A Kiss Turns a Moment of Triumph Into an Ugly Spectacle in Spain

  • The kiss laid bare how pervasive machismo is in the country
  • Anger at soccer chief comes in a charged political landscape
Rubiales during the extraordinary meeting of the General Assembly of the Spanish Football Federation in Madrid, on Aug. 25.Source: Royal Spanish Football Federation/Getty Images
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For Spain, winning the Women’s World Cup should have been a moment of celebration.

Instead it laid bare the toxic masculinity that still pervades the euro’s fourth-biggest economy more than 40 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship — a period when the country went through radical social change that saw it become one of the world’s most progressive nations.