Never apologize, never explain
Sorry. Five letters, two syllables: it’s a fairly straightforward word. Its Spanish equivalent, lo siento, has an extra couple of syllables but it’s not exactly difficult to say.
Or so you’d think. An extraordinary number of powerful men seem allergic to apologies, living life by the mantra (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill) that you should never apologize, never explain.
Take Luis Rubiales, for example. The Spanish soccer chief sparked outrage after he planted an unsolicited kiss on forward Jenni Hermoso’s lips during the Women’s World Cup medal presentation. If he had just said sorry, if he had just expressed genuine remorse for his actions and tried to understand why forcing a kiss on someone is problematic, the story would have fizzled out and people would have moved on. Most people weren’t asking for his head, after all, just for a little introspection.
But he couldn’t do that, could he? Instead he dug his heels in and started ticking off every cliched move in the Aggrieved Aggressor’s Handbook.
Step one: claim she was asking for it. That’s always the first argument to come up in any allegation of assault or misconduct, isn’t it? She wanted it, she asked for it. Despite the fact that Hermoso has said she didn’t consent to being kissed by the Spanish football federation president, Rubiales has said she did.
Step two: cast yourself as the victim. It’s a witch-hunt, they’re out to destroy me. Aggressors love to turn the tables by claiming they’re the ones that we should feel sorry for. In a bizarre speech shortly after the incident, Rubiales said his critics are “trying to kill me” and hit out at “false feminism”. Dude, nobody is trying to kill you. We just want you to understand the basic concept of consent!
Step three: weaponize the women in your life. Men charged with misconduct routinely go through their Rolodexes and get the women in their lives to vouch for them. If they’ve got daughters, then they love pulling out the “as a father of daughters” line. During the speech where he railed against “false feminism”, Rubiales pointed at his three daughters and addressed them directly.
It’s not clear how Rubiales’s daughters feel about being used as defensive props by their father, but some of the women in his life would clearly do anything to support him. A flair for drama must run in the family because Rubiales’s mother, Ángeles Béjar, has gone quite the extra mile for him: on Monday she locked herself in the Divina Pastora church and announced she was going on a hunger strike over the “unwarranted, inhumane and bloodthirsty hunt” of her son. “I don’t mind dying for justice,” she told the broadcaster Telecinco on Tuesday.
By Wednesday, however, it seems she started to think better of the hunger strike and reportedly checked herself into a hospital. (The Santa Ana hospital would not confirm to Reuters whether she had actually been admitted.). A local priest who identified himself as Father Antonio told reporters she was feeling tired and stressed out.
Not everyone in the Rubiales family is starving themselves in support. Juan Rubiales, his uncle and former chief of staff, told reporters on Wednesday that he is Team Hermoso. He also called his nephew, who has been embroiled in many other scandals in the past, “a proud, arrogant person and … a cowardly man”. He didn’t stop there. Rubiales, in his uncle’s estimation, “is a man obsessed with power, luxury, money and even women. I think he needs a social re-education program”.
I’m not sure he’s going to get a social re-education program, but might Rubiales be suspended? The jury is out on that one. Spain’s administrative sports court (TAD) has opened a case against Rubiales for a “serious” (but not “very serious”) breach of conduct. If TAD had found that his conduct was “very serious” the government could have suspended Rubiales from his role. As it is, he can’t be suspended, but there will be an investigation and he might be banned from football for a while. Long story short, this saga is going to drag on and on. The only silver lining to all this is that the misogyny in Spanish football has become impossible to ignore.
Is Texas going to start enforcing pregnancy tests at its borders?
The way things are going it doesn’t seem implausible. Texas has some of the toughest abortion bans in the US but it’s still theoretically possible to leave the state and get an abortion elsewhere. Anti-abortion activists want to clamp down on that. The Washington Post reports that a wave of new proposals would make it illegal to use certain roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion.
“This really is building a wall to stop abortion trafficking,” said Mark Lee Dickson, the anti-abortion activist leading this dystopian initiative.
Tennessee woman sets world record for longest female mullet
Tami Manis is all business at the front and a 33-year-long party at the back. Manis’s mullet isn’t just record-breaking – it’s very ontrend: salons are reporting a surge in demand for the divisive haircut.
Canada warns LGBTQ+ tourists about visiting the US
The travel advisory comes after a wave of discriminatory laws passed by Republican states. Crucially, it’s not just places like Florida where being LGBTQ+ has become more difficult. Inflammatory rhetoric by Republican politicians has turned back the clock across the country, and even places like New York feel less safe. In the Guardian, Dan Clark writes about how he has “started to change [his] appearance to accommodate a growing hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community in the US”.
Elon Musk, a man who loves insulting other people, is reportedly building a glass house
College volleyball match sets world record for attendance at women’s sporting event
More than 92,000 fans showed up to watch Nebraska and Omaha play volleyball. How and why? It’s a long story and Brady Oltmans has all the details.
Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons
Two major new studies suggest that if you’re going to go under the knife, you’d better hope it’s a woman wielding it. Patients treated by male surgeons were 25% more likely to die a year after surgery than those treated by their female counterparts, one analysis showed.
The week in paw-triarchy
A new study has found that a majority of US dog owners are now skeptical of vaccinating their animals, even against rabies. 37% of people surveyed thought that vaccines might cause their dogs to develop autism, an idea that isn’t backed by any sort of evidence. “What this demonstrates is that Covid fundamentally changed how Americans look at vaccines,” political scientist and study co-author Matt Motta told Bloomberg. More bluntly, what this demonstrates is that the pandemic seems to have infected many Americans with brain worms.
