Eva Soriano's Greek fling sparks wave of sexist abuse in Spain

Eva Soriano and her Greek fling: the sens barrage against women's storytelling

What happens when a woman recounts an episode of her love life without asking permission? In the case of Spanish comedian and presenter Eva Soriano, the answer has been a combination of contempt and objectification that says more about the writers than about the story itself. Her tale, a fling that took place in Greece, has triggered a wave of reactions dominated by the most tiresome sens: from utter indifference to attempts to reduce her to an object. What is striking is not that criticism exists; it is the virulence and direction of the attack.

Others have ventured into humiliation territory with jibes about her looks or her age. And there is no shortage of those who reinterpret the anecdote to claim she was not the one doing the flirting, but was being used instead. That aggressive paternalism, which erases the autonomy of a woman narrating her own experience, is exactly the pattern that repeats every time a female voice steps off script.

The underlying issue is, unavoidably, boring from being repeated so often: there is still a long way to go before a woman's intimate story is treated with the same naturalness as a man's. Soriano's Greek anecdote is a minor affair. The reaction, however, is a thermometer of how much pogre remains to be made.

Perhaps the only surprising thing is that it still surprises. The next time a woman tells a story like this, someone will respond with the same self-affirming contempt. And so it will go until the wit deployed to criticise amounts to something more than recycling the same old clichés.