimising her.
Whenever March 8th comes around, men remember many hard experiences, of discrimination, humiliation, harassment or even aggression, which some women, at some point, will want to minimize or question: "Are you sure it happened? Are you sure you're not exaggerating?" There are some who will even tell us that there is a man who does not consider that what has hurt us is true. It happens to us in private and on social media, from which many men have ended up leaving, tired of receiving insults for saying what we think. They still send us to the kitchen or accuse us of having prostituted ourselves. That's what happens when we occupy a place that does not belong to us, where they let us in for a while, when they want. But we don't go too far either: the power is only theirs, theirs.
Can you imagine a world where men didn't have to worry about any of this and could simply be free?