Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here. Garish but informative.
Matters Spanish
- More developments in a chapter from Spain's dark past, when Catholics thought they could do whatever they liked here, so long as they believed some god justified it.
- If this, as I suspect, is not behind a paywall, you can see here some of the monstrosities resulting from Spain's phony construction boom of 2002-8, driven by the intro of the euro and the cheap money from German and French banks that flooded into Spain.
- More here on the fall in tourist numbers in July and, I expect, in August.
- This is an uplifting tale of a Brit couple who came here to set up a hotel back in the mid 1930s. Though it didn't end well. Thanks to Mr Franco, mainly.
- Yet another list from The Local. This time – 7 reasons to love Spain in September.
Matters Galician and Pontevedran
- Another nice tale from the declining Galican city of Franco's birth, Ferrol.
- Washington Irving writes in the 1830s: Among the water-carriers who once resorted to this well, there was a sturdy, strong-backed, bandy-legged little fellow, named Pedro Gil, but called Peregil for shortness. Being a water-carrier, he was a Gallego, or native of Gallicia[sic], of course. Nature seems to have formed races of men, as she has of animals, for different kinds of drudgery. So in Spain, the carriers of water and bearers of burdens are all sturdy little natives of Gallicia. No man says, “Get me a porter,” but, “Call a Gallego.” I doubt all this is true nowadays, for one reason and another.
- My friend Eamon in La Coruña has managed to capture the essence of the Frenchman I tried to help on Saturday last . . . .
Finally . . .
- Below are 2 controversial articles by or about brave British women. One asking why women confuse men and the other asking why misogny might become a 'hate crime' in the UK. I hope they both have hard hides.
© [David] Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 5.9.18
THE ARTICLES
1. Women dressed like prostitutes confuse men: Maureen Lipman
Women celebrities who dress like prostitutes but complain about male attention are to blame for “confusing” men, Maureen Lipman has claimed.
The actress said that the #MeToo movement was “going too far” in vilifying men for incidents that took place decades ago when standards of behaviour were different.
“We mustn’t wipe out men,” she told Radio Times. “I know men have brutalised women over centuries, but I don’t think the message we’re giving out with #MeToo is right.”
Lipman, 72, is not the first well-known woman to express misgivings about the backlash against inappropriate male behaviour. She said that women celebrities who appeared in public in “all this bondage clothing — dressed a bit like a prostitute would have dressed” were sending mixed messages. “Young female pop stars, for example, are saying: ‘It’s my body, and I’m empowered to show it to you’. But then: ‘Don’t touch it, don’t come near it, don’t flirt with it.’ That is a bit of a shame because flirting is some of the best fun you’ve ever had in your life. We’re batting our eyelids and clenching our teeth at the same time. That is confusing.”
Lipman also indicated some sympathy for Roman Polanski, the film director who fled the US after pleading guilty to the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Polanski, 85, has never served time in jail, but Lipman, who starred in his 2002 film The Pianist, said that his decades-long exile in Europe was “probably enough” punishment. She also suggested that the circumstances of Polanski’s crime during a “photoshoot” at the Los Angeles home of the actor Jack Nicholson, were not considered so problematic in the era in which they occurred.
“We’ve got to stop judging everybody now on the mores of then,” Lipman said. “In the Sixties it was plausible for a young girl to be brought to Jack Nicholson’s house and left with Roman Polanski. It wasn’t an unusual thing.”
She made it clear that she supported the progress made in encouraging sexual abuse victims to come forward but said that #MeToo was leading to “kneejerk” and “all-inclusive” condemnation of men for relatively minor historical offences.
Lipman is perhaps best known for playing the Jewish grandmother Beatrice Bellman in a series of British Telecom adverts. She has just signed to play Evelyn Plummer, an “outspoken battleaxe”, in Coronation Street.
She ended her long-standing support for the Labour Party in 2014 and has repeatedly criticised Jeremy Corbyn’s record on antisemitism.
In her Radio Times interview, the actress implied that the low profile adopted by Mr Corbyn’s Mexican wife, Laura Álvarez, reflected a broader marginalisation of women by political leaders. “Where’s Mrs Corbyn? She’s a Mexican in a peaked cap following two paces behind . . . Is he hiding her?” she said. “Where is Mrs Putin? Where has she gone? Can you trust a man like that? Trump grabs pussy as a way of saying, ‘How do you do, madam?’ We know that; he’s a misogynist and a vulgarian. And he’s on the third Mrs Trump, who hates him.”
