Feminist

  The contracts that Spanish teachers were forced to sign in 1923, included among its provisions, the prohibition to dye their hair and travel in a car with another man other than their father or brother. They were forced to be home between eight pm and six in the morning, unless it was to attend a school assignment and had to wear at least two petticoats. Needless to say they were not allowed to walk around the city ice cream parlors. The ice cream parlors were places of doom, especially the ones that had handmade products, but we'll talk about that in another moment.

  These obligations and prohibitions, and many other recent ones, seem like laughable anachronisms now that they have disappeared from the face of the civilized earth as naturally as ripe fruit falling from a tree or Windows Vista crashing. However, as we all know and prefer to forget, its abolition was the result of a century of struggles of many women: the feminists.

  I´m a feminist: And you, fat or skinny sir or madam that is reading this, are also one too. Well, I give the benefit of the doubt, and maybe you were or would have wanted to be in the last meeting of Josep Anglada from the extreme right, were he manifested (always so original) that we must blame everything (everything in its entirety) on the Muslims (Moors in his slang) and Latin Americans (in his slang, wog). In that case it would have been strange that he was a feminist. But I presume because of your good and rare taste to read my texts, that you are, despite everything, using the terminology of Mariano Rajoy a "normal person".

  “I am not either a feminist or a male chauvinist”. “I am not a feminist, I am feminine”. “I don´t radical ideas, I don´t believe women are better than men”. “Of course, I am not a feminist because I don´t hate men...” Anyone who has not said or heard some of these unfortunate phrases should cast the first stone. If you are Angel Luna (the stone is a metaphor) refrain in any case of throwing one.

  While other trains of thought, such as socialism, liberalism or even environmentalism, have managed to maintain the prestige of their name (or their brand) despite their failure or omission. Feminism, which has succeeded in essence, integrating naturally in everyone's mind, has gained little recognition; misunderstood and dismissed as an abandoned cocoon that a butterfly leaves; we could say in a cheesy way. And maybe it wouldn´t be so important, if it didn´t unfairly drag down the same path of oblivion and even contempt, the women and men who elaborated and fought for feminist ideas obtaining rights that we all enjoy. Recently, there is a tendency to mask the unappreciated name of feminism, preferring to use the more acceptable term "gender" as a last name that comes from a good family, a good number of words, such as politics, education, problems, research, observatory etc.

  What is feminism? The Spanish philosopher Amelia Valcárcel defines it as that political tradition of Modernity, egalitarian and democracy, which holds that no individual of the human species should be excluded from any asset or any right because of their sex.

  Who were their predecessors? As noted on many occasions, it is not innocent that in the collective imagination we continue caricaturing feminists like ladies with mustaches who hate men. Nor that throughout high school and my career in law were they once mentioned. But they did speak about the essential canonical law and indispensable Justinian law, but not a word about Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges, to name only two. No wonder that when you talk about "gender" issues, sometimes we do not know where we come from, what we want to do and where it is trying to go, lost behind a strange and pilgrim at(@). Everyone will understand what I am talking about.

 

Spanish version

 

 

 

El Señor Gordo

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Translation by Amanda Perri