Staring Into the Arena

On Women and Bullfighting

PART I: ASHAMED IN THE ARENA

When, with much embarrassment and some reluctance, I recently purchased—on my therapist’s recommendation—the self-help book Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown, I was at a low point. The book was supposed to have something to do with confronting your own shame, but the act of buying the book was utterly humiliating. I am a basic bitch, I thought, as I opened it on the train, trying to hide the title from my seatmates: I am a cliché.

To my surprise, it started with a passage from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt that referred to a subject very dear to my heart, a subject I had never associated with shame, self-help books, or the women who read them. That subject is bullfighting:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly …

I have seen with my own eyes men whose faces are covered in blood and sand, their eyes shining with the fanaticism of mad prophets, rise with broken ribs from between the hooves of bulls ten times their weight, and attempt to kill them.

When I tell people that I love bullfighting, they generally ask the same three questions. I will address them now:

1. Yes, the bull (almost) always dies.

2. No, I don’t know why I like it so much.

3. Yes, there are female bullfighters.

I am not sure why so many people are curious about female bullfighters, but I am beginning to think it has something to do with shame. In fact, I have spent the last few months not only confronting my own shame (thank you Brené Brown), but considering the role shame plays in bullfighting. I myself have at times felt ashamed in the arena.

Señoritas toreando en un festival, Plaza de toros de Indauchu, h. 1914

I wonder if it is uniquely American that shame is considered a personal problem to be solved via self-help books rather than a collective feeling experienced within a communal structure. In our embrace of anything-goes culture, we have turned the shamer inward, converting shaming from a process that is administered by our society when we break known rules to a punishment we administer to ourselves for idiosyncratic psychological reasons. I have noticed that Spaniards are particularly sensitive to public shame, much more so than us. Once, when my husband, a Spaniard, was trying to scalp cheap bullfight tickets for us from an old man in front of La Maestranza, he made me step back a few paces and then said in an undertone to the seller, “Please. Don’t ashame me in front of this blonde.” We got the tickets.

Because of this cultural susceptibility to shame, I have often wondered at the double psychological courage of the bullfighter—to enter the arena is to risk not just death but public mockery. As Carrie B. Douglass writes in her 1984 journal article toro muerto, vaca es: an Interpretation of the Spanish Bullfight, “Like the ridiculed husband forced to wear horns if he cannot control his wife, the bullfighter is also the object of insults and ridicule from the public when he dodges the bull rather than really controlling its charge.”

I think Americans are ashamed to be interested in bullfighting because they associate it with (a) animal cruelty (although Americans are fine with animals being killed cruelly, as long as it is done in secret), and (b) machismo (as embodied by Ernest Hemingway). By asking about women in bullfighting, I think my interlocutors are trying to satisfy their interest while side-stepping their shame about the topic. Perhaps bullfighting might be…feminist?!

Bullfighting is not feminist, but the gender dynamics in traditional Spanish tauromaquia are complex, defying the easy stereotypes Anglos have about Latin “machismo.” And identifying where women—and femininity—fit into bullfighting is a more subtle question than it might initially appear.

First, let’s stipulate that the world of tauromaquia is ruled by tradition, hierarchy, and masculine values. Muriel Feiner, in Women and the Bullring, has written the definitive book on the history of women in and around the plaza. She notes that José María de Cossío, who wrote the authoritative encyclopedia on bullfighting, devoted only seventeen pages out of 11,000 to female bullfighters. He opened the section, “As this manifestation forms part of the spectacle [of tauromaquia] as such, I will proceed to cover it briefly, but with all the repugnance of one who is obliged to deal with a subject that appears to be in direct conflict with Nature itself.”

Despite the fact that Cossío and men like them considered them shameful, female bullfighters (toreras) are recorded from the earliest days of formal bullfighting in Spain. In principle, there is no physical reason why a woman cannot fight a bull just as well (or badly) as a man.