In January, 100 prominent French women signed an open letter claiming that seduction was being criminalised by the #MeToo campaign. Mary Beard, the classicist, has spoken of the tendency to “cherry pick” isolated incidents of misbehaviour out of context, urging the movement to focus on the protection of women working now rather than past misconduct.
2. The thought police turn men into the enemy: Melanie Phillips Times
Moves to add misogyny to the list of hate crimes are motivated by intolerance and prejudice
The Labour MP Stella Creasy wants to make misogyny a hate crime. Misogyny is defined as hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women. Tomorrow, the Commons will debate Creasy’s amendment to the “upskirting” bill, which would add misogyny as an aggravating factor.The MP reportedly hopes this will be the first step to making it a “hate crime”, along with offences motivated by hostility based on race, religion, trans identity, sexual orientation or disability. She claims the public backs such a move. A two-year pilot scheme by Nottinghamshire police, which recognised public harassment of women as misogynistic hate crime, is said to have received overwhelming support.
Yet laws already exist prohibiting violence against women, discrimination or harassment. So why does misogyny need to be made a crime? “Upskirting”, says Creasy, “is a classic example of a crime in which misogyny is motivating the offence”. Really? What’s the evidence for that? It seems to be nothing other than the apparently unchallengeable belief that unwanted behaviour towards women is invariably motivated by prejudice against them.
This is a false and damaging generalisation. Since the perception of such a hate crime involves someone’s subjective view that she is the victim of male prejudice, it can expand to cover a vast range of behaviour. Such expansion is already on display in the Nottinghamshire scheme. This includes wolf-whistling, groping, indecent exposure, sexually explicit language, unwanted sexual advances and online abuse.
Some of these are, and should be, treated as offences in their own right. Others may be inappropriate, socially maladroit, oafish or evidence of pathological deviancy. But are they invariably motivated by hatred or dislike of all women? And are all of them serious enough to use up already overstretched police resources? And what about all those women who ogle men, address sexually suggestive remarks or insults to them, touch them inappropriately or speak of men in general with disdain?
Should misandry — hatred of, contempt for or prejudice against men — also be made a hate crime? And while we’re in the mood, why not make misanthropy a hate crime, thus criminalising all those with a generally grumpy view of their fellow human beings? Indeed, since hatred is part of the human condition, why not expand the criteria to criminalise most of the population?
Under hate crime doctrine, however, bigotry is reserved only for the powerful. Men are deemed to be the patriarchy that runs the show. So by definition men cannot be victims of women.
That’s why Zakia Soman, a women’s rights activist and one of the “experts” who decided in a recent Thomson Reuters poll that America was one of the ten countries perceived as most dangerous for women, explained this dubious ranking on the grounds that “our society is ruled by misogyny and patriarchy”. Feminists used to fight the disempowering perception that “biology is destiny”. When it comes to their view of men, however, biology is guilt.
Far from creating a more decent, civilised society, existing hate crimes have helped promote a climate of intolerance, bullying and social division based on suspicion, recrimination and blame.
Hate crime was first introduced in the US in the Eighties and was problematic from the start. This was because it did not seek to address any deficiency in the laws designed to safeguard people from harm. It was instead part and parcel of “identity politics” in which groups define themselves as victims. Victimisation is deemed to be proof of an unjust society; in identity politics, virtually everyone outside the supposedly dominant establishment is a victim. Hate crime is a symbol of solidarity with them. It is said to be more serious than regular crimes because the prejudice involved aggravates the harm done to the victim. Really? How? It doesn’t increase the injury sustained from an assault or the potential threat posed by harassment.
The aggravating factor is surely nothing more than the offence or revulsion felt by the victim at the crime’s presumed hateful motivation. So the extra punishment is instead for values thought to be objectionable.
Hate crimes thus don’t police deeds but thought. They are an attempt to drive out attitudes that the self-appointed cultural police deem to be beyond the pale. Now actual police are being used to enforce them.
Their arbitrary nature will inevitably mean the invidious targeting of certain individuals. The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson, for example, says boys are the victims of “gender-equality” and that men are generally dominant in society because they are better at being in charge.
For that, he is of course labelled a misogynist of the deepest hue. If Creasy has her way, will Peterson be arrested for hate crime if he should return to Britain for one of his wildly successful public appearances?
Making misogyny a crime presupposes that male attitudes to women need to be regulated in and of themselves. It therefore makes men the enemy, not just of women but of decent and civilised values.
That is a hateful calumny. In other words, the real hatred involved in the crime of misogyny doesn’t lie with the male sex. It resides instead in the minds of those whose prejudice against men now risks labelling their chromosomes as accessories to crime.
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