Sexual Double Standards: Amaral Applauded, Students Expelled

Sensual double standards: women applauded, men expelled

A singer performs with bare breasts and much of the press frames it as a brave feminist gesture. Students write crude comments about women in a private chat and their university announces disciplinary proceedings with sanctions that can reach three years of expulsion. Both episodes circulate through the same media within weeks. The debate isn't about whether one behavior or the other deserves criticism. It's about why the bar is measured with different yardsticks depending on who is involved.

Amaral, Rubiales, and two sets of rules

In one case, an artist performed topless and coverage was celebratory: female freedom, groundbreaking gesture, courage. In the other, former president of the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (Royal Spanish Football Federation) appears in images placing his hand over his clothing at genital level, a gesture labeled by the press as obscene exhibitionism. Analysis of the debate highlights this detail: he shows nothing, removes no clothing. She does strip. Yet the label of liberator went to the singer and the shameful one to the official, who was suspended and reported to the Audiencia Nacional (National High Court), facing up to four years in prison according to reports.

There is another uncomfortable element. What is now sold as stage innovation has been done in Spain since 1978, when Susana Estrada collected an award with her chest exposed. Nine years later, in 1987, TVE—then state monopoly under a socialist government—had already broadcast the episode where Sabrina’s breast slipped out. None of this was presented as feminism then, according to accounts in the debate.

What is punished in the La Rioja chat

The second front is a closed messaging group. The University of La Rioja announced opening an inquiry into students who wrote vulgar phrases about women. The announcement mentioned sanctions of between two months and three years of expulsion. It was a private conversation among students. In the same timeframe, a TV network announced a series presenting teenagers and their sensual behaviors as models, with a casual tone. No one resolves the contradiction: it airs and people move on.

East Germany also allowed showing breasts

The argument that nudity is liberating has a counterexample in European history itself. In the German Democratic Republic, leaving the country, listening to Western radio stations, or having Western currency in your pocket was forbidden. And yet there was no problem with someone undressing on the beach or on stage. If nudity measured a society’s degree of freedom, the regime that built the Wall would have been a paradise. Freedom to show the body, this reading argues, says nothing about freedom to dissent, leave, or remain silent.

Francoist adultery and the inverted pendulum

Gender-based sarracena duality is not new. It just changes hands. During Francoism, adultery was a crime, but for men it had to occur in the marital home to be penalized; for women, anywhere. A century ago, women were required to arrive at marriage as virgins, while men visiting brothels to relieve themselves was understood. The current scheme, according to this line of analysis, mirrors that one: leniency for them, sixties-style formality for them. A pendulum that has swung to the other end without ceasing to be a pendulum.

The oppressor/oppressed framework explaining inconsistency

The apparent contradiction has internal logic if you accept its premise. From the framework dividing society into oppressed and oppressor groups, any action by the considered oppressed group is read as legitimate challenge, justified rebellion. And any action by the considered oppressor group is read as another act of domination, whatever they do and wherever they are. The same behavior changes sign depending on who executes it. With this criterion, according to figures cited in the debate, the 20% of homicides classified as gender violence becomes the country’s central problem, while the remaining 80% falls out of focus for not fitting the structure.

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With rules that invert depending on the subject, any behavior can be virtue or fault, and no public discussion reaches closure. The question is no longer who is right in each specific case. It is how long a system of rules lasts when it changes meaning depending on who breaks it.