A Spanish journalist was the victim of a hand to the buttocks on Tuesday, September 12, while she was speaking live on television. This still too banal gesture is none other than sexual assault in the eyes of the law.
These are a woman’s buttocks that have gone viral on social networks, those of a Spanish journalist. While she is live on television, Tuesday September 12 in Madrid street, a man approaches, full of confidence, arrogant sunglasses, smirk, he touches the journalist’s posterior and proud therefore, stays by his side. The journalist, by an ancestral reflex, apologizes, and she politely asks the rude guy to move away to let her work.
Impolite is a euphemism because when we touch a woman’s buttocks without consent, we are not talking about a hand on the buttocks but about aggression and impolite is nothing other, in the eyes of the law, than ‘an aggressor. The latter must now tighten his buttocks since he was immediately arrested by the Spanish police.
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Point of gender equality when it comes to buttocks
The rump is full, it’s not new, women’s buttocks have always been the subject of 1,000 fantasies, as far back as we go back in the history of art or cinema or advertising. While men’s buttocks appear athletic, military, or even funny. We remember Daniel Prévost in the Petit Rapporteur.
For women’s buttocks, there are no schoolboy jokes, but eroticism, always this sexualization of women’s bodies. From the Callipyge Venus of antiquity lifting her tunic to admire her harmonious buttocks, to the Viscount of Valmont in dangerous relationships writing to Madame de Tourvel on a “table which is used for this purpose for the first time”the table in question being prostitutes’ buttocks.
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Buttocks that are like objects that men could appropriate. So we tell women that they lack humor, that it’s not that serious, that we shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. But as one of this Spanish journalist’s colleagues puts it so well: “In a society that we want to be better, this feeling of impunity can no longer exist.”. Because as the writer Albert Cossery already said in 1913 “social progress begins with the independence of the buttocks”and I would add: by the equality of the buttocks.