“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 this week. Succinct and to the point, it is a sentiment shared by many women in Mexico after watching the now viral video of a drunk man groping the country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, as she walked from the National Palace to the education ministry on Monday. Sheinbaum, who has pressed charges against the man, said much the same at her daily press briefing on Wednesday: “If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?”

Sheinbaum’s unprecedented 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.

Sheinbaum, like her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is known for wading into crowds, shaking hands, chatting with people and posing for selfies. She was doing just that when she was groped. “It’s a fragile balance between being safe and being close to the people,” said Ishtar Cardona, a sociologist who specialises in cultural studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, when she and I met at her Mexico City home for tea, both feeling enraged. And for a female president it’s a reminder that you often can’t win.

If Sheinbaum abandoned the closeness to people that her party prides itself on, she would be accused of being scared and not fit for office. Maintaining the tradition as a woman who was so brazenly assaulted, she is open to accusations of being reckless. Already, her opponents are saying that she deserved it, both Camastra and Cardona told me. As Cardona explained to me: “For people that are raised in a very traditional way in which a patriarchal structure is normalised, a woman (like Sheinbaum), who is a scientist, a leftist, represents all that macho men, patriarchal status quo men, in Mexico, hate.” She told me of an incident three years ago when a student approached her in the melee of people congratulating her after she gave a keynote speech and tried to grope her. President or professor, neither woman’s position or power protected her from patriarchal men.

Sexual assault is not unique to Mexico, of course. Talking to Mexican women about what happened to their president burst open a cupboard of stored memories and a sharing of war stories. When Cardona told me that she urges her women students not to freeze when they’re groped, I told her of how I froze at the age of 15 when I was sexually assaulted twice during the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, including by a Saudi policeman. (I started using the hashtag #MosqueMeToo in 2018, which went viral at the time, and to which many Muslim women still share their experiences with sexual assault in sacred sites.) And when she told me of punching her fair share of gropers in the street, I told her how at the age of 50 I beat up a man who groped me in a dance club in Montreal, Canada. (I started #IBeatMyAssaulter, which also went viral, and encouraged women around the world to share stories.)

Perhaps this is the moment when the dam breaks for Mexican women. “We have been breaking the taboo for about 10 years now but it’s very tough,” says Cardona. “Many women are ashamed but now we can talk with more freedom, more freely about this.” She always talks to her students, men and women, about the precautions she takes when she leaves home, she tells me. “I think about how to dress to try not to be grabbed by the ass or have some man tell me something gross. And I ask my male students: ‘Have you ever thought about that?’ Never.” Once they have seen it happen to their president, in broad daylight, in footage beamed across the world, will Mexican men think differently about it now?

“I tell my students you have to embrace the anger!” Cardona told me.

I told her I know that man who groped me in a club will always remember the woman who beat him up.

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