Shorouk Express 
In this week’s Inside Spain, we look at why the Spanish government doesn’t want people to write the woman’s name “Charo” online, and how many drivers in Spain are questioning why they have to spend €50 on the new mandatory V-16 light.
The Spanish Ministry of Equality has launched an initiative to try to eliminate the use of the term “Charo”, a label that originated in Spanish online forums like Forocoches and is used pejoratively to mock feminist women over 30.
Charo, a shortened version of Rosario, is actually a very common name in Spain.
But referring to someone as “a Charo” has acquired a new meaning in the Spanish vernacular.
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Something similar has happened with the term ‘Karen’ in English, but that describes an entitled white woman with veiled racist attitudes and anger issues, whereas “Charo” has a whole different meaning.
There really isn’t an equivalent in English, but it is a somewhat lighter version of feminazi.
Nevertheless, Spain’s Women’s Institute has produced a 30-page report analysing the origin of the term, its spread online, and the consequences of this expression.
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For the ministry headed by Ana Redondo, calling someone “a Charo” is a mechanism for “silencing” women in digital environments.
The report notes that the term began to gain popularity around 2011 to ridicule single women, supposedly “bitter, and with links to the Spanish civil service and feminism.”
Its popularity led to derivative terms such as ley charía (‘Charia law’) or charocracia (charocracy) which many defended as just jokes and plays on words.
But it’s no laughing matter for El Ministerio de Igualdad, considering “Charo” an insult and a misogynistic stereotype that constructs “a grotesque image” of feminist women and serves to delegitimize women’s political participation in social media.
“The insult functions as a form of contempt disguised as irony,” the ministry argues, affecting “any woman who uses her voice in the digital space from progressive positions.”
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It’s not the first time Spain’s Ministry of Equality – a department set up under the first left-wing coalition government of Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists and Unidas Podemos – has looked to clamp down on what it deems sexist language in everyday Spanish
In 2024, plans to make the name of Spain’s Congress of Deputies more inclusive reopened a long-running and controversial debate about the Spanish language, more specifically, its gendered grammar.
Put simply, they wanted to change it from El Congreso de los Diputados to simply Congreso, thereby removing the masculine gendered los and -o word ending from the name.
Spain recently ranked in fourth place out of 27 in the latest equality index, by the European Institute for Gender Equality. In 2023, an Ipsos study also found that Spain is the ‘most feminist country’ in Europe.
But although Spain’s feminist movement has for some years now openly confronted deep-seated chauvinist and patriarchal views in the country, femicide and other forms of gender-based violence continue to be a scourge for Spanish society.
In other news, the debate surrounding the new mandatory V-16 emergency light for drivers in Spain is heating up.
These are meant to replace the warning triangles people carry in their cars and that they place behind their vehicles when they break down.
The V-16 lights are meant to be safer, as they go on the roof of the vehicle without the need for drivers to get out and potentially be hit by an oncoming car on the motorway, for example.
But are they really that necessary? Many are now questioning this fact, especially as the officially recognised ones cost around €50.
In fact, there are articles in the Spanish press citing the ‘inventors’ of these devices, who apparently said that they were meant only for people with physical disabilities, not for them to be compulsory for the entire population.
Spanish police have also criticised the fact that the light they emit isn’t bright enough during daytime, and they claim that they’re not useful on roads with a high number of bends as oncoming drivers don’t get the pre-warning that a triangle provides.
Consumer watchdogs such as Facua have also slammed the DGT traffic authority for not properly informing the population of the need to buy officially recognised (homologadas) V-16 lights, meaning that thousands of people have bought cheaper knock-offs (somewhat understandably) that for example don’t have the necessary geolocation feature. This, they claim, has resulted in “massive fraud” by some businesses.
Furthermore, some drivers are not too fond of the idea of being tracked by the V-16’s geolocation feature either, although the DGT has clarified that this only happens in the event of a breakdown.
Overall, there’s a sense among many Spaniards that making the V-16 light compulsory for drivers is just a money-making racket by the Spanish government, as no other country in the EU has anything similar in place, nor plans to.
An article in Spanish news site El Confidencial Digital calculates that the Spanish treasury will make €300 million in VAT alone through the sale of V-16 beacons.
There are 34 million vehicles in Spain, which means that if all drivers buy a V-16 light, a whopping €1.7 billion will be spent.
