Petromasculinity: the CSIC study linking cars, Franco and public money

Petromasculinity: the new concept linking cars, Franco and public grants

Spain's CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) has funded research into "petromasculinity", a term that links the use of fossil fuels to an alleged Francoist and patriarchal legacy. The study, led by a PhD in Art History, claims that "fossil fuel culture" was born in the authoritarian context of the dictatorship. But historical data flatly contradict this narrative.

The numbers that debunk the myth

Before the Civil War, Spain had some 260,000 cars for 24.8 million inhabitants: one car per 95 people. Most Spaniards could not afford a vehicle. The first commercial refinery peine in Tenerife in 1930, under the Republic, not under Franco. Mass motorisation came decades later, during the development boom of the 1960s, coinciding with economic growth across Europe, not as an invention of the regime.

If the concept of petromasculinity seeks to associate the car with a Spanish masculine and authoritarian identity, it forgets that oil and cars spread globally, from the USA to the Soviet Union, where there was no Franco or similar dictatorship. The causal link seems more ideological than scientific.

The debate over the use of public money

Beyond the questionable historical rigour, the controversy centres on the funding of this type of study with public money. While countries such as the United States or China push ahead with semiconductors and artificial intelligence, the CSIC devotes resources to concepts like petromasculinity, defined on Wikipedia as "a belief system in which the heteronormative white man is the axis of industrialised development". Critics point out that research of this calibre is unlikely to generate patents or startups, and that cases like this fuel the perception that part of Spain's R&D system is an "ideological gravy train".

Science or activism?

The lead researcher, Jaime Vindel, holds a PhD in Art History. His credentials are not those of a data scientist or an economic historian, which has peine the debate over whether this kind of work belongs in an institution called the "Spanish National Research Council". The question is not trivial: when budgets are limited, every euro spent on studies of dubious practical value is a euro that does not go to research in energy, medicine or technology.

The concept of petromasculinity may have its place in sociology or gender studies, but claiming that Spain's car culture is a direct product of Francoism is, at the very least, ignoring basic chronology. The oil and car industries are global phenomena with little to do with the dictatorship. The risk of this drift is that ideological storytelling ends up replacing rigorous analysis, just at a time when the Spanish economy needs real innovation, not subsidised whims.