Spain: From Catholic Morality to a Public Language of Desire

A woman born in Madrid in 1960 has lived through the following, in this order.

When she was fifteen, a married woman in her country generally needed her husband’s authorisation to take a job, open a bank account, or travel far from home. When she was eighteen, adultery stopped being a crime and contraception stopped being contraband. When she was twenty-one, divorce became legal for the first time since the Second Republic. When she was forty-five, two women could marry each other in Spain before they could in most of the world. When she was sixty-two, her country rewrote its criminal code so that the question in a sexual offence case was whether consent had been given, not whether the woman had fought.

No other society in Western Europe compressed that much into a single lifetime. Which is why Spain is the second essay in this chamber: if you want to know what law can do and what law cannot, you want the case where the law moved fastest.

And the answer is not the encouraging one. Spain is the strongest available evidence that a society can change what it is legally required to do, and what it is publicly able to say, far faster than it can change how families actually distribute money, time and obligation. Both halves of that sentence matter. The first is genuinely hopeful. The second is why this essay has a counter-thesis.

The phrase to hold on to is the marital permission — the licencia or permiso marital. Under the Francoist civil code, a married woman’s legal capacity was substantially exercised through her husband. Employment contracts, commercial activity, opening accounts, disposing of property, long journeys: these were areas where a wife’s own signature was not, by itself, sufficient. This was not a custom. It was the civil law of a European country, and it was dismantled by statute in 1975, the year Franco died.

Around the same short window: adultery and cohabitation offences that fell with conspicuous asymmetry on women were removed from the penal code in 1978. The sale and advertising of contraceptives was decriminalised in the same period. The 1978 Constitution declared equality before the law. Divorce returned in 1981 — returned, because the Second Republic had legislated it in 1932 and the dictatorship had abolished it. Parental authority was reformed in 1981 so that it was held jointly rather than by the father.

Read that list again and notice the compression. A legal order that treated adult women as dependants was taken apart in roughly six years.

This is the fact that most changes how a reader should hold Spain. It is not a society with a long liberal tradition that has been getting gradually freer. It is a society that was, within the memory of living grandmothers, one of the more legally restrictive places in Europe for women, and then was not.

Here is where most accounts go wrong, including admiring ones.

Spain’s family law did not fall because Spanish private opinion about sex had quietly liberalised until the statutes became untenable. It fell because the statutes were part of a dictatorship, and the country was dismantling the dictatorship. The Francoist family code was not an old law that happened to sit inside the regime. It was one of the regime’s instruments, ideologically continuous with everything else about it, and when the political order went, the family order went with it as part of the same demolition.

That is a different mechanism from persuasion, and it matters enormously for anybody hoping to transfer the lesson. Spain did not have to convince a majority to change its mind about women’s autonomy in order to change the law. It had to change its mind about the regime — which it did, decisively — and the family provisions came down in the rubble.

The cultural surface of those years, the Movida, the films, the sudden explosion of public frankness, is the part that travels in photographs. The engine was constitutional.

Which means the most transferable observation in this essay is also the least comfortable one. The speed of legal change in Spain is evidence about political rupture, not evidence about how fast private opinion can move. Japan has no equivalent rupture available to it and should not wish for one. So the Spanish timeline cannot be read as a schedule that Japan is simply running late on.

In 2005 Spain recognised same-sex marriage — among the first countries in the world to do so, and well before most of Protestant northern Europe, before the United States, before the United Kingdom.

It did this as a country where the Catholic Church retained enormous institutional presence, where bishops spoke against the law from pulpits, and where very large demonstrations were organised in opposition. The law was challenged and upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2012.

The reason to put this in the chamber is not celebration. It is that a widely used predictive model broke here. The model says: historically Catholic, strongly religious societies move later on sexual and family questions than secular or Protestant ones. Spain was supposed to be a laggard and was instead early — earlier than societies that score as far more secular.

So whatever is doing the work, it is not simply the depth of religious inheritance. It may be the route available: parliamentary majority plus constitutional framework plus a generation for whom opposing the Church was part of opposing the dictatorship. That configuration is specific to Spain. But the failure of the prediction is general, and it is worth carrying into every other essay here. A society’s religious history tells you what the argument will sound like. It does not reliably tell you when the argument will be won.

The second transformation is the one this essay is really about, and it began with a case.

In 2016, during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, five men sexually assaulted an eighteen-year-old woman. In 2018 the court convicted them — but of abuso sexual rather than agresión sexual, because it did not find that violence or intimidation had been proven. The sentence was nine years each.

To understand why that detonated a country, you need the distinction in the old penal code. Agresión sexual required violence or intimidation. Abuso sexual covered sexual acts performed without the other person’s consent but without violence. The effect, in practice, was that a woman who froze — who did not fight, did not scream, did not resist in a way the court could see — was described by the law as having been abused rather than assaulted.

Freezing is one of the best-documented responses to sexual threat. A legal architecture that treats the absence of resistance as legally significant is not describing what happens to human bodies under fear. It is describing what a nineteenth-century lawyer imagined happens.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched. The sentence the protests produced — it is not abuse, it is rape — was blunt, and it did something more durable than the marches. In 2019 the Supreme Court reclassified the conviction as agresión sexual and raised the sentences to fifteen years.

