Can you give us concrete examples of what you think fits into these two categories? At the moment, it’s pretty abstract.
Context is always going to be a factor in deciding what’s okay and what’s not. In some contexts, putting a hand on someone’s lower back is okay, like directing a teammate in a certain direction on the field. In other contexts it’s not, like a boss directing an employee into their office.
Even in this instance, it’s useful to look at the moment before the kiss:
Here she’s grabbing him in a bear hug and lifting him up in the air. I doubt if there is any sexual connotation, but it is an action which would be very inappropriate in other contexts. If this was a department meeting and she greeted her manager this way, likely there would be a meeting with HR soon after to explain how this was inappropriate for the office. For this medal ceremony, the prior players were just hugging the owners and managers. This player escalated the interaction with the bear hug. Rubiales may have taken that as an invitation to further escalate the action to show a higher level of celebration. It was inappropriate for him to escalate it with a kiss, but it’s not like he just randomly singled her out for a kiss after the typical hug that everyone was doing.
Also, the person on the right seems uncomfortable with the hug from the player. The player is giving a close embrace, but it seems to me that the woman in the suit is not comfortable with that level of closeness (just guessing from the body poses). The woman in the suit is giving what I would consider an “office appropriate” hug (in those rare instances where hugging in the office might be appropriate), but the player is giving a “hug your teammate” hug.
I haven’t read it all, so apologies if this is repetitive.
Boxers in a ring have an understanding: they’re going to hit each other. I don’t get to hit one of them if I see them at Waffle House the next day.
Auto racers have an understanding: there’s some car-car contact on the track. There are rules and there are lines, but it’s not unexpected or inherently out of bounds.
Doesn’t mean I get to run a Formula One driver off the road, for kicks, if I see him on the Autobahn.
Hockey: similar. I can’t check a Pittsburgh Penguin into the wall at Panda Express because I’m excited to see him. It’s a criminal act.
Players on a team may have a strong convention and a tacit understanding about celebratory contact, but they’ve opted in unless they’ve opted out. I don’t get to pat the ass of a Denver Bronco if I see him at the Opera.
I can’t – in any way shape or form – see anything even remotely equivalent to an opt-in in this specific soccer/futbol situation. I also can’t understand any defense of it.
Full stop.
Is it criminal? If it fits with the required elements of the relevant law, it is.
Should it be punished? If adjudicated and ending in a guilty verdict, it should.
What should be the sentence? In keeping with the guidelines, and I don’t care where on that gradient it falls.
I think it’s binary AND a continuum. Unwanted contact crosses you over from heads to tails – that’s the binary part. I do think there are degrees beyond that.
He was jubilant and celebratory? How cool for him. I was drunk. What license does that grant me vis-a-vis non-consensual contact with a woman?
Zero.
I don’t think that’s what that picture shows at all.
As two people approach one another, the person who offers a hug usually holds their arms high and open, and if the hug is reciprocated the other person places their arms underneath. So I think he probably initiated that hug, and then went further by jumping up (and opening his legs to grind his crotch into her). That’s a frozen image of a dynamic movement, I don’t think you can say from that still that she’s lifting him up, except to the extent she has no choice because he jumped up onto her and he’s hanging on to her shoulders. To me, that position and body language is perfectly consistent with her being reluctant and uncomfortable with the interaction.
I know this is going back a bit in the conversation, but no, I don’t celebrate a win by slapping a male teammate on the butt, and it would be a wtf moment if anyone did it to me.
…except a screenshot doesn’t provide the right context here. So it isn’t useful at all. Here’s the video. It looks like he jumps: he isn’t lifted.
All that matters here was he kissed her without consent. It isn’t any more complicated than that.
Just chiming in to add to the many excellent responses to this attempt at “pseudo-allyship”.
No, condemning a more minor act of sexual assault such as forcing an unwanted kiss on somebody does not in any way “minimize the experiences” of victims of more major acts of sexual assault.
And that’s coming from somebody who, like most other women, has experienced forms of sexual assault up to and including being grabbed and groped by male strangers when alone in a room with them, which I presume you would agree counts as “real” sexual assault.
Forcing an unwanted kiss on somebody, as several other posters have explained to you, is a form of sexual assault, and nobody should do it.
