The inanities of unhealthy feminism

"Spaniards, Franco is dead". Everyone in Spain remembers (either as a direct witness or from television archives) this historic phrase and the image of Arias Navarro on television on 20 November 1975. How shameless, how macho, how he disregards women by refusing to pronounce "Spaniards, men and women, Franco is dead", perhaps Franco died only for men!
Does what I have just said sound grotesque? Yes, it is.

Let's be clear from the outset: I am not against feminism, or at least not against the definition given by the Royal Spanish Academy: "Feminism: Principle of equal rights for women and men". 

I was born and grew up in a country - Bulgaria - where the concept of feminism, let alone the feminist movement, did not exist. Since the 1940s, with the establishment of the communist regime, Bulgarian women were treated, for better or worse, absolutely the same as men in all facets of social life, sometimes too much so. It was not uncommon to see women alongside men on a construction site, carrying 50-kilo bags of cement on their shoulders, or climbing the scaffolding to assemble bricks, or lifting boxes full of dozens of bottles in a supermarket... Do you like such equality, girls? We had had enough of it.

At first, this vehement desire for gender equality in Spain is understandable. For three quarters of the 20th century, Spanish women remained enslaved at home, unable to choose their own destiny, unable to decide for themselves. Yes, there were women, especially in the political and cultural sphere, who fought - and for much longer - for their rights, but it is also true that they achieved little before the arrival of democracy in Spain in the 1970s. But more than 40 years have passed since then. During that period Spanish women fought passionately and in a hurry - as if they needed to make up for lost time - to equalise their rights with those of men. And there is no denying that they have succeeded. Are there no women in the Spanish government today, are there no women running large public and private companies, are there no women entrepreneurs successfully setting up their own businesses, etc.?

Inequalities do exist today, for example, with regard to salaries in some sectors, or when it comes to hiring people in a company (here we have other, much more serious inequalities, such as age, race, sexual orientation, but for feminists, it seems this is not their fight).

We have just entered the third decade of the 21st century. Equality between men and women, at least in the civilised world, has largely been achieved, and not exactly as a result of multi-dutiful and boastful demonstrations, nor as a result of always stressing "the men" and "the women". Apart from the 40-year struggle of Spanish women, ( let's not take the credit away from them), female equality came about because the world is changing, society is becoming more open, minds are broadening, and men themselves are changing their minds and realising that women are just as competitive. 

So why are all these women's movements here in Spain today? What rights are they demanding? It is not clear. I'm sure you've heard a high-ranking feminist activist: empty words and words, cliché phrases, and nothing concrete. When a few weeks ago the mass demonstration on 8-M was banned because of the pandemic, I listened on television to a girl from a student association, who said that they were going to go out and demonstrate, no matter what. And she argued in the same way as her mentors, emphasising the phrase that has become very fashionable lately: that "feminism is being criminalised". Poor girl!

The thing is that feminism in Spain has become an instrument of politics to suck the brains out of people, especially young women, such as Los (the) students, oh, sorry, Las (female) students, and turn them into submissives of a certain political doctrine. Or in other words, to hook them into their network of loyal voters.

By the way, those in favour of the inclusive language controversy, that is, LOS and LAS instead of just LOS! In all languages where there is a distinction between the genders in the plural, the masculine form is accepted by default as generic, comprising both sexes. In Bulgaria, for example, when you say "the Bulgarians" or "the citizens", you mean the whole nation. And no one would think of starting a feminist movement for this reason, or taking the controversy to Parliament, and turning grammar upside down just to show that women are not inferior to men. 

Equality is not achieved by making the language more loaded, less fluent and less expressive. This only leads to ridicule.