The controversy unleashed at the end of last November around the program
El hormiguero,
after its director and presenter, Pablo Motos, was taken for granted by a campaign by the Ministry of Equality against machismo, despite the fact that his name was not pronounced , turned public opinion's eyes towards
prime time
television.
"It's indecent," Motos said, outraged, a recurring reaction every time a television entertainment presenter faces a situation of this type.
"They bark, then we ride!" Juan y Medio sang live in 2017 on his program
La tarde, aquí y ahora,
after the controversial scene on Andalusian public television in which she destroyed the dress of her partner, Eva Ruiz, stripping her naked live, and which, in response to the complaints received, caused the entity to commit to teaching courses against machismo among their workers.
"Fascist, the macho is you!" Javier Cárdenas alleged when he was a driver of
Rush Hour
on La 1 at the same time, and pointed out to the Vertele website for criticizing the fact that he stripped and objectified three girls on a television set to carry out a magic trick (it was not the first time that the Catalan acted like this, in the In the past he had already tried to get a listener of his program on Europa FM fired from her job who denounced his sexist comments).
Bertín Osborne usually clings to the same answer with different versions when he is reminded of the criticism generated by his comments and attitudes on television: "I think it's an asshole who calls me macho."
What if our children, changing the channel, find this on Andalusian public television?
Will they think it's fun to do it to other girls?
pic.twitter.com/9EhHELkc2j
— Teresa Rodríguez - Adelante Andalucía ۞ (@TeresaRodr_) September 8, 2017
The networks as complaint
But the social debate about the macho ballast of
prime time that the
El hormiguero
incident generated
is not an isolated phenomenon.
In the heat of this fourth feminist wave and the power that social networks have given to viewers —established as opinion agents in the cycles of indignation of digital conversation—, social rejection of machismo and television heteronormativity has multiplied.
A phenomenon that has been self-regulated in recent years through the use of
hashtags
or trends of the day in networks, which were later picked up by the media.
And the show where celebrities are supposed to have fun isn't the only one that hasn't passed the equality test.
There have been
trending topics
similar to that of the Pablo Motos program with Carlos Herrera asking his viewers “if women lied better than men” in the now-defunct
Cómo ves lo
en TVE —the same one in which Salvador Sostres defended that sexual harassment « it is subjective" and that the Gender Violence Law is "fascist" -.
With Risto Mejide calling girls who only like to hug their roommates a "teaser" ("This in my town has a name, I'm going to say it, it's a tease," he said at the premiere of
All you need is love
).
Or with Bertín Osborne in
My house is yours
, like when he gave an apron to Miguel Poveda, an artist who has spoken openly about his homosexuality, and told him, assuming that they always cook or that everyone likes women: "You give this to your mother or your girlfriend" .
The interview as a red light
"The most obvious bias of inequality in infotainment are the interviews," warns the journalist and professor at the Faculty of Communication of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Carme Ferré Pavia.
Together with Marta Llanos, this academic has published
The figure of women in infotainment programs in Spain: the resistant glass ceiling
, a 2020 study that aimed to analyze the manifestations of the role of the female gender in five television programs in Spain.
Both Ferré Pavia and Llanos found that programs that mix information with comedy and entertainment, included in the macro-genre of infotainment, are among the most watched on television.
For this reason, her research quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed female interventions for a week in five successful programs:
El intermedio
(La Sexta),
El hormiguero
(Antena 3),
La resistencia
(Movistar+),
Late Motiv
(Movistar+) and
Poland
(TVC).
Although Ferré Pavia defends that his study "was exploratory", the research concluded that there were obvious biases in the way of dressing between men and women ("dark tones associated with seriousness are associated with them; colorful or pastel tones are associated with to highlight their femininity"), that "the objectification of the female gender was evident in all programs", that women appear to a lesser extent than men and that theirs, in the vast majority of cases, had to respond to a regulatory appeal to appear on screen.
A phenomenon that is especially accentuated in interviews, a fertile territory for committing micromachismo.
"It happens especially in
El hormiguero
, but it also happens in the rest of the programs," warns the academic.
And remember that not only on-screen collaborators have to respond to a normative telegeny, as happens with Pilar Rubio in
El hormiguero
or Sandra Sabatés in
El intermedio
(“figures that reinforce the indecent and offensive cliché of the funny presenter and the hot co-presenter” ), but with the women invited: "There the differences in attractiveness are even more accentuated, the women interviewed in 90% of the cases are beautiful and the guests, in contrast, do not have to be."
The topic persists
One of the most interesting points of Ferré Pavia's research was the interview with female scriptwriters from two of the analyzed programs (Pilar from Francisco from
Late Motiv
and Júlia Cot from
Polònia)
about their formal involvement with the image of women.
From the meeting, it is worth highlighting two ideas about why some sexist clichés persist in these programs.
Both concluded that the most obvious ones have been banished not because of social outrage or self-regulation, but because they no longer work among the general public (“At least if you aspire to a
mainstream public
.
A joke is funny if the premise is bought, but if you joke about 'women driving badly' and your audience doesn't think so, the joke won't work,” said De Francisco).
Also, in most cases, if certain types of jokes are avoided, it is for fear of being targeted by cycles of social indignation ("Why are these contents still being offered? Well, because they still work and it is much easier to do these jokes need to be rethought [...] This new, more respectful treatment is not done out of conviction or from a deep gender analysis, but they do it because they believe they have to do it in order not to be criticized on the networks," he said. cot).
In the last 10 years, between January 1, 2012 and November 30, 2022, the Women's Institute received 662 complaints for alleged macho behavior detected by viewers in Mediaset and Atresmedia programming (Mediaset had 527 complaints and Atresmedia, 135).
And although the average for
El hormiguero
is to receive one complaint per program —for example, only one came for the controversial interview of
Las chicas del cable
, but two did arrive about a program in which Ricardo Darín and his son Chino Darín laughed openly with a joke of a rape that Karlos Arguiñano told on the air—, from the institution they assure that beyond the dictatorship of telegenia, there are There are many other barriers to break down: "Especially in terms of the use of the image of women as objects and the reinforcement of sexist stereotypes that support the idea of women's subordination to masculine interests and desires, sometimes associated with the idea of competition between women”, they explain.
More than 20 years ago the study was published
How do women look on TV?
,
which analyzed the cathodic sexist stereotypes of this country, betting on changes that have not yet been fulfilled.
And although the medium has evolved and Valerio Lazarov's TV in which the “chin-chin girls” walked half-naked around
¡Ay, que calor!
and the mamachicho did the same in
Tutti frutti
sounds far away, although no one resists without sleeping anymore to see Ana Obregón taking a soaking shower at the end of
What we bet
, telegeny continues to prevail among workers and television hostesses.
They appear during dinner in
El Intermedio
and during lunch in
La roulette de la suerte
.
They are still there, with more clothes, but always smiling.
To remedy these attitudes, the Women's Institute advocates "for greater education and training of the professionals who produce such content."
And remember that the Organic Law of Effective Equality of Women and Men and the Organic Law of Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence, of 2004, include several references to the treatment of the image of women in messages and media content of communication, "with special attention to publicly owned media, but also with a reference to privately owned media, pointing out the promotion of self-regulation agreements."
A reading that is also given in the General Law of Audiovisual Communication, where there is an emphasis on transmitting an egalitarian and non-discriminatory image of women and men.
the laws say so
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