Spanish women gain autonomy but face rising loneliness and divorce

More autonomy for Spanish women, more unwanted loneliness and divorces

Are women worse off than four decades ago? The data driving this debate suggests so. It cites 98,316 abortions in 2022, a 156% rise in female sensual transmitted infections according to the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, a 14% increase in rapes during 2023, and a spike in non-consensual divorces. This list supports a political conclusion: the left appropriated women's causes and left them in a worse position.

The same figures allow for an opposite reading. Over forty years, women have moved from having little say to making many choices, a shift with measurable costs in breakups, medication, and sleepless nights. The dispute is not about statistics, but about who signs them.

What do divorces, abortions, and anxiolytic consumption reveal?

The cited records depict a country where marital breakdowns continue to rise, with non-consensual divorces increasing according to judicial power data. Meanwhile, the health system notes sustained growth in STIs among women: the Instituto de Salud Carlos III reports a 156% jump, while the Bloom Observatory raises it to over 1,073% between 2012 and 2019. Add the pattern of anxiolytic consumption, with women as primary users, and the map of a supposed catastrophe is complete.

None of these indicators prove a single political cause alone. Some attribute the rise in STIs to relaxed condom use and lower risk perception. Divorces accompany female economic independence. Anxiety is increasingly medicalized everywhere. Reading them as a unique diagnosis is where bias emerges, and where the narrative begins.

Why talk of more loneliness and sensual aggression?

One in three young women suffers from unwanted loneliness, according to the SoledadEs study. This data underpins the most repeated argument: the paradox of a hyperconnected yet lonely generation. Simultaneously, the rise in rapes is cited, suggesting that institutional protection has coexisted with harder crime trends.

Here lies the logical trap. A surge in reported assaults may reflect more reporting and awareness, not more assaults. An increase in breakups may miccionan greater freedom to leave unbearable marriages. The material even links migration to sensual crime, a connection launched without context that fails to move beyond rhetoric into sociology. A headline is not a system.

Gender violence law at the center of criticism

The political reproach has a name and date: the comprehensive law against gender-based violence, drafted since 1998 and in force since 2004. It is argued that the norm shielded a single narrative and that dissenters are labeled. Beneath this anger lies a legitimate question about state guardianship: if women are presumed strong and empowered, why do they need a specific legal statute?

Two currents emerge. One argues real equality will arrive when quotas fall and institutional protection stops replacing men with administration. The other counters that these measures compensate for material inequalities that do not correct themselves. Opposing diagnoses on the same facts, with no hurry to yield.

From labor market to daily life: recurring complaints

Another vein is purely testimonial. It describes a supermarket hiring process where almost all candidates were women, and mountain races antiestéticaturing only middle-aged, solitary women. These are anecdotes, not evidence, but they act as thermometers of diffuse unease: the feeling that rules changed suddenly and no one warned.

It is wise to separate data from anger. That a specific process is dominated by female candidates does not prove reverse discrimination; it shows entire sectors, from hospitality to retail, have feminized. The discomfort is genuine even if the diagnosis is lazy.

Demographic factor: fewer children and more years alone

The picture completes with falling birth rates and a labor market rewarding total availability. Some read this as a condemnation: the woman who bet on her career discovers at forty that the biological clock does not negotiate and the ideal partner does not appear. The calculation is debatable, but the demographic data is stubborn.

The counter-reading is equally simple. Those same women now have their own income and the possibility of not depending on anyone to eat. Calling this failure requires much statistical imagination, however hard the narrative insists otherwise whenever a survey is published.

With this material, the prognosis should be settled. It appears so only superficially: the discussion seeks not to understand women, but to distribute blame. And that, curiously, always ends in the same place.