At the beginning of my career, before I had even completed university, I worked on an audiovisual project. It was aimed at women, made by women, and directed by a man. I wasn’t paid for my time; it wasn’t even an official internship. I showed up and they put a microphone in my hand. A few days later, the boss summoned me to his office. It was the first time I had interacted with him. There was no one else in the room. He went through some video—frame by frame—questioning my physique, encouraging me to lose weight, to grow my hair long, to get a tan. “Don’t you realize that all successful women on television look like that?” or “Do you really think that T-shirt suited you?” he asked, as he traced the contours of my body on an image frozen on the screen.
He was in his early 40s, I was in my early 20s. “I’m not going to pursue television; I’ve realized I don’t like it,” I told him, and I left. The truth is that for years I have avoided television as a career because of that encounter. A few days later, when I said goodbye, I let my colleagues know that I didn’t like the boss and I was surprised that they weren’t surprised. We never spoke about it again, not even years later when I met up with them, although it was an experience we all shared. That should not be normal.
The company behind the project was actually a start-up established by a number of young women who wanted to enter the world of fashion. It was mostly run by women. At the top of the pyramid there was a man, but underneath we were all women: the cinematographers, the editors, the journalists. Perhaps, because the focus of the company was fashion and beauty, it was assumed that a female staff was necessary.
These days, with the Rubiales case, I think a lot about our peers in sports media. Of women who have embarked on their careers vulnerable, enthusiastic, and talented who then find themselves facing sexism at the top—and the bottom and every layer in between. I think of all that they have had to endure, of all that the indignities that they are calling out and naming in the days after the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, forced an unwanted kiss on forward Jenni Hermoso during the celebration following the Spanish women’s team win at the World Cup.
“How can we explain the reality facing female football players if we are surrounded by our own ‘Rubialeses’ in newsrooms,” asks journalist Gemma Herrero in Jotdown Sport. “Those who have touched and kissed us without permission or consent and the next day have informed us, warned us, that it was no big deal,” she wrote in a piece that describes the multifaceted nature of the misogyny common in sports media.
I have never worked in sports journalism, although as a child I would have loved to. When I was 10 years old, I used to write letters to the official magazine of the Valencia football club and when they were published; it was as if I had been hired as a columnist. At 14, however, I started to feel excluded from football. There was something in the air from the moment I got on the Metro with my father on the way to the Mestalla Stadium to the moment we left after the match. I couldn’t describe what it was exactly. I do remember that I would sometimes tell my father that a certain friend of his was a chauvinist or that I noticed someone else was laughing at me or gave me an odd look. I stopped going to football matches. The other day, the sharp-tongued writer Marta Sans, a fellow exile from the world of football, was saying to me that the same thing happened to her when she was a child. Being at a match and feeling the violence of the insults, the male performance, made her feel a distance from the sport.
Many women journalists have come out to support former sports journalist Anna Solans after she publicly described an episode of sexual harassment by her former director at the sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo. But this sexism, sometimes so normalized, silenced and subtle, is not limited to sports media. Other men like Rubiales, and those who choose to keep quiet about men like him, are everywhere. If the media, where we should be exposing machismo in society, is also saturated in it, where can we turn? Journalist Esperanza Balaguer, who currently works as a correspondent in New York for various Spanish newspapers and is a member of the International Association of Women Communicators (ACM), told Vogue Spain that for many women journalists, walking away from their jobs has been the only way to escape toxic work environments.
The union of media professionals to which she belongs launched a call recently demanding the resignation of Luis Rubiales. “We […] know how important it is for the Football Federation to project a good image of our country on a global level and how important it is to defend our equal rights, which have still not been achieved in our sector,” wrote this group of women that includes many journalists who are familiar names in Spanish media—Almudena Ariza, Mayte Carrasco, Rosa María Artal, and Charo Izquierdo among them.
Izquierdo, a writer and editor at the Spanish newspaper El Español, also published an article describing her unpleasant experiences with a boss at the beginning of her career. “It was a long time ago. We didn t even imagine the possibility of something like ‘Me Too’ back then,” she wrote. In the last few days and weeks, the historic voice of women’s sports in Spain, Paloma del Río, announced her retirement: She was stepping down after almost four decades of work covering gymnastics and equestrian events for Television Española and other outlets. In an interview with the Spanish sports website Relevo about the Rubiales case, she recounted an encounter when a boss touched her breast during her early years at the RTVE network.
Balaguer tells us that many of the professionals who belong to the association of women journalists are now sharing cases of harassment and sexual assault at their workplaces. She shares her indignation at a boss who psychologically abused her and other female colleagues at a newspaper but who now publicly rails against machismo, positioning himself on the good side of history. And then there are others who, like Rubiales, claim to be unaware that their actions are reprehensible. There are many types of violence. Impunity confirms how embedded machismo is in society in general and in the workplace in particular. Balaguer pointed something out during my talk with her: “the complicit silence of colleagues.”
There is a large spider’s web that traps and eventually drives women away from journalism. On the podcast Estirando el chicle, journalist Olga Viza recently discussed how trying to achieve a proper work-life balance, especially in the case of women with heterosexual partners, has limited the careers of many brilliant journalists. She herself saw how, on 9/11, those who were mothers left the newsroom, giving up the most important story of their careers, while the men remained unperturbed. Those with wives had someone who gave them the space and freedom to focus on their work without worrying about children and other family responsibilities. Then there is also the pay gap, which in football is incomprehensibly normalized. All of it has the same patriarchal roots.
Many Spanish women have been waiting for years for a Me Too moment here. If in the United States this movement emerged out of the movie industry, it makes sense that here it would emerge out of the world of sport: Football plays the role in Spain that Hollywood does in America. It is the focus of media attention and has a huge social influence, to the point of elevating its most visible stars to the level of legends. If there was going to be a reckoning, it is right that it should begin with football.
The Rubiales affair has awakened a new wave of Cuéntalo that journalist Cristina Fallarás started in 2018. [Editor s note: The phrase translates as “tell it” and the hashtag was used to encourage women to share their experiences with sexual aggression.] But this time it is focused on powerful men and abusive bosses. As footballer Alexia Putellas put it, in a slogan that has now gone viral, “se acabó”—in English, “it’s over.” Balaguer says, “I like the power behind those two words. ‘Me Too’ was very much necessary, but now we have to be more decisive.” It s not enough to share that it happened to me too, it’s now necessary to make sure that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. To all the Rubialeses of the world, this is the beginning of the end.
This story originally appeared in Vogue Spain. It was translated and adapted by John Newton.