• Willis Haviland Carrier The Man Who Saves Your Life Every Summer

It is about to be a year from the day that a councilor from Podemos in Alicante denounced the air conditioning as a chauvinist - "micromachista", he said, to be precise - in a plenary session on equality. The mayor asked him if that was a joke and the mayor, in an advanced state of freezing, clarified that no, that what refrigeration discriminates against women is more than documented. "You can look it up on the internet whenever you want," he said as final proof.

"Well, nothing, we turn off the air and sweat in equality,"

the councilor settled in the greatest exercise of harmony that has been remembered since the Transition.

And so we are.

In full heat wave a year later and with Spain once again divided, now by the thermostat.

Is air command another heteropatriarchal tool?

What temperature guarantees gender equality?

Is it zero degrees?

Neither cold nor hot?

Neither michismi nor fiminismi?

Let's see what the internet says before we rush.

In 2015, a study published in the journal

Nature

documented that the usual office temperature was set since the sixties for the comfort of

a man in his 40s, weighing 70 kilos, and dressed in a suit and tie

.

It was logical, then, that women were stripped of cold in summer.

Especially because their body - experts explain - needs about three degrees more of temperature.

Google says that another study, this one from 2019, showed that in closed spaces

men perform more when temperatures are lower

.

They perform more intellectually, it is understood.

That is, they are more skilled in verbal or arithmetic exercises when it is colder in the classroom, while as the room warms, the women's scores increase.

"When the temperature rises, the gender gap disappears,"

resolved German researcher Agne Kajackaite.

Science has therefore proven that when it is cold, women are less effective and that when it is hot, boys fall in love.

But it has not resolved the great pending dilemma.

Is Spain in favor of sleeping in summer with air conditioning?

Yes or no?

THE WORLD has asked and our shadow sticks have fallen. Never better said.

56.4% of Spaniards prefer to sleep without the air on, compared to 41.6% who choose to go to bed with artificial cooling

. So far, the predictable. The surprise is that it is mostly men who refuse to stay cool in bed. Years and years of conjugal fights over the temperature of the room, of supposed thermal machismo, of divorces and separations, of processions to the sofa on tropical nights in August and of

"if you're cold, my dear, cover yourself with the blanket,"

and It turns out that democracy is coming now and the legend is knocking us down.

Our survey says that

only 38.5% of Spanish men prefer to sleep with air

, while the percentage of women who are not willing to be warm in bed is close to 45%.

"The cooling of closed spaces is notoriously sexist," denounced in 2018 the campaign of actress Cynthia Nixon, the famous Miranda Hobbes of

Sex in New York

, when she launched the race to be governor of the city.

Then the temperature of the television sets where the electoral debates were held became a matter of state in the United States and even the American essayist Kerry Howley denounced that "49% of Americans (that is, men) are controlling 100% of the thermostats ».

What does our panel say about the relationship between degrees and ideology?

Well,

in the extreme cold are the voters of Vox

, the most in favor of going to bed with the air at full blast.

More than 46% of his supporters prefer not to turn off the pot overnight, whatever they say about climate change.

Do you remember that Vox deputy who said that we could not be guided by the temperatures of 1850 and that if the world warmed, fewer people would die of cold?

Well that.

At the other extreme is Ciudadanos, who abandons the vagueness to bet without doubts on airless nights.

Almost 65% of its voters prefer to open the windows rather than out in the cold

.

The voters of PP, PSOE and Podemos are quite tied above 55% of

antiaires

.

If we look at the age ranges, few surprises.

The young are

hotter

and the older ones, more cold.

Spaniards between 18 and 29 years old are the most divided.

48.5% of them sleep with air conditioning and 49.2 turn it off.

Above 65 years, the differences are much greater.

Only 37.4% of retirees prefer to air-condition their room to sleep.

We do not have data by autonomy, but at least we do know that three years ago a guy from Córdoba collected signatures to have a street for

Willis Haviland Carrier

.

The same does not sound to them, but Willis is the inventor of the air conditioning that divided our nights.

At least until now.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • HBPR

  • Sexism

  • Feminism

  • Climate change

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