Joan Laporta, president of Barça, delighted us on Monday with a press conference to give his version of the Negreira case, in which Barcelona's court number 1 investigates the club as an alleged buyer of arbitration favors. Laporta must be one of those who believe that the best defense is attack. Because although he did not clarify the details of the relations between the club and Negreira, in his day vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees, he took the opportunity to launch accusations against the president of La Liga and against Real Madrid, and to present Barça as the victim of a smear campaign. He therefore presented the case as an example of Barçaphobia and, by implicit extension, of Catalanophobia, without the need to use these two words ending with the suffix phobia.
We live a splendid spring of phobias. Any group that claims to be attacked tends to declare itself the object of a phobia. In other words, aversion, hatred, animosity or a feeling of visceral rejection motivated by their condition. For example, if any viewer of said press conference lost the thread of Laport's doctrine and noticed -it was inevitable- his prominent belly and the intensity with which the lower buttons of his shirt stressed the corresponding buttonholes, he should know that he took a risk to be accused of being fatphobic. Just as anyone who ponders the luxurious abdominal foreshortenings of Minister Elena in the Parliament would also risk it, every time she puts an arm on her hips and removes the skirt of her jacket; or the difficulties of the Republican Junqueras to button his jacket.
Phobias is a dynamic and growing sector. There were always those related to the fears that the natural environment produces in us, from claustrophobia (fear of narrow spaces) to its opposite, agoraphobia, through hydrophobia (fear of water) or arachnophobia (fear of spiders). There are also phobias related to certain professional groups, such as odontophobia (fear of dentists). And there are, in increasing numbers, with a social or political dimension. There is xenophobia, which describes the fear or rejection of a foreign person or of another ethnic group. Or LGTBIphobia and its various varieties, starting with homophobia, referring to discrimination and even violence suffered by certain people based on their sexual orientation.
All groups that wish to do so can already denounce offenses and claim rights. And boy do they. But not all these rights are comparable, nor are they of the same value for the whole of humanity. It is one thing to denounce, prosecute and condemn all homophobic aggression. And another is to raise, for example, the flag of fatphobia, going so far as to convert, as certain groups have done in an exercise of reassignment of meaning, May 4, World Obesity Day -in fact, the fight against obesity–, on the day against Fatphobia. It is good that we try to avoid jokes at the expense of the obese. But presenting them all as unresponsible victims of their opulence does not correspond to the truth.
It is appreciated that doctors are concerned about obesity, which affects 800 million people (and a quarter of Spanish men and women), and that they warn of its discomfort for those who suffer from it and the risk it entails for their health . And it is not so much that the aforementioned groups play down these risks, that they present fatphobia as a system of oppression, reduce their status to a subtle expression of diversity and invite their overweight colleagues to a festive celebration of fatness. Because there are fat and fat. As there are different approaches to fatness.
Kingsley Amis said that out of every fat man there is another even fatter who will one day complete him. And Ciryl Connolly assured that in every fat man a thin man lives imprisoned who would like to recover his freedom. Both authors were British and carried overweight.
If this proliferation of phobias that are more militant than supportive thrives –everything indicates–, perhaps it will lead to the appearance of another: the phobia of the phobia. In other words, the phobia of those who claim to fight against phobias whose genesis and consolidation they contributed with their indolence and victimhood. Not everything is the fault of others!