As Ernest Hemingway wrote in his non-fiction treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon,

“The matador must dominate the bulls by knowledge and science … Strength is of little use to him except at the actual moment of killing. Once someone asked Rafael Gomez, ‘El Gallo,’ … what physical exercise he, Gallo, took to keep his strength up for bullfighting. ‘Strength,’ Gallo said. ‘What do I want with strength, man? The bull weighs half a ton. Should I take exercises for strength to match him? Let the bull have the strength.’”

According to Cossío, there is a record of a farmer’s daughter fighting a bull on horseback in front of the King of Spain in 1654. Feiner notes several instances of eighteenth-century Spanish ladies of noble birth fighting bulls immediately before entering convents to become nuns.

Women continued to appear in the bullring throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the doors to the arena closed abruptly to female bullfighters in Spain in 1939 with the advent of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. No woman fought again in any official bullring in Spain until 1974.

Since then, just three women, Cristina Sánchez, Mari Paz Vega, and Conchi Ríos, have been confirmed as full matadoras in Europe.

All that said, I wonder if the question of female bullfighters is a bit of a red herring when women’s role in the imaginative space of tauromaquia is fully considered. What if there is another reason behind our fixatoin on female bullfighters? Specifically, I wonder if our preoccupation with female bullfighters might reflect a discomfort with the sexualization of male bullfighters’ bodies—an objectification we believe is properly feminine.

PART II: THE BULLFIGHTER IS A WOMAN

It is here, reader, that I must admit the truth, which is that when I go to a corrida, what I want to see is a man’s body in peak physical condition, performing a feat that harkens back to one of the most primal roles a man must fulfill in nature—dominating a dangerous animal. It’s embarrassing to admit—but it’s true. I am learning to confront my shame. Bullfighting is an art, not a sport, and that art concerns stoic values of confronting death with acceptance and bravery.

There is an undeniably erotic aspect to bullfighting. The first time I saw a bullfight, I was taken aback by the way the toreros’ bodies were presented in the ring, wearing skintight silk uniforms, inciting the bulls to charge them with pelvic thrusts and intimate murmurs. The average crowd at a bullfight skews male and aggressively heterosexual. Thus, at my first few corridas, I found myself looking around, wondering if everyone else was seeing what I was seeing…? The spectacle seems explicitly designed for an erotic gaze while coyly denying that any such intent is present. The bullfighters’ bodies are objectively beautiful, and they are wrapped in garments that are decorative in a way that is highly unusual for male clothing. From their first step into the arena through to their dedication of the bull and killing of it, the bullfighters present their bodies to the crowd in a deliberately artful manner, like dancers. But, of course, what they are displaying is not just a pretty dance—it is a display of their martial virtue, their masculinity and virility. The whole operation is an objectification of the male body which has no equal in Anglo culture. The words “female gaze” spring automatically to mind when looking at bullfighters in a way that is unusual anywhere else in art or culture.

In fact, the very idea of bullfighting may have come from women. Rubén Lardín, a Spanish critic and writer, explored this idea in an interview with Antonio López Fuentes, a renowned bullfight tailor, about the famous “suits of lights,” or trajes de luces:

Fuentes: In the past, there were no bullfighting schools; the bullfighter learned in the country, no matter whether he was the son of a landowner or a simple farmhand who just happened to work in one of those huge ranches they had back then. So you had these 14- and 15-year-old boys with tanned skin bullfighting half-naked. The landowners wouldn’t be around. They were somewhere else, doing business, but their wives stayed at the ranch. Every now and then those women would throw a bull calf to the boys, just to watch them move.

Lardín: So it’s all down to the female erotic impulse?

Fuentes: Absolutely. Those ladies ended up making clothes for the bullfighters to wear. Nowadays, a man can wear a pink suit if he feels like it, but back then women dressed the boys in unusual colors for a male. They dressed them like women but still managed to make them look manly. And today you can dress a woman in a traje de luces and she’ll look masculine to you, regardless of how big her ass is.

There is a saying in tauromaquia that a man must dress himself in the costume of a woman (the traje de luz) for his encounter with death. And it is perhaps partly for this reason that the presence of certain women at bullfights, even as spectators, has long been viewed with suspicion.