And a phrase entered ordinary Spanish speech: the absence of resistance is not consent. Not a slogan in a seminar. A sentence that ordinary people, including people who disagreed about everything else, learned how to say.

In 2022 Spain passed the organic law on the guarantee of sexual freedom, known universally by the phrase only yes means yes. It collapsed abuso and agresión into a single offence defined by the absence of freely given consent, and required that consent be expressed rather than inferred from silence or passivity.

In principle this is the cleanest consent standard in European criminal law. In practice, something went badly wrong, and the honest version of this essay has to tell it.

Merging two offences meant rebuilding the sentencing bands, and in the rebuilt scheme the minimum penalties attached to some conduct came out lower than they had been. Spanish constitutional principle, like that of most legal systems, applies a more favourable criminal law retroactively. So convicted sex offenders applied for resentencing under the new ranges. Reported figures ran into the hundreds of reductions, with some early releases. In 2023 the law was amended to restore higher ranges — and the amendment passed with votes from the opposition, against the governing coalition partner that had authored the original, which tore a hole in the government.

It is important to say exactly what this episode demonstrates and exactly what it does not.

It demonstrates that a consent standard is a definition, and a penal code is an architecture of ranges, and that you cannot replace the definition without rebuilding the architecture in the same motion. The drafting failure was real, the harm was real, and it fell hardest on the constituency the law was written for.

It does not demonstrate that consent-based law is reckless. That conclusion is now a permanent talking point for people who opposed the reform on entirely different grounds, and it is worth naming the move when you see it. Anyone who cites the sentence reductions as an argument against defining rape by consent is making an argument about penal drafting and presenting it as an argument about consent. Those are not the same claim.

Here is the comparison that makes this essay worth the space, and it is almost never drawn.

In 2023 — one year after Spain — Japan substantially revised its own sexual-offence law. The offence formerly framed around forcible intercourse was reformulated as non-consensual sexual intercourse. The age of consent was raised from thirteen to sixteen. New offences covering photography were created and limitation periods were extended.

Pause on that age. Until 2023, the statutory age of consent in Japan was thirteen, a figure set in the Meiji-era code and left in place for over a century. Any account of Japan as merely reserved or merely slow has to metabolise that fact, and most accounts do not.

Now the drafting, because this is where the two countries part company. Spain wrote a general standard: consent must be freely expressed. Japan wrote an enumerated list — a set of specified circumstances in which valid consent is deemed to be absent, covering such things as violence and intimidation, the effects of alcohol or drugs, the exploitation of a position of authority or economic dependence, and situations where the person was taken by surprise or could not form a judgement.

Each route has a cost, and they are opposite costs. A general standard is broad in principle and leaves courts to decide what counts, which is how Spain ended up with a penal architecture crisis rather than an interpretive one. An enumerated list is more predictable for prosecutors and judges, and it is narrower: conduct that falls between the listed circumstances is harder to charge, and the list becomes the ceiling rather than the floor.

Neither design is obviously better. That is the honest finding, and a reader who came here hoping one country would turn out to be the model will leave without one. What both countries did, within twelve months of each other, is move the legal question away from what the woman did and toward what was agreed. That is the shared movement, and it is larger than either statute.

Now the counter-thesis, which in Spain’s case is not a quibble. It is half the picture.

Religious identification in Spain has fallen steeply, and among younger Spaniards the decline is sharper still; the share who describe themselves as practising is far smaller than the share who describe themselves as Catholic, which is itself much reduced. On the numbers, this is a substantially secularised society.

And yet. The ritual calendar is intact. Church weddings and church funerals continue for people who do not attend otherwise. Holy Week fills streets in cities whose voters approved same-sex marriage. Religion stopped being a rule and did not stop being furniture.

The more consequential residue is structural rather than liturgical. The family remains the real welfare system. Young adults in Spain leave the parental home unusually late by Northern European standards, which is economic as much as cultural — youth unemployment has been high for decades — but the two reinforce each other. Grandmothers provide childcare that in Denmark would be provided by the state. Obligation runs along family lines with real force.

And the demographic result is stark. Spanish fertility is among the lowest in the European Union, first births come late, and a large share of births now occur outside marriage. A woman has the legal right to organise her life exactly as she wishes, an economy that makes independent household formation expensive and slow, and a family that will shelter her on terms.

So the correction to the triumphant reading is this. Spain did not replace a Catholic family structure with an individualist one. It removed the law that enforced the structure and kept a great deal of the structure, which is now voluntary. Voluntary obligation is still obligation. It is simply obligation you cannot appeal, because nobody is making you.

One stereotype has to be dismantled before a reader in Japan can use any of this.

Spain reads, from outside, as expressive: physical in greeting, loud in company, direct, sexually confident. Some of that is accurate as a description of public behaviour. None of it is evidence about private capacity.

