The debate resumed in August, with new forces, around the Elgoibar festivities. The Equality Area of the City distributed a list of songs to the hotel owners and those responsible for txoznas, a non-sexist music list. This version was later known, as in the beginning several media delivered another message: That Elgoibar banned reggaeton. Why, of course, is a machista musical style. It is necessary to clarify how the positive action of the City Hall became a sensationalist headline, and in that way we could ask some more frequent questions, among them, why was it repaired automatically in the reggaeton and not in the Basque Radical Rock, which is heard much more in many public places?

But how are you going to be a reggaeton and a feminist?

Journalist June Fernandez wrote the article If I can't perrear is not my revolution (If I can't perish is not my revolution), tired of hearing that question over and over again. Apparently, he responded to a general concern, as it has been read by more than 100,000 people, published in two Mexican journals, has been a source of conversations... Phendez: “I believe that reggaeton has spread greatly because in our society there is a need to liberate the body and dance more by touching each other. Reggaeton is outrageous because it reminds of sexuality, but it's no more sexist than other styles. In tango, for example, man leads the woman, and with no exceptions, there is no possibility that same-sex couples can dance. Reggaeton, on the other hand, dances itself, and each person decides how close they are to others and how. Perraeum is sexist only when it is represented with certain roles”.

The transfeminist group Medeak, created 10 years ago, has also had from the beginning the objective of politicizing desire and pleasure. In this respect, reggaeton has proved very useful to them. This is how Kattalin Miner explains: “We get a lot of messages that promote the subjugation of women in a more subtle way, and I have thanked the explicit of the reggaeton, precisely because it shows the patriarchy crudely. We are not naïve and we know that it represents violence against women, but it also offers great possibilities for parody. In fact, we have claimed reggaeton to the extent that we wanted to revolutionize the model. For example, when two women perish with each other or those letters are sung, that exaltation of masculinization, so present in the reggaeton, becomes root.”

Recently, things have changed a lot, according to Miner: “In very few years the reggaeton has been inserted into what can be our political space, at least in what is festive. He's been taken from the devil. The youngest of us naturally live that music in their context of juerga, so I don't know to what extent it's invested. On the other hand, I find it very different to go to a hegemonic bar or a nightclub and dance there the reggaeton or perish among us in one of our feminist festivities”.

The outside eye, ugly...

Miner finds it suspicious to pay so much attention to reggaeton machismo: “I’ve never heard of Scurvy or Scar songs that raise a similar noise, nor of others that have been trained with Daddy Yanke songs. That is a hypocrite. It is legitimate to use sexism for or against something in the Basque Country, for example, this is what we have all sung out loud: ‘I’d like to find a female policeman to be fucking her every day, every day’ (‘I’d like to find a police officer to be always giving her continuously’). It is more important for a police officer to get involved than to rape a woman. That does not do anything, while “give him with the whip” (“make him with the shame”) seems to us a path of mistreatment. The galbahe is double: as it is music to have a good time, and as it has no content, we only see sexism; in political music, however, it is accepted without problems”.

According to Fernandez, the classic thing is that Basque society more easily identifies foreign machismo than its own: “Surely, these same people who say reggaeton is machista will consider me exaggerated if I say that Indian music festivals are sexist. But let's ask ourselves: How many DJ women work in electronic music halls? What models of women and men promote heavy metal? How many women musics are usually on the signs of rock festivals?”

Regarding the lyrics and the reproduction of roles, Fernández believes that the key is in the gaze, and that, living in a patriarchal society, it is a generic evil: “The most well-known reggaeton letters are written by heterosexual men, the gaze is always male and heterosexual. These men determine, according to their desires, what women are and what they like. The main obstacle is that women do not present themselves as subjects and talk about their desires. However, this issue is not a characteristic of reggaeton itself, it is a consequence of androcentric discourse, and commercial music appears massively”.

The class struggle has not disappeared, it has changed

There is another decisive element in this whole affair: the cultural origin of the reggaeton. Miner: “I would say that it is not only racism, but it is a matter of class: who listens to that music and who drives it. I've been at Daddy Yankee and other reggaeton musicians' concerts, and that's where I was the whole 'other'. There I found people like I don't see it every day, and I suspect that the problem of reggaeton is not related to the rejection and ridicule of those people. Many articles have been written, that people who listen to the reggaeton are more silly or have no studies... But what's going on? Does it make you listen to the reggaeton or the lower-class people play that music? No one has investigated the IQ that people who listen to Alejandro Sanz or His ta Gar have.”