Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- I touched on fashion yesterday, citing the wearing of black underwear beneath white clothes. A young cultural spy has now told me this has been taken a step further here in Galicia. During the summer fiestas, she says, she clocked 3 or 4 young women wearing black bras as tops. I haven't seen that yet but will be on the lookout for it now.
- Here's The Local (again?) with an analysis of the veracity of Spanish stereotypical images. I concur with their conclusions.
- More importantly, here's the same journal with advice on Spain's outbreak of listeria.
- The Galician government is seriously concerned about Madrid's holding back of funds on the grounds that - there being no government - there's no national budget. Here's news of a lawsuit aimed at changing the situation. But presumably not very quickly . . . [Another true stereotype].
- Down in Extremadura - in a place called Peraleda de la Mata - the summer draught has revealed 'Spain's Stonehenge'. Built, they say, by folk who'd come west from Anatolia and who eventually headed north to the British Isles around 6,000 years ago. These 144 granite blocks can be seen c. 120km north east of Caceres. Or, if you like, 140km west of Toledo. They're thought by some to have been erected by Celts 4-5,000 years ago. But don't tell the Galicians; their 'national' myth is that they're the only descendants of the Celts in Spain:-
- Here in Pontevedra, they've been cleaning up some of our architectural sites. Here's the one at the city end of O Burgo bridge, where both Roman and Medieval remains can be seen, at or around the level of the approach to the original Roman bridge.
- As for the current bridge, paving work has progressed slowly but is now past the mid-point. Maybe it really will open in October. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying biking into town via the pretty 'temporary' camino alongside the tributary of the Lérez river.
- On my way into the old quarter this morning I'll be taking a look at the Gastroespacio, which debut'd yesterday on the first floor of the fish and seafood market.
The UK
- Not so long ago, Anglo medical practitioners used to mock the 'polypharmacy' of the Continent and the developing world. But now it's been revealed that 2 million patients in the UK are taking at least 7 prescription drugs daily, putting their lives in danger from lethal side effects.
- The French might well have shot themselves in the foot by predicting huge traffic disruption at the 'choke point' between Dover and Calais after a Hard Brexit. Transport companies are looking hard at using rail and east coast ferries, rather than trucks across the Channel. Who wants to be a prisoner of French politics? Companies in Belgium and Holland are said to be rubbing their hands in glee. As well they might.
- Hard to believe - well, no, not really - Tripadvisor and its ilk have made the exceptionally poor district of Dharau in India a tourist hotspot.
- The Times in the UK provides the Sex Guide Every Teenage Boy Needs in the Me-too Era. Read the article below. Especially if you're a teenage boy.
Nutters Corner
- Check out this clown, who claims that (Jewish) Bernie Sanders is ignorant of the true significance of the Bible and Israel's role in it. And therefore, doesn't understand true Judaism.
- More confused right-leaning Christians
Spanish
- Word of the Day: The versatile Bochorno.
Finally . . .
- Well, the collared doves are definitely back in my garden, and I'm sure I heard the alarm call of a blackbird last night, perhaps because there'd just been the loud cawing of a crow. And the robin is twittering as I write this. Normality is returning, though the feed containers remain full for the moment. The robin never goes near them and the doves and blackbirds confine themselves to hoovering up those seeds which fallen to the ground. But still no sign at all of the many sparrows. Perhaps they've already headed south for the winter. Off-peak flying.
- After yet another incident yesterday, I'm now convinced that the second I mount my (ancient) bike, I become invisible.
THE ARTICLE
The sex guide every teenage boy needs in the Me Too era
A new, no-holds-barred manual promises to educate young men about relationships. Hilary Rose meets its author, Inti Chavez Perez
A generation ago young men might have learnt about sex from their parents, or their teachers, or friends. They might have learnt from fumbling around on the job. But however they did it, they learnt by talking to someone. Then the internet happened, and social media and online porn. Now they learn by watching, and suddenly the rules aren’t so clear. In a world of limitless information, of Me Too, dick pics and ubiquitous porn, and when the American president boasts of committing sexual assault, what is a teenage boy supposed to think? And how can he set about learning?
“Guys have so many questions about sex, but they don’t always reach out and ask them,” says Inti Chavez Perez, a sex education expert. “There’s this idea that you should already know everything. So many guys tell me that the sex education they get isn’t useful. They don’t learn what sex is, how it’s done. And our cultural images of sex don’t really live up to what sex is like for real.”
A 2016 study by Middlesex University found that 53 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds had seen explicit material online. A report into child sexual exploitation published in 2017 by the children’s commissioner quoted one young person saying: “Basically, porn is everywhere.” The result is that children tend to think sex is a straightforward affair, usually involving male dominance. The clitoris doesn’t matter, everything works brilliantly every time, nobody has pubic hair and everyone has an orgasm. Which, Chavez Perez says, is so much misleading rubbish, and it’s not just the internet, it’s sexist adverts and romantic films with unrealistic sex scenes. If you watch all that as a teenager, he argues, you are going to be left wondering, when the time comes, why it isn’t anything like that in real life.
