When the president is groped in public, women know who to blame

'Machismo in Mexico is so fucked up not even the president is safe," said Caterina Camastra, a professor and feminist, when I talked to her in Morelia, a city west of the Mexican capital last week.

- Mona Eltahawy

Succinct and to the point, it is a sentiment shared by many women in Mexico after watching the now viral video of a man groping the country's first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, as she walked from the National Palace to the education ministry on 3 November. The drunken man tried to kiss her neck and embrace her from behind as she mingled with citizens on the capital's streets, before she removed his hands and an aide stepped in and placed himself between them. Sheinbaum, who has pressed charges against the man and has called for sexual harassment to be criminalised nationwide, said much the same at her daily press briefing last Wednesday: "If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?" Sheinbaum's position has made this a teaching moment in a country where women have long complained that sexual harassment and assault on streets and public transport were too often normalised and not taken seriously. The leftist Sheinbaum's political opponents on the right have done just that by claiming her sexual assault was staged to distract from the assassination of a local mayor, Carlos Manzo, an outspoken critic of organised crime who had called on the government to do more to protect him and others.

Most women here, on the other hand, know that sexual violence does not have to be set up - half of them have experienced it at some point in their lives.