Once, in Sevilla, I met the family of a young, novice torero in the apartment of a friend. The boy would be soon making his debut. Naively, I asked his mother whether she was nervous about seeing his first bullfight in Sevilla. Meaningful eye contact was exchanged between Spaniards. Finally, an older man explained, “It is traditional that mothers of bullfighters do not go to their corridas. Neither their wives.” The topic was quickly changed. I was left to wonder at the reasons why the closest female relatives of bullfighters are not present at their corridas. There is, of course, the fear of death or injury. But there is also the fear of shame. A young bullfighter once opined, “You fear ridicule not only in front of the bull; also in front of a woman.” On the other hand, a number of bullfighters have remarked that they would not bother to bullfight if there were no women in the stands.

(Caption: Photo by Philippe Latour)

The bullfighter Alejandro Talavante, who has a jawline so powerful that it has broken containment on the Spanish web and become a Chad meme here on the Anglo internet, recently made headlines when he mused ingenuously that he didn’t know if a naked woman or a bull in the arena caused him more fear.

Along with fear of dishonor, there is the question of physical manhood. Most bullfighting injuries, because of the position of bull’s horns, are between the stomach and knee, with a special emphasis on the groin. In the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway introduced bullfighting to the American public while forever linking it with the idea of male impotence. The novel’s hero, the expat American Jake Barnes, has been rendered impotent by an unspecified injury in World War I. Barnes is hopelessly in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a passionately sexual Englishwoman who has an affair with a virile Spanish bullfighter.

Ironically, what Hemingway left unconsidered in the novel was the question of impotence among toreros. It remains a taboo topic, but if any men are especially susceptible to injuries which render them sexually incompetent, they are those supremely sexually alluring bullfighters, who routinely suffer injuries to their groins. One bullfighter who is active today suffered a penile goring and still fights.¹ When I saw him in the ring, he was knocked down and bloodied by a bull, but he got up and killed it. On bullfight Twitter, someone remarked that whatever had happened to his penis, it was clear by his behaviour that his balls were still intact.

PART III: THE BULL IS A WOMAN

But if the bullfighter must confront the risk of shame, and if more than one famous bullfighter has equated the terror aroused in him—or the demands placed upon him—by a naked woman and a bull, does there not remain a further possibility: that the two challenges are one and the same?

In the previously mentioned journal article, toro muerto, vaca es, Carrie Douglass has advanced a startling theory about women’s symbolic place at the heart of the corrida. She believes that the bull represents a woman. The title of the essay refers to the Spanish expression, “A dead bull is a cow,” meaning unsexed, unthreatening, unmale. By allowing himself to be killed by a man, he has ceded his masculine power.

But a bull becomes a woman long before he enters the arena. Like a girl of good family, the early life of a bull raised for the corrida is marked by containment and chastity. A brave bull is said to be “casta” which in context means it is “well-bred,” “of pure lineage,” but also means “chaste.” Bulls must be literal virgins as well as “virgins to the cape” when they enter the ring. They can never have faced a man trying to fight them before. The ranchers who raise them thus attempt to protect them from night-time incursions by aspiring bullfighters who try to illicitly torear them. Many famous bullfighters describe nocturnal adventures of this sort which sometimes ended with being chased by angry men with guns. As Douglass notes, “insofar as [the illicit bullfighter] penetrates a male domain of bull-keeping and defiles the bulls, he commits symbolic adultery.”

The Anglo mind has always viewed with ironic humor the Mediterranean idea of female honor as reflecting on their men. Hemingway felt comfortable speculating in print about his wife’s openly sexual admiration for bullfighters, and, in English, “your mom” jokes are generally seen as more absurd than offensive.

Douglass, however, writes that “The relationship between the sexes is an instance of the social hierarchy, and the outcome of the bullfight thus becomes more generally a victory of all formal hierarchical structures.” In other words, bullfighting represents victory over the “Longhouse”. The Bronze Age warrior, the bullfighter, representing order and civilization, defeats the demon of feminine chaos represented by a bull, by pulling him (i.e., her) closer and closer until he stabs him (i.e., her) in the heart.

