Dear men, a kiss is never just ‘a kiss’

Woody Allen, who at 87 should know better, has waded into the debate about Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales’ full-throttle grab of world-cup-winning footballer Jenni Hermoso.

“The kiss on the soccer player was wrong,” he concedes, “but he did not burn down a school… they didn’t hide, nor did he kiss her in a dark alley. He wasn’t raping her, it was just a kiss and she was a friend. What’s wrong with that?”

In Hermoso’s view, quite a lot was wrong with it – she has today filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office in Spain over the unsolicited kiss.

Allen’s bar for male behaviour in professional life is set as low as one would expect from someone who cast a 16-year-old as his love interest in Manhattan when he was 42, and as a 56-year-old was alleged to have taken naked photos of the 21-year-old daughter of his long-term partner.

The surprise isn’t that he believes this, but that in 2023 he still feels emboldened to express the view that a kiss is “just” a kiss (so long as it’s not down a back alley) shows “just” how big the gulf is between how many men and women see things. And for how long women have “just" had to laugh so many incidents off.

Every woman has their own “kisstory” – their grope account, (per)version of events, a chronicle of handsyness – that is activated when events like this become public. Hermoso allegedly laughing off Rubiales’s assault has been used in evidence against her, but all women know that instinct to minimise the upset because to make a fuss is just too embarrassing.

I remember telling myself that a work colleague hadn’t kissed me on the lips, I must have moved at the last minute causing him to miss my cheek. The prospective employer who interviewed me for a job over drinks and whose hands just kept brushing mine as he showed me the books his company published, but so lightly, that I kept thinking it was my imagination. The colleague who always stood with his hands on my shoulders during group meetings. Was he “just” showing me who was the boss?

And it never seems to stop. In my 40s and as a mother of three, I had a hospital appointment which required travelling 15 floors in a lift crammed with dozens of people. An elderly man behind me thrust his crotch hard into my bum and whispered a joke in my ear that I didn’t understand but seemed to revolve around an old man having a young man’s erection. Did I turn to him and tell him to get out of the lift, the filthy pervert? No, I blushed at his “just joking”, sidled out at the next stop and wearily trudged up the remaining 10 flights. I was mortified by both what he’d done and by my own pathetic response to it.

Being unwantedly pecked, patted and prodded in public for us is like tripping up in the street. However hurt you are, you learn to bounce back up and assure concerned onlookers that you’re just fine, despite your self-esteem suffering a career-defining injury. The alternative is to admit that you’re a victim, and somewhere along the line, you’ve absorbed the message that it’s your fault.

Totty, hottie, piece of skirt, bit of stuff, sex on legs, banger, cracker – it feels like that for some men there’s a ticker tape of phrases that pass through their brains before they get to KC or surgeon.

It’s depressing, but I’m not without hope. My daughters are 15 and 16 and travel to school by public transport, sometimes defiantly wearing the tiny sports “skorts” that they’ve been told by teachers not to wear on their commute, and have never been hassled, flashed at or groped. I’m heartened that they seem spared the relentless soundtrack of “cheer up, love” or “I’d like to get in your saddle” that I’d get when on my bicycle at the same age.

Unlike Woody Allen, it seems, most men are decent and respectful, and those van drivers know that it’s neither flattering nor acceptable to comment on women or girls. Despite the influence of porn and the horrifying tales of the anti-rape movement, Everyone’s Invited, the teenage boys I know astonish me with their nuanced understanding of consent. If they want to “get with” a girl or boy, they ask first, which sounds clunky to my jaded Gen X ears but then I think, hang on, of course, if you’re putting your tongue in someone’s mouth the least you can do is use that tongue to ask if it’s OK.

I’ve known 17-year-old boys to hold interventions where they tell their friends off for pestering girls at parties, while another was ostracised for upskirting. Perhaps Rubiales and Allen might wonder why those not old enough to buy a drink or vote are capable of showing such greater maturity and emotional intelligence.