Too sexy for my sport: Facebook forces Spanish sports club to change risque name
The Sexitano Athletics Club from Granada, in southern Spain, has been forced by Facebook to change its name when creating a page on the social network: the original couldn’t be used due to “sexual connotations.”
The club’s owners tried to put a space between the letters in the word “sexitano,” or to use an ‘h’, but it didn’t work.
Eventually, the group decided to change the name to ‘çexitano’, which was accepted.
The club’s name has nothing to do with the English word “sex”: Almuñécar, the town where the group is located, was originally a colony in the ancient Phoenician empire called Sexi, with its residents called “sexitanos.”
Nowadays, the locals are still called that, and that’s where the club derives its name.
The club’s treasurer, Manuel Alonso, told The Local that it is of utmost importance to preserve one’s own historical identity – and that’s what he would tell Mark Zuckerberg if he had a chance.
"Facebook’s policies prohibit the word 'sexi' from being used and Silicon Valley doesn’t know anything about Almuñécar and its Phoenician origins," he said.
"We have to defend our history, our identity but of course, if I could speak to Mark Zuckerberg I would tell him that the town was the Phoenicians’ first point of contact along the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula," he told the Spanish news agency Efe.
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"I would tell him that the place name Seks, or Ex, encompasses an archeological complex comprising of the town’s three necropolises. And that this place name became Sexi, the name by which the town was known during Phoenician and Roman times, and where the current word 'sexitano' comes from," he added.
The name has caused trouble before with Anglophones: the group Antiguo Sexi (Ancient Sexi) had to come up with a different name in the UK, as the British “didn’t believe the name or where it originated from," Alonso told The Local.
Sexitano Athletics Club was registered in 1986 and currently has about 60 members.