If a bull can represent a woman, a woman can represent a bull. The Spanish language is replete with comparisons between women’s bodies and bull’s bodies, and the dangers both pose for men. For example, this copla popular or popular rhyme collected by Douglass during her field work:

La mocita de esta casa
es una becerra brava
si yo fuese su torero
las dos orejas ganaba.

(The young lady of this house
Is a brave fighting calf
And if I was her torero
I would win two ears.)

She also pointed me to the following quote by bullfighter Juan Mora:

“When you are dominating the bull to perfection, if you reflect on what is happening inside during this moment, it is, at least for me, as if the bull were a woman and you were having intercourse. You get goosebumps all over and you enjoy it a lot.”

PART IV: THE CROWD IS A WOMAN

At the same time as a man might feel that a bull is a woman, a woman might desire to be a bull: “Cela cites a conversation from a novel by Alvaro Retano in which two prostitutes are talking: ‘Oh Girl … when I see a twenty-year-old boy in the [bull] ring … when I see him run his spear in [the bull] all the way up to his fist, I think ... if only I were a bull.’ ”²

When it comes to bullfighting in art and literature, women have generally been cast in a supporting role. They watch (when permitted), rather than stepping into the arena. However, the world of tauromaquia has often provided a stage for male artists to portray female sexuality with a frankness that startled their contemporaries.

In 1862, Édouard Manet painted his model and muse Victorine Meurent in drag in the costume of an “espada (sword)” or bullfighter. Her shapely legs in bullfighters’ stockings were scandalous for the time, and her generous feminine curves are, if anything, more alluring than they appear when she is fully nude in Olympia.

Hemingway’s character Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises remains the most famous fictional woman associated with tauromaquia. She arrives in Pamplona with three besotted men in tow and proceeds to ditch all of them for a teenage torero whom she seduces in a startlingly masculine fashion. Lady Brett’s character, with her series of men’s hats purloined from lovers, became almost as famous as Hemingway himself, starting a trend among American co-eds for loose living and bullfight appreciation.

What can I say? I have long considered myself far too complicated and sophisticated for anything as basic as Brené Brown, but, when it comes to Lady Brett Ashley, I’m an utter cliché. As humiliating as it is to admit, from the moment I read The Sun Also Rises as a fourteen-year-old, I deeply, desperately wanted to be Brett Ashley. “She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht” is how Hemingway introduces her. Hull of a racing yacht, I wrote in my school notebook, determined to look up what exactly a racing yacht was and find a way to look like one.

In fact, bullfighting, as seen in the last two examples, has always come with a hint of gender confusion, if not outright cross-dressing. There has not infrequently been a suspicion that hiding behind all the masculine performance, there is something queer. I have noticed that even today, leftist men who oppose bullfights on the grounds of animal cruelty often impugn the masculinity of bullfighters with innuendo they themselves would call homophobic in other contexts. Indeed, one of the notable aspects of bullfighters’ physicality is, to American eyes, a striking tendency to publicly touch, embrace, and even kiss other men, as well as to cry quite openly (although crying in the bullring is only permitted when expressing poignant sorrow, as when a bullfighter retires, never when expressing frustration or, God forbid, fear).

I might not be writing about this topic today if one of the grande-dames of American queer literature, Gertrude Stein, had not introduced the idea of bullfighting to the neophyte Hemingway in Paris. It is curious that he later depicted her as a perverted pussy-hound in print, and she depicted him as a secret pansy. For both of them, bullfighting represented something important about gender and self-expression.

Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, was present in Pamplona during the summer that inspired the book but was written out of the novel, replaced in her role as cock-block with a war injury. In reality she was an avid bullfight fan, having received a bull’s ear (a mark of admiration) from a famous bullfighter and named her and Hemingway’s first child after him. Hemingway wrote of Hadley’s passion in a 1923 article for The Toronto Star Weekly, with admirable sang-froid:

“If you want to keep any conception of yourself as a brave, hard, perfectly balanced, thoroughly competent man in your wife’s mind never take her to a real bull fight. I used to go into the amateur fights in the morning to try to win back a small amount of her esteem but … it became apparent that any admiration she might ever develop for me would have to be simply an antidote to the real admiration for [toreros] Maera and Villalta. You cannot compete with bull fighters on their own ground. If anywhere. The only way most husbands are able to keep any drag with their wives at all is that, first there are only a limited number of bull fighters, second there are only a limited number of wives who have ever seen bull fights.”

Unfortunately for her husband, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, who played Lady Brett in the 1957 movie version of The Sun Also Rises, did see some bullfights. She left Sinatra for the dashing Spanish bullfighter Luis Dominguín, ostentatiously applauding him from the stands as flashbulbs popped and Sinatra seethed, even attempting to win her back by bringing six cases of her beloved Coca Cola to Spain. Humphrey Bogart reportedly told Ava, “most women would be willing to drag themselves at [Sinatra’s] feet, yet you go around with a guy who dresses up in a cape and ballet shoes.”

All of this is relatively benign compared to Histoire de l’œil by Georges Bataille, a 1928 erotic novella. An amorous couple explore increasingly extreme sexual experiences until the novel reaches its climax at a bullfight in Sevilla. Simone, one of the two teenaged protagonists, is enchanted with the idea of eating the testicles of a freshly killed bull while watching a corrida of the famous torero El Granero. As he is impaled by a bull, one of his eyes pops out, and Simone has an orgasm while watching his death and masturbating with the bull’s testicle.

Every time I go to a bullfight, I’m afraid—afraid of feeling ashamed. The fear starts, more often than not, in the airport. As I fly across the Atlantic, I wonder: Is there something wrong with me? Am I completely insane? Am I a monster?

I’ve never felt more shame than at bad bullfights, where the bullfighter kills badly, the animal is bleeding out, and I look around and wonder, What am I doing here? Once I took an ex-boyfriend and his entire family to a bullfight which turned into a humiliating disaster not only for the bullfighters, but for me personally. My invited guests looked at me with increasing horror until they snuck out halfway through. We did not discuss it afterwards.

But I keep going, because I have never felt more human, more alive, more of a participant in a work of art than at a good bullfight, where the brave, honorable bull charges and charges again, determined to kill or be killed, and the brave bullfighter offers his young body as a potential sacrifice on the altar of glory. Glory cannot, of course, be earned without defying shame. The possibility of shame, as much as the possibility of death, is glory’s price.

It is nice to be American, sometimes, because you can go to bullfights alone and learn from the people around you as they shout their cheers and insults. It is nice to be a woman, sometimes, because you are treated gently by old men in small towns who tell you which bulls are good and which are bad. It is nice to be an eccentric, traveling in a country that is not your own, in thrall to a tradition that is not your own because you love it so much that it is painful sometimes to think about it. But it is hard to think that something you love so much will always be foreign to you, as an American, as a woman, as an eccentric—that the things you have chosen to love are things which will never be yours, things at which you will always be a spectator—an outsider—a stranger—or, most shameful of all, a tourist—peering into a world which remains mostly masculine and mostly mysterious, as if peering through the crack of a door held ajar.

And yet, still I am there, at the edge of the action, staring, staring, staring, into the arena.

1. Aplausos, “Dos cornadas a Juan de Castilla: una en cresta iliaca de 15 y 5 cm, y otra que desgarra el pene (Two gorings to Juan de Castilla: one in the iliac crest measuring 15 and 5 cm, and another that tore his penis)”, https://www.aplausos.es/dos-cornadas-juan-de-castilla-cresta-iliaca-15-5-cm-otra-desgarra-pene

2. Douglass again. “Toro muerto, vaca es: An Interpretation of the Spanish Bullfight,” American Ethnologist, https://www.jstor.org/stable/643849