“The daughter still has the flu, have you seen the neckline she is wearing?”: the sexist comment of the president of Portugal

“Your daughter is still going to get the flu, Have you seen the neckline she has?“. This comment by the president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has generated criticism from several political parties in the Portuguese country. Rebelo de Sousa has made these sexist comments this Friday about the cleavage of a young woman during a visit to Canada.

The scene, captured by television cameras, occurred in Toronto when Rebelo de Sousa was taking a walk through the Little Portugal neighborhood to meet members of the Portuguese community in the North American country. There was a point when the Portuguese president stopped to talk with a mother and daughter, and said to them with sarcasm: “The daughter is prettier than the mother. Her daughter is still going to get the flu, Have you not seen what her neckline is like??

The video of that moment has gone viral and the criticism against the Portuguese head of state has not stopped intensifying, 74 years old. The president of Portugal denied this Sunday that his comment was sexist and explained that he did it because it was cold. Asked by the Portuguese journalists who are accompanying him on a state visit to the North American country, Rebelo de Sousa expressed surprise and, to make matters worse, justified: “Now everything is sexist.”

“Don’t tell me, I don’t even know what I have to comment on,” he noted. “It wasn’t a sexist comment.It didn’t even occur to me, neither for that young woman nor for the old ladies. It was not sexist at all,” Rebelo de Sousa added in statements to the press in Toronto.

Rebelo de Sousa stated this Sunday that at the end of his walk through the Portuguese neighborhood of Montreal – although Portuguese media had previously reported that it had been in Toronto – it started to rain and it was cold, so he alerted “several elderly ladies, one of them with white hair, and others who are younger.” “I told several people, but apparently only the young woman was recorded, ‘be careful, because they can still catch a cold, I caught a cold,'” he concluded.