Culture, jokes, elitist mysoginist frat boys doing Nazi salutes and football players

German Ambassador to Spain says "despicable towards women" and slams "Hitler salutes and national-socialist chants".

Two stories you could file away in “crossing the lines everyone expected” in the “Spain and the public sphere in the 21st Century” category. First the mysoginist chants from the lads at the elitist private university hall of residence in Madrid run by Catholic priests (the Elías Ahuja), who profess a “unique spirit” towards the young men’s education, and then yesterday, a tweet from the very famous former Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas suddenly announcing to the world that he was gay, which he then deleted with the poor excuse of his account having been hacked.

The Ahuja lads quickly progressed from the initial 30-second TikTok video and tweets to the parliamentary record via the words of the Equality Minister (“this is rape culture, this is sexual terror”) and a tweet condeming the chants from the Prime Minister himself, to national TV news by lunchtime and then to international wires and the BBC by the end of the day. Casillas’s “joke” got everyone excited on social media and was headlined on sports pages around the globe in minutes, as these things always are 15 years after Twitter and the iPhone were invented.

The boys at the Ahuja school apparently didn’t mean to offend women at all, despite shouting, as an enraged pack, “whores, come out of your holes like rabbits, you’re fucking nymphomaniacs” at the girls in the private residence across the road, and Casillas and Pujol didn’t mean to offend homosexuals when they wrote “I hope you respect me: I am gay” (Casillas) and “it’s time to tell them about us, Iker” (Puyol), before deleting the messages as “a joke with no bad intentions”.

The other video of the Ahuja lads that has surfaced in the meantime—all chanting Sieg Heil with ties on their heads and arms raised—apparently has nothing to do with this, nor does the “jokey” article about hunting women written by former PP leader Pablo Casado in the school journal when he was a resident there 20 years ago.

The German Ambassador to Spain is clearly mad when she writes “it is despicable towards women and the Hitler salutes and national-socialist chants shouted are an assault on the memory of the millions of victims of an atrocious regime” and “because of our own history, Germans are shaken and deeply saddened on seeing that some young men do not respect memory and equality”.

It’s all just tribal jokes among rich lads; it’s not what they meant, or not like that, and certainly not to the whole world, which doesn’t understand Spanish, never mind whatever’s going on in Casillas and Puyol’s heads or the Ahuja dorm rooms in the middle of the night. All the rest of us, who are not a member of those tribes, the women and homosexuals who are the object of the “jokes”, the reporters and editors in media outlets around the world, or the millions of readers in different languages have just not been capable of properly intepreting the context or the clever subtltey of what they meant to say with the daft boisterousness of rich teenagers or football players.

In England, it would be drunken rugby lads, in the US, partying frat boys.

We can put the little theory to the test: if, instead of 100 Spanish lads at an elitist paid hall of residence in Madrid run by Catholic priests, there were 100 North-African immigrant lads in a vociferous pack shouting “whores, nymphomaniacs, rabbits, we’re going to fuck you all” at a group of Spanish girls across the road, from an immigrant centre somewhere in the country, what political reaction would we be seeing? Would the Ahuja lads do their Nazi or mysoginst hakas in front of their mums, sisters and grannies? Or perhaps a combined version especially for the (female) German Ambassador?

If, instead of Casillas and Puyol the football players, it was two politicians, maybe Sánchez and Abascal themselves, who have a couple of million followers between them and are known internationally, who wrote “I want to announce to the world that I am gay […] Santi, tell them about us” to then delete it all because it was just a joke, what kind of a reaction would we be seeing? What example have Casillas and Puyol just created for those football players who are gay but who because of dominant lads culture have serious problems trying to fit together their love for football for their love for another man?

“In private I’m going to tell you I respect you but in front of the tribe, the club, the school, the country, the planet, in the public sphere in this 21st Century, I am going to do you damage and stomp all over your identity in favour of mine because…whores and homos…” is no kind of culture. It’s boorish tribal contempt.