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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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My take is that the kiss itself, not really that bad, but also something that does reflect on power dynamics, both men/women but also boss/employee. It deserved a real apology which was not given, instead the apology was not only extremely insincere, but also a result of behind the scenes pressure to sweep it under the rug and downplay. Rubiales doubling down was awful and it is kind of dystopian to see so much applause. He's the one playing a victimhood narrative, not Hermoso. Which is crazy! She didn't even talk about victimhood AT ALL until AFTER Rubiales basically lied about the kiss. I might add that Rubiales' version of events is in my opinion not supported by the video of the kiss, where they don't seem to have much of a conversation at all.

Yeah, sorry chum but I don't see anything in your post that changes this from the he said she said nonsense I thought it was in the first place. She says he lied about asking for a kiss. Why is she more credible than him? Because you empathise with her more. Anyone who feels the opposite will find Rubiales more credible. But we didn't record that exchange so we'll never know. What we did record has Rubiales mouth blocked by Hermoso's head while they hugged, which would also be a good way to say a few things in a roaring stadium.

Also

Commentary: Note how he focuses on how he's almost forced to apologize, how he created a distraction, and how he minimizes everything that happened. He doesn't even say what he did, he just says "what happened, happened". No big deal, no big deal. It's all about the consequences of his actions and nothing about how it could have made her feel or if he truly made a mistake. No, it's an apology that he "has to" make. This is, IMO, extra clear in the original Spanish and with intact voice inflections, etc. and I've tried to render the overall "vibe" of his comments accurately, though Spain-Spanish isn't my forte.

This is how every public facing representative apologises. Minimise everything that happened. Nobody was hurt by it, it was just a mistake. And yet, he does own up to his mistakes. He calls them his mistakes, he says he is embarrassed for distracting from the team's victory. Should he have busted out a whip and struck his sin away? Obviously Rubiales desperately needs some pr person by his side to slap the side of his head every time he opens his mouth, but once again it feels like we are razing the countryside over a minor interpersonal conflict, which is what nearly every msm cancel culture crusade turns out to be.

Instead, Hermoso is only a reluctant participant in the whole debate who might have though it also wasn't a big deal and wanted to move on herself, until pressure and slander essentially forced her hand.

Say what. So you think she didn't think it was a big deal except he said she said yes and that made it a big deal, because she was ok with the non consensual kiss but not ok with him claiming it was consensual, so after days of silence she released a statement denouncing the nonconsensual kiss?

Also why did this need a new thread?

why is she more credible than him

Who politely asks for a kiss as a celebration?

Far more likely that he made a snap judgment that she wouldn’t mind and went for it. Which is the story she’s telling.

I’d find her less credible if she’d been righteously wading into the culture war side, but she’s been pretty reluctant.

She says he lied about asking for a kiss. Why is she more credible than him?

have you ever won anything and celebrated ? You can barely hear you own voice. Now imagine that at WC scale in the greatest moment of your life.

You think in that moment, he went : "May I kiss you on the lips, deeply while shoving your face into mine mademoiselle ?" Ofc not. I would doubt his statement even if she corroborated it.

I haven't won a world cup, but I have been in roaring stadiums and arenas before. It reminds me of a Slayer concert I went to when I was young, because it was packed full of giant hairy angry dudes. But because nobody could hear anything over the music, people were having to talk right in each other's ears. And the way it evolved was incredible. At the start of the night it was awkward, and you'd watch the angry giants flinch constantly whenever they came close to contact with another angry giant. But as the alcohol flowed and the haze bloomed people got more comfortable, and by the end of the night everyone was hugging everyone. Sometimes to speak about something, but sometimes they just felt like a hug. It was beautiful. I hate the idea of throwing that away.

But back to this shit, if you watch the video there is a beat between the hug and the kiss where he appears to say two or three syllables. From what I'd heard he wasn't alleged to have said "May I kiss you on the lips, deeply while shoving your face into mine mademoiselle ?", he said "un beso?" and she smiled and nodded assent. I assumed this was going to come down to "he was holding her head and the movement of his hands made it look like she was nodding but she wasn't", but either way we will never know what exactly went down, and in situations like that I default to 'then it's none of my business'.

