The Kiss of Death
Luis Rubiales, Spanish Football Federation chief, is resigning after the kiss scandal. Luis Rubiales kissed star player Jenni Hermoso on the lips as he handed the Spanish team gold medals last month, provoking outrage and protests from Spanish national players and the sports community, resulting in a global reckoning and turmoil. A few minutes before the Kiss, it didn’t help to see Mr. Rubiales grabbing his crotch as a victory gesture at the exclusive section sitting with Queen Letizia of Spain and 16-year-old Princess Sofia nearby. During his press conference, Mr. Rubiales repeatedly refused to resign and got a standing ovation.
He insisted that the lip kiss was consensual. “It was totally a spontaneous mutual gesture due to the immense joy of winning a World Cup,” and denounced what he called a “false feminism” and a “social assassination”. Social media responded, and a Spanish #MeToo movement was born. The Spanish soccer federation was late to react, saying that the player wasn’t bothered by Rubiales’ Kiss. A phone video floating around social showing where the Spanish players in the dressing room screamed and laughed while watching the Kiss being replayed on the phone; Jenni Hermoso can be seen laughing and shouting, “But I didn’t like it”! What if she did, I wonder! In modern life and progressive liberal culture, what is right or wrong is a relative social construct, decided based on what we like or don’t like as individuals and not as values shared. Rubiales thinks the Kiss was consensual, and Hormoso thinks it was not; with whom should we argue? FIFA football and the Spanish sports government body are still investigating whether the Kiss violated the code of conduct. A top Spanish court with only three women members is looking into the case to see if the Kiss constitutes a “sexual assault”. It is all about manufactured rules and regulations, a code of conduct drafted mostly by men in power outside of societal morals and values. The Mafia had the best code of conduct; here is a link to Mafia’s ten commandments. Spanish prime minister condemned Rubiales’s apology, it was “insufficient”, another look at our moral relativism. Sex is a big business in sport and has been with us from the beginning; sex sell they taught us in business school. The disgraced former FIFA president Sepp Blatter suggested in 2004 that wearing a sexy uniform could help women’s soccer. “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts”. We can’t watch a sporting event without seeing scantily dressed women displaying their bodies, sexualized young girls in gymnastic sports, where girls can start serious training as early as age two and five, and cheerleaders with their suggestive dancing on the sidelines. In a free market society, as long as you are in a transaction relationship, you can sell your body and call yourself a sex worker; (most of them are forced into the sex industry), a porn star can sue a president for defamation, not adultery; this is a free country. A kiss is not a kiss unless it is manufactured and confined on a big screen of a Kiss Cam in a baseball or a football game. The Kiss of Death it wasn’t about sex; in our modern life, sex is a language used to express power and identities. Sexism has been a systemic bias against women in sports. Men players earn ten times as much as women, and the number of women in managerial or ownership is negligence. Money and winning at any cost drives sports to billions of dollars. Soccer has always been the poor man’s sport, and you don’t need to be big, rich, or even fit to play the game. Best soccer was played in poor countries, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Africa; they have been dominating the sport for years. Now it is all about money and entertainment; players are bought and sold in the marketplace like cattle, and they get paid millions, but their lives are completely controlled and managed: what they eat and drink, control their bodies, how they spend time all controlled by owners of the clubs. When Messi joined the MLS, tickets shot up 1700%, making it hard for core soccer fans to watch the game, now watched by celebrities and those rich brats who have never watched a game in their lives, all going to see Messi not watch the game, when Messi takes his money and leave, they are back to their beaches, pickleball and La Cross. Sex is a big business; sex sells, and millions of dollars are spent in advertising using sex appeals. As I was researching this piece, sex ads popped up on my screen with women’s bodies trying to sell me fast food, cars, skin Lotion, and vacation; none of the ad showings was about improving my writing or spellings.
— Ahmed Tharwat
Host/Producer of Arab American T.V. show
BelAhdan Tv
He is still working on his film Democracy
Follow him on Twitter
Minnetonka, MN