The register you use with a room is not the register you have available with one person in the dark. A society can be effusive in the plaza and inarticulate in the bedroom, and many are. Public warmth and private candour are independent scales, and conflating them produces the unhelpful conclusion that Japanese reserve is the reason Japanese intimacy is difficult. Reserve is a public register too.

There is a harder piece of evidence in the same direction. Spain has built one of Europe’s most developed state apparatuses for gender-based violence: a dedicated 2004 organic law, specialised courts, an official count of women killed by partners and former partners maintained since the early 2000s, and a standardised police risk-assessment system for protecting women who report.

A country does not build that unless the problem is serious. But notice what the apparatus actually proves. It is not evidence that Spain is more dangerous than its neighbours. It is evidence that Spain decided to count, and counting produces numbers, and numbers produce pressure. The thing for a Japanese reader to notice is not the Spanish figure. It is the comparative absence of an equivalent counting machine here, and what that absence does to any argument about how large the problem is.

The attractive reading of Spain is: a deeply Catholic, legally restrictive, socially conservative society transformed itself inside one generation, so any society can. We do not think that survives contact with the detail.

Three reasons. The engine was the collapse of a dictatorship, which is not an instrument available to Japan and not one to wish for. What changed decisively was law and public language; what changed far less was the family economy that determines whether a woman can actually live the life the law now permits. And the 2022 consent reform shows that even a sincere, well-supported, intellectually correct change can injure the people it was written for if its technical architecture is not rebuilt alongside its principle.

What does survive is smaller and, we think, worth more than the triumphant version.

A population can learn a sentence. In about three years, the absence of resistance is not consent went from a protest chant to a phrase ordinary Spaniards could use, including people who agreed on nothing else. That is an observable change in what a society is able to say out loud, and it happened faster than any change in what that society is able to arrange. Language moved first. Childcare is still being argued about.

Which suggests the right order of operations for anyone who feels behind. The sentence comes before the settlement. Being able to say the thing is not the whole of freedom, and it is not nothing, and it is available earlier.

You do not owe tradition obedience. You do not owe modernity performance. You are allowed to discover what actually fits your life.

Three things travel badly from Spain to Japan.

The first is the law-first model: the belief that changing a code changes a culture. Spain’s code changed because a regime ended, and then had to be changed again in 2023 because the first attempt misfired. The code was downstream of a rupture and upstream of a mess. Neither position makes it the lever.

The second is expressiveness as a personality prescription. Spanish public warmth is a register, not a superior capacity for intimacy, and a reader who concludes that she would be closer to her partner if she were louder has been given a bad instruction by a photograph.

The third is the most dangerous, and it is already arriving. The only-yes-means-yes sentence reductions are a ready-made story for anyone in Japan who wants to argue that consent-based reform is irresponsible. It is a drafting lesson. Used as an argument against consent itself, it is a substitution, and the substitution should be named whenever it occurs.

What does travel is the sequence. Spain shows that a public vocabulary can be acquired in a few years by a population that previously did not have one, and that the acquisition does not wait for the economy, the church, or the family to be reorganised first.

The legal dates here — the abolition of the marital permission in 1975, the decriminalisation of adultery and contraception around 1978, divorce in 1981, same-sex marriage in 2005, the organic law of 2022 and its 2023 amendment, and Japan’s 2023 penal revision — are stated from memory and should be verified against primary sources before this piece is marked fact-checked.

The scale of the sentence reductions under the 2022 law was reported in the hundreds and was politically contested at the time. This essay deliberately states an order of magnitude rather than a figure, and a reader should treat the number as reported rather than settled.

Religious identification and practice figures come from national survey barometers that move year to year and are sensitive to question wording. No percentage is claimed here for that reason, only a direction that is consistent across series.

Fertility, age at first birth and the share of births outside marriage are claimed as direction and relative position, not as values; current figures should be read from Eurostat or the Spanish national statistics institute rather than from this essay.

Japan’s 2023 enumerated circumstances are paraphrased rather than quoted. The precise wording carries the legal weight, and anyone relying on the comparison should read the provision rather than this summary of it.

And Spain has more internal variation than one essay can carry. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Andalusia, Madrid and rural Castile differ on almost everything described above. A reader who knows the country will find a paragraph here that describes nobody she knows.

What Spain leaves us with is an order of operations, and a limit.

A society can change what it is able to say much faster than it can change what it is able to arrange. Spain learned its sentence in three years and is still arguing about who pays for childcare. Japan rewrote the definition of a sexual offence in 2023 and most people here cannot tell you what changed.

But notice where both countries stop. Neither a Spanish organic law nor a Japanese penal revision reaches into the private scale where any of this is actually lived: whether one particular woman, in one particular room, with one particular person, has a way to say what she wants and some reasonable expectation of being heard. No code reaches that far. It cannot.

That scale has to be practised, and practice requires a place where saying the thing is the point rather than the risk. That is the whole of what an evening with Moonlight is for: the asking is the activity, the boundary is part of the conversation rather than an interruption of it, and nothing is inferred from your silence. Spain needed three years and a supreme court to establish that the absence of resistance is not consent. You should not have to establish it again in your own living room.