“Many guys don’t know how women’s bodies work, and that makes it quite hard to make the magic happen,” he says. “They don’t understand the importance of the clitoris.”
So Chavez Perez decided to write a book in which nothing was off-limits. What would be the point of limits, he asks. The whole purpose was to get real about sex, so he gets straight down to it. Chapter one, line one reads: “Is my dick normal?” We move quickly on to how to masturbate and a bullet-point guide on how to kiss (“try not to drench the other person’s lips with saliva as they might not like it”). He talks about straight sex, gay sex, dick pics, groping, consent and even offers handy hints on how to take off a bra. One chapter is called “What to do with girls”, while another, headed “Sex — the basics”, offers 21 bullet points for how to make out, from stroking someone’s face to caressing their bottom.
“Sex education in schools doesn’t necessarily speak to a teenage agenda,” Chavez Perez says. “It tells you how not to get an STI, but doesn’t give you the social skills training to actually hook up with somebody. A teenager would say, ‘How do I even get to the stage of choosing to use a condom or not?’”
It’s true that Chavez Perez occasionally takes some things to what can seem like ridiculous extremes. Then again, you might think he’s wisely leaving nothing to chance. Do straight guys really need to be told that if they’re making out with an unresponsive woman, who has her arms folded defensively across her chest, they should probably back off? Some of the advice amounts to what Basil Fawlty would call the bleedin’ obvious. If someone asks about you and your life, they’re interested in finding out more about you. If the object of your interest never wants to meet up, and never gets in touch, it’s a sign that they’re not interested. Well, duh. And President Trump notwithstanding, do we need to spell out to men that groping is wrong and they shouldn’t do it? Chavez Perez swerves the question.
“Many guys are taught that if someone says no then you have to stop. What I’m saying is that they [the other person] have to say yes. That’s very different. Mostly people say it without words, maybe because it’s a bit embarrassing to say things out loud. What I’ve done is translate what is a yes and what is a no. If they have their arms around you, that’s a good sign. If they have their arms between you, it’s not. I don’t think everybody understands unspoken language.”
Chavez Perez, 34, is Swedish, but was born in Spain to a Spanish mother, who was born in Belgium, and a Peruvian father. The family moved to Sweden in search of work when he was four. As a teenager he remembers being interested in gender equality and curious about sex education. He came from a Catholic family where sex was never mentioned, and went to an international private school where it wasn’t on the curriculum. At the age of 18 he was offered training in how to educate his peers about safe sex, and he enjoyed giving out information and free condoms. He went on to pursue a career as a political journalist, working mainly for Swedish public broadcasters, but worked as a sex-education and equality activist on the side. “Then one day I realised I didn’t want to just describe the world, I wanted to change it,” he says.
He went back to college to study andrology (male health) and embarked on a second career giving lectures to midwives about how to be gender and trans inclusive, advising the Swedish government about sex education in schools, writing books and travelling around Scandinavia giving talks and advice to teenagers. “There’s this idea that sex just happens and then you don’t speak about it, but we are not the same, our bodies are not the same, our ideas of sex are not the same, so we need to speak about what arouses us, and how we want it,” Chavez Perez says.
Parents, he thinks, should be talking more about sex with their children, but not in a big set-piece kind of way. They should be calling out an unrealistic sex scene in a rom-com, where the characters climax in five seconds, or an advert filled with sexual stereotypes. Yes, it can be hard for parent and child, he concedes, but it’s easier if you do it in small steps. (He is in a long-term relationship, but has no children.) Perhaps surprisingly, he thinks the internet is largely a positive phenomenon when it comes to sex and relationships: it has made it easier to meet people, to have dates, to have sex, he says.
Yes, social media and smartphones have increased some forms of sexual harassment, of which the most important he thinks is men sending unwanted dick pics. But sexual violence, he argues, was around long before the internet; he cites his own Spanish grandmother who couldn’t walk down the street when she was young without being heckled appallingly. And groping isn’t even really about sex. “It’s more to do with a guy wanting to dominate, wanting to show other guys how little he cares about other people’s boundaries, and how cool he is in the masculine hierarchy.”
He says it is a sign of the toxic masculinity which young men have it within their power to stop. A guy wolf-whistling at a girl might not think it’s a big deal, but when millions of men around the world think harassment is OK, then every day there are millions and millions of acts of sexual harassment “and we have a problem for the whole of society. Sexual violence is a world health problem and it comes from the individual.”
It’s depressing to contemplate Chavez Perez’s central thesis, that many young men have to learn the most basic rules governing consent and appropriate behaviour from a book. Then again, at least they’re learning it somewhere. “Guys feel bad about their bad behaviour. Many people think that teenage boys do stupid things because they’re stupid, but they’re not. Many times when they do things to show how cool they are, they get home and they ask themselves why. We have to teach guys their own value. The first step towards respecting others is to respect yourself.”
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