Five days after the Alicante duo Nebulossa won the Benidorm Fest, this is the state of affairs:
When María Bas and Mark Dasousa wrote this very Benidorm-friendly song dedicated to Manuela Trasobares, the first trans councilor in Spain, they probably did not suspect that Pedro Sánchez would have to speak about her at Antonio García Ferreras' table, between question and question about the amnesty, nor that the former minister Jorge Fernández Díaz would dedicate an article to her in ABC in which he reminds us that “women have the incomparable privilege of being the host and transmitter of life” and in which he denounces that the dancers from Nebulossa, who “appear to be men” show “butts worthy of a better cause.”
The controversy, which will probably revive if the duo finally goes to Malmö to compete in Eurovision – apparently, they are not clear about it – has also served to delineate in a fairly clear way the factions within feminism and to revive debates that have to do with the attitude towards prostitution, the need or not for feminism to join forces with queer movements and the role of sex (and consent) when defining what it means to live in a body typed as female.
Although, at first the lyrics of Zorra have more in common with the monologue that America Ferrera does in Barbie, which comes to say that it is very difficult to be a woman ("When I get what I want, bitch bitch bitch bitch / it's never because I deserve it / and even though I'm eating the world / it's not valued even for a second") that with polarizing texts like King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, there are those who relate the song to that post-feminist school of thought that is identified, as the film director herself says and writer, with “the ugly ones, the whores and the lesbians.” In that book, the Frenchwoman writes: “In Judeo-Christian morality, it is better to be taken by force than to be taken by a whore.”
One of the underlying questions that arise from this debate is whether the same thing that was done with 'faggot' should be done (or if it has already been done) with the word "slut", to resignify what has always been an insult thrown at a collective. In his essay Bad Fags. Building a collective future from dissidence (Paidós), the anthropologist Christo Casas uses the term 'faggot' ("which sounds like a vault", as the singer Miguel de Molina responded when they called him a "sissy") as opposed to 'homosexual', which he considers to be the medicalized version of the faggot and compared to the gay, which for him represents the “commercialized faggot.”
For Casas, it is clear, “what the lyrics of the song do is literally explain what it means to reappropriate an insult; it couldn't be more pedagogical. 'Bitch' is a term that, like 'faggot', 'dyke' or 'black', seeks to deactivate the insult by giving it new positive meanings."
Faced with this argument, there are feminists, such as Silvia Carrasco, from Feministes de Catalunya, who argue that “changing the meaning of words is not changing things.” In an intervention on Antena 3, Carrasco, who maintains trans-exclusionary positions, assures that “'slut' is the cry with which one hundred women are murdered every year and is the word used to make the recorded video of the rape go viral.” of girls up to eight years old.”
For her and for people like the clinical psychologist José Luis García, who has written several books warning of the danger of minors' access to porn, there is no possible resignation. “There are violent porn websites with that name: slut, whore, vicious, bitch, slut,” he warns in a thread on X.
According to Casas, denying the use of those words by feminisms hides a paradox. “It buys the sexist doctrine about what a woman must be (mother, faithful, good) to deserve respect. Feminist sectors that flee from the 'whore' stigma, as one flees from the 'faggot' stigma, are actually blaming bitches for the sexist violence they suffer. They seem to say that if you want men to respect you, you should take up the Good Wife Manual.”
To Rosa Márquez, co-author with Marta Jaenes of the book Close your legs. Against rape culture (Plan B) and the documentary What the Fuck is Happening (Netflix), Nebulossa's song at the outset does not seem empowering or that it can be classified as a feminist anthem. Does the term 'slut' need to be redefined? “Activism has often tried to appropriate certain pejorative terms to redefine them, but the reality is that it is very difficult to dismantle the oppressor with his own weapons. The solution is not to resign ourselves to being called 'bitches' or to proudly incorporate sexist insults into our vocabulary, but to eradicate them. Just as we have fought for the term 'handicapped' to disappear from the Constitution or for calling a homosexual 'faggot' to be considered a hate crime, feminism fights to eliminate sexism from language."
Márquez points out that it is “neoliberal and simplistic to objectify ourselves or call ourselves 'sluts'. What would really empower us is to have better salaries, a more equitable distribution of care and to be able to walk freely down the street without fear of suffering sexual assault.” Faced with the fun feminism that Pedro Sánchez demanded at the Ferreras table, Márquez says that the movement is or should be “combative, not 'enjoyable'.”
Faced with the idea, also very repeated these days, that 'bitch' is the first (and sometimes, ominously, the last) thing that sexist aggressors call their victims, there are those who respond, like the journalist Paola Aragón, that perhaps by deactivating The insult no longer matters what those men say. “If we decide that it is an affectionate term, 'funny', it will be empowering between and for us, which is what is powerful,” she wrote in X.
The Nebulossa song, by the way, has not only generated debate because of the lyrics, but also because of the staging that was seen at the Benidorm Fest, with two dancers who began the number in a suit without a shirt and ended it in a corset, thong leather and glitter high boots. The influencer Raúl Ernman, who commented on the festival on his networks, asked “to give a twist to the staging and turn it into a feminist anthem and not LGTBI paraphernalia.”
With this analysis, Christo Casas sees three problems: the first, ignoring that LGTBI women exist, the second, assuming that two men with corsets are gay or represent gayness and third, that these are not separate struggles - here the other big apple of feminism discord. “Feminist analysis and queer analysis are two Siamese twins joined by the pericardium: they are born from the same vision of society and have proposals that run parallel.”
Finally, comes the question “what do we do with children?”, which has been asked so much lately also in relation to access to pornography (prohibit or explain, set aside or look for better porn). Susanna Griso, not a fan of the song, wondered on her program if this song opened the ban on boys insulting girls by calling them bitches at school. The most likely thing, in reality, is that boys and girls will sing together “stone me, if that's it / I'm a picture-postcard bitch”, just as they sang until they were heartbroken about the mother-in-law, the neighbor and the Treasury debt. And it will be up to parents and teachers to analyze the aspects of the lyrics or wait for the next trend to arrive.
There is a single element that unifies many detractors and supporters of the Nebulossa song. They point out that this is not the debate, but rather what Spain is doing by participating in a contest that validates Israel when the 26,000 fatalities in Gaza are exceeded. Asked about the fox issue, former Secretary of State Ángela Rodríguez Pam answers that she prefers not to enter into this debate “as long as there is a genocide underway.”