Well, if I'm honest part of my judgement is based on simply my experience of watching firsthand the Spanish-language videos, and my personal judgement of who to believe, but also there are two videos of different angles (which I saw but now can't find clean zoomed out links of because googling for original videos is a fucking horrible experience) that don't seem to support any real conversation between them. But it's also possible they had the conversation he claimed but she thought it would be a cheek kiss or a head kiss or something so it's not like any reasonable person is going to expect grabbing your whole head and planting a full on kiss on the lips in that situation?

I don't know how it comes across in my clumsy translation but all of his apologies were basically linked grammatically with some other excuse or with a connotation of "I have to" rather than "I want to". It's kind of the apology equivalent of being passive-aggressive.

So you think she didn't think it was a big deal except he said she said yes and that made it a big deal, because she was ok with the non consensual kiss but not ok with him claiming it was consensual, so after days of silence she released a statement denouncing the nonconsensual kiss?

That's pretty much right. She was fine being like, a little mistreated for the sake of not distracting from an awesome victory and celebrations. But when it morphed into a huge and deliberate misrepresentation, and him being so belligerent about it all, she felt she had to say something. My reading of her comments focuses on how she thinks it's more about him lacking respect for others than the actual vulnerability or any harm from the act itself. That Rubiales has created a "manipulative culture". And she realized that staying silent, rather than being a noble act, is in fact sending a message of impunity for bad actors to other women who might find themselves in similar situations. That's perfectly in keeping with for example the Wednesday release with the union, where she seems more interested in improving overall player conditions and a general sense of justice and being respected than an extraction of a specific punishment.

Because if there were true respect between the players and Rubiales, a kiss like that would be unthinkable.

Because if there were true respect between the players and Rubiales, a kiss like that would be unthinkable.

I know next to nothing about the situation or the people involved. For all I know you're absolutely right about Rubiales, and he's an absolute creep. I'm actually quite inclined to believe that, as my opinion on people in elite positions tends to be rather low, but this single sentence made me do a hard-format and wipe everything you said prior to it from my mind.

To say that I disagree would be the understatement of the year, it's stuff like this that makes me believe progressivism is downright inhumane, and it's goal is to maximize human misery. Even granting you every other premise, and accepting your version of the events, this sentence is completely wrong. There's nothing unthinkable about a kiss like that, and there's no way it contradicts respect, even if it was unwanted and was the wrong thing to do. If there's warm blood running through your veins, you should at least be able to see a possible non-disrespectful reason for his actions.

There is an axiom in certain strains of Western feminism that male lust is inherently dehumanizing. That the male (lustful) gaze objectifies any and all women towards whom it is directed.

This academic paradigm has filtered out to the masses in various forms. Young men have all been exposed to the message that their sexual desires are in some way problematic and expressing them to women is in some way harmful to those women. "It is disrespectful to have any sexual desire for your female colleagues." is an unsurprising belief to come out of that environment. It obviously isn't a true belief, sexual desire and respect aren't actually linked in our psyche that way, but it's probably a useful belief in the post metoo era.

I like the new thread, he collected a lot more relevant information into one place where more people will see it.

Yeah but aside from this being a he said she said situation that can only end with everyone disappointed in everyone else (so I think we should talk about it less), any time we get multiple threads on a current hot topic I can't help but wonder what we might have talked about if everything had remained in one thread.

That said, I was pretty keen to read the new posts in that thread this morning myself, I understand the allure and the desire to get engagement you are unlikely to get in an older thread. And I agree this was a good op, whatever I think of the conclusions.

It could have been an error on my part. I just reached like 14k characters and was like, is this big enough to be its own thing? Certainly I put the effort in (translating sucks). I'm not sure that pure length + effort is a great heuristic for a top level comment but it seemed acceptable at the time to me, especially considering my point is more about the reaction to the kiss, rather than the dynamics of the kiss itself, though that might get lost in discussion.