If more men could manage to understand this simple fact, our society would have more success in reducing not only unwanted forcible kissing, but more serious forms of sexual assault as well.
This is some next level victim blaming. If a male player had “bear hugged*” their male coach who responded with a kiss on the lips no one would be claiming that the player’s behavior had escalated the situation.
*Forthe sake of argument let’s pretend this actually happened
Sure, but NFL players often do. Doesn’t make it OK innother contexts.
Perhaps ironic, but the baseball player credited with inventing the high five was gay. It’s important to respect other’s bodily autonomy, even when playing a sport. Just because they consent to being touched as part of competition doesn’t mean athletes have consented to groping after a good play.
So yeah, I don’t think posting that image has worked out quite the way you intended. It prompted @Banquet_Bear to find the video of the entire interation, not just the forced kiss that has been widely publicized. For me, seeing the entire sequence makes him look a whole lot more creepy and disgusting. He jumps up onto her, spreading his legs and grinding his crotch into her, then tries to kiss her a couple of times but she turns her head away, so then he grabs her head for a forced kiss. It’s obvious from her body language that she’s uncomfortable.
It’s also clear that not everybody was hugging (let alone kissing). If his behavior was typical for the celebratory moment, we should see the other officials hugging everybody. We don’t - some offer a warm handshake, and that’s it.
I care but don’t know.
The important point is to send the message that clarifies that such behavior is not normative even if had previously been so within the culture. What sort of punishment above and beyond his job loss is required to send that message clearly enough? What degree of what punishment is appropriate to the crime? Punishing this the same as rape would end up backfiring I suspect, for example.
I think we should care about that. I just have no concept of what the answer is.
I’m skeptical of this. There is always language for exceptions to this if he’s fired for cause, something like “bringing the sport into disrepute”.
I understand your point totally … in the abstract.
But I’m mindful of the old saying in business: “You have to trust the person who is/was in the room. (implying: during the negotiations)”
I’m going to trust the trier of fact – whether that be a judge, judges (Pl.) or a jury – who have heard every aspect of both sides of the case to understand to which end of the guidelines to lean in the event of a conviction.
I don’t know, for example, whether this guy’s history – if he has one – will be deemed admissible, but if the answer to both is yes (ie, he has one and it is admissible), that might lengthen the sentence for me.
Which is why some jurisdictions have done away with “rape” as an offence, and substituted “sexual assault”. That approach recognises that there is a spectrum of prohibited conduct. The penalty varies with the severity of the conduct, but the sexual nature of the conduct is always part of it.
An example: some years after the new offence of sexual assault came into force in Canada, there was a case in my area where a man intentionally groped a woman’s breasts while they were standing in line in a workplace cafeteria. (!?!) The trial judge acquitted him of sexual assault and convicted instead of simple assault. The trial judge said that he didn’t think the assault was sexual in nature. (?!?)
The Crown appealed, and the Court of Appeal set aside the acquittal and entered a conviction. That’s rare, but they held that the trial judge erroneously instructed himself on the nature of sexual assault. There didn’t have to be a certain level of “seriousness” akin to the old offence of rape to make it a sexual assault. On the facts as found by the trial judge, the groping was a sexual offence.
The Court of Appeal sent the matter back to the trial judge for sentencing. That was a bit unusual, since normally if a matter is sent back for sentencing, it’s sent to a different judge who hasn’t been involved in the case before. The feeling at the bar was that the Court of Appeal was sending a personal message to the trial judge.
Because some people seem dismissive of her claim that she was assaulted. How is it not relevant? It’s assault either way, but perhaps more understandable why she didn’t chose not to ignore it.
Yeah, many people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around the notion that a heterosexual woman can genuinely not want to be kissed by a man (or vice-versa). According to this mindset, lesbians are the only kind of women who can be sincerely grossed out and refusing consent to a man’s forcibly kissing them.
Read about it here:
La nueva ley del deporte establece que este procedimiento no puede darse cuando quede menos de un año de mandato.
My translation: The new sports law establishes that this proceeding (motion of no confidence) may not be applied when the remaining term of office is less than one year.
That’s about a “motion of no confidence”. But I’m extremely skeptical that it’s impossible to fire him for gross misconduct. They may be reluctant to do that because there will no doubt be a burden to investigate and document the misconduct, and a process for him to challenge their findings.