Kristen Gyles | Diary of a mad Paraguayan woman

This particular soap opera begins with France’s recent round-of-16 match against Paraguay in the FIFA World Cup. The Paraguayan team was needlessly abusive towards the French players and particularly so towards the captain of the French team, Kylian Mbappe. After a series of slide tackles and fouls, most of which seemed to go unnoticed by the referees, it became clear that Paraguay was playing a different kind of football – the dirty kind.
Nonetheless, both teams held their own and, for most of the match, football fans sat waiting to see which team would first break the nil-all score. In the 70th minute of the game, France was awarded a penalty which Mbappe took successfully, ultimately leading to France’s victory over Paraguay. 
Immediately after the circus act by the Paraguayan team, while France was still in celebration mode, Orlando Gill, the goalkeeper for the Paraguayan team, reached out to Mbappe to shake his hand. Mbappe seemed to be too busy cheering and celebrating France’s success and did not acknowledge the gesture for a handshake. In response, the Paraguayan goalkeeper turned and threw the ball at Mbappe which hit him in the back. Mbappe gave no response.
Within a short while after the match was over, one Paraguayan senator took to social media to unleash the worst of her opinions about Mbappe. She referred to Mbappe as a colonised Cameroonian and said he was pretending hard to be French. She also said:
“The brute never even learned to write. Instead of breast milk, he sucked on coconuts and the most educated creatures he ever listened to were chimpanzees. You should have given him the finger, Orlando Gill.”
Very becoming of a Paraguayan national leader. Wouldn’t you say?
Mbappe quickly responded in a tweet saying the senator was despicable and unworthy of her position, and that, on account of her blatant racism, her country’s performance at the World Cup would be overshadowed by “an incompetent woman who is presenting the worst possible image of her country”.
You’d never believe what happens next.
She pens an open letter to Mbappe, for the whole world to see, accusing him of gender violence. The letter starts with her doubling down on her initial nasty and racist remarks and suggesting that Mbappe was somehow arrogant for not wanting to shake hands with the players of a football team that spent 90 minutes trying to play rugby. She then ends the letter by telling him: 
“Don’t you attack my status as a woman and a politician. Retract your statement, honor your French citizenship and apologize to me. Otherwise, I may initiate legal action for gender violence.”
Oh brother. Here we go again.
The senator wants to sue Mbappe for gender violence because he called her a despicable woman. If she’s a woman, and she’s despicable, does that not make her a despicable woman? Or is it inherently misogynistic to refer to a woman as a woman while using any negative descriptor? It is really a mystery what could be going through the senator’s mind, but we are left to wonder if racism could really be that strong an influence on the mind as to cloud out even common sense.
Somewhere amid the saga between the star footballer and a clearly ego-driven woman, the Paraguayan foreign ministry released a statement condemning the senator’s statements. French prosecutors have also indicated that an investigation has been opened into the statement made by the senator to determine whether she should be charged with aggravated public insult or incitement to hatred or violence. We will see what, if anything, comes of that.
One thing that this situation has revealed is that the allegations of racism in some South American countries might not be unfounded after all. The senator is only a representation of a not-so-small subculture in Paraguay that makes light of racism. No, not all Paraguayans are racist, but countless Paraguayans have come out in defence of her racism towards Mbappe. And while Paraguayans may be far outnumbered by the number of football fans across the world expressing support for Mbappe, similar criticisms have arisen in relation to Argentina, Paraguay’s geographical neighbour.
Still, some manage to see this as a gender issue. One social media commentator, in reaction to Mbappe’s response to the senator, was as follows:
“Stop being misogynistic Kylian.
If a man said this, you wouldn’t say nothing.
You have been talked down on by male players, coaches and everyone else, but you keep quiet and pretend not to notice. Now it’s a woman and you feel the need to respond … .”
What rubbish.
Doubtless, the fact that such racist comments were delivered by a national leader or politician must have some bearing on the discussion here. If the usually composed and unbothered Mbappe chooses to respond in this case, is it strange to think that it may be because the comments originated from an unexpected source? To make the senator into a victim simply because she has been called out for her own racism is ridiculous.
It brings to focus an emerging practice that women, in particular, should start thinking about. Often now, when a woman is criticised for bad behaviour, her retort is that the criticism has been made because she’s a woman. This is a very sensitive and delicate slope to go down. Unless a woman has a clear basis for concluding that her gender is the basis of a criticism, making the claim does more injury than help to the cause of female empowerment. For every woman that cries ‘foul’ when no one has fouled her, the cry of ‘foul’ is taken less seriously. Gender is not, and cannot become, an escape route to avoiding accountability.
Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com