In Spain, the inflatable doll served as a transgressive element at the end of the Franco regime, when censorship had been relaxed, and during the transition. They were years of exposure and caustic social satire. In 1973, José Luis López Vázquez had portrayed a lonely and pathetic man in love with a female plastic body in Pedro Olea’s film “It is not good for a man to be alone”. On La Orquesta Mondragón’s 1979 debut album, precisely called Muñeca inflable, Javier Gurruchaga sang a lyric by Eduardo Haro Ibars: “Locked up, waiting for it to arrive, stuck in your closet. Silent and sleeping all day I know that you are mine. I take care of you, I invent you, I give you life with my kisses. And in return you save me from fear and boredom.” The band from Gipuzkoa has successfully practiced ugliness and a commitment to the grotesque to confront us with our worst side.
The fact that someone is demonstrating with inflatable dolls in 2023 doesn’t say much about the reason for their protest, but rather about themselves. It’s a form of self-portrait. At some point someone decided that it would be a good idea to go to the demonstrations on Ferraz Street and bring up about twenty humanoid figures from a sex shop and shout: “This is not headquarters, this is a brothel” and “These are them Government Minister”. .
The messages in this performance are many, but none of them are good. The idea, of course, refers to the objectification of women, who are replaceable by an artificial replica because they only serve that purpose; in praise of sexual submission. In this case, it expresses contempt for women who occupy relevant positions and for what they did to whom to get there. And it points to the confident and proud machismo that says, “All whores,” and that today goes by the name “Incel,” an English acronym for “involuntary celibate.” (The incel thing is serious: There are misogynistic and violent groups online that applaud the rapes or massacres in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 and Toronto, Canada, in 2018, committed in the name of this movement.)
We don’t know if the inflatable dolls have ever met those who come to Ferraz every evening to pray the rosary. The two actions don’t go well together. The self-portrait of some demonstrators in front of the PSOE headquarters The most ridiculous profiles out there through the networks (interviewed by a medium that supports the agitation), have led to many memes. Of course, they do not represent all the people who mobilized against the investiture and the amnesty. But there is no joke here. Just like the guy dressed as a bison who was there during the attack on the Capitol in Washington was no joke, just like what happened later in Brasilia was no joke.
The erotic doll did not disappear from popular imagination; It can still be seen at bachelor parties and in the stands of football stadiums. Now they are sold robotically, but it must be expensive to get them to Ferraz. “Just live my dream and my rage, playmate,” Gurruchaga sang in this parody that I didn’t expect to be projected into the future.
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