Viva Espagna campeones del Mundo

Sometimes a kiss is not just a kiss

By Alper Ali Riza

When the history of women’s football comes to be written it will be Spain’s 1-0 World Cup victory over England in Sydney, Australia on Sunday, August 20, 2023 that will take centre stage and not the kiss inflicted by Spain’s football association president Luis Rubiales on midfielder Jenni Hermoso at the end of the game.

In the meantime it is the kiss that dominates the news because social gender equality in Spain is politically more important than the equality boost that inevitably flows from having won the Women’s World Cup.

There is even talk that Rubiales should be prosecuted for sexual assault – defined as non-consensual contact with another person that is sexual – which would be unwise in all the celebratory circumstances in which the kiss occured. The law in England, and presumably in Australia and Spain, is that a person must have the ability and freedom to choose whether to consent or not to sexual contact of any kind, though it would be wrong to prosecute Rubiales for what appears to have been over exuberant rather than criminal behaviour.

It was a moment of madness borne of exuberance even if of an extremely male chauvinist kind. Kissing on the lips is prima facie sexual; on the other hand, the photographic evidence seems to show his mouth was closed on contact. One would need to have Jenni Hermoso’s version about the nature of the kiss before reaching a definite conclusion one way or the other.

Earlier in the incident Rubiales is shown triumphantly holding his crotch, which was as inappropriate a way to celebrate the success of Spain’s women footballers as it was conduct unbecoming of the president of Spain’s football association standing a few steps away from the queen of Spain.

Whether he should step down, however, is for the Spanish football association to decide; what may be resigning misconduct in one country may not be a resigning matter in another. What seems to have happened in Spain is an explosion of suppressed feminism at the moment of its greatest triumph. The fact that the Rubiales kiss overshadowed the triumph of winning the World Cup is proof that women in Spain are no longer prepared to accept the male chauvinism that dominates their daily lives – true not just in Spain but across Mediterranean Europe.

It is interesting to wonder what would have happened if England won the World Cup and an English FA official behaved as inappropriately as Rubiales. My guess is that the ever-pragmatic English would not have allowed a World Cup victory, for which they have been pining since 1966, to be overshadowed by a male chauvinist kiss. They would have waited until the victory celebrations fizzled out and prosecuted only if the evidence the kiss was sexual and non-consensual was compelling and a trial would be in the public interest.

Not since Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ with a kiss in the garden of Gethsemane has a kiss been so vilified as it has been in Spain lately. There have been other famous kisses, but most are artistic. There is Rodin’s sculpture called the Kiss which despite its name is a kiss that did not happen because the story goes that the couple were about to kiss when they were caught in the act of adultery and killed by the woman’s jealous husband. There are also the kisses of Sleeping Beauty and her Prince and of Romeo and Juliet at her balcony in Verona.

The irony of the Rubiales kiss is that it should happen in the context of football in which kissing is very much part of the game. Footballers who score goals are invariably chased by their teammates and kissed on the cheeks and sometimes on the lips too – some goal scorers have more kissability than others, but they all get kissed when they score whether they like it or not.

Apart from kissing footballers, until gay kissing became acceptable in Western liberal democracies, one only saw men kissing one another at airports in the Middle East between visiting Arab leaders – the late Palestinian leader Yaser Arafat was a prolific kisser – and between socialist leaders during the Cold War when they visited one another in East Europe.

The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was particularly prone to kissing in fraternal brotherhood. His kissing was so intense it often involved a kiss on each cheek rounded off with a kiss in or near the mouth. His kisses were not universally popular, and some leaders took routine precautions to avoid them. Rumour has it that Fidel Castro, who loved kissing his female lovers and wrote a poem about his insatiable appetite for kissing women, was particularly averse and ensured he had his characteristic cigar in his mouth when he met Brezhnev.

There is an iconic 1979 picture of Brezhnev kissing Eric Honecker of East Germany that was so expressive it became news and was later touched-up into a grotesque caricature kiss in the mouth between the two men that makes Rubiales’ kiss look positively tame by comparison.

In the 1942 film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a kiss as the two lovers separated by war meet again as Sam (Arthur Wilson) plays and sings As Time Goes By, whose opening lines are

You must remember this

A kiss is still a kiss

A sigh is just a sigh

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by

Which is all very well if a kiss on the lips is consensual but a criminal offence if it is not consensual.

Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge