The selected opinions of two of the academics were very relevant, since both assume “the misogynistic tradition”. Carme Riera declared: “My ideal project within the RAE would be to clean up and give a much more feminist splendour to the language”, “to eliminate the misogynistic heritage of the language should be one of the priorities of the Academy”, “It cannot be said that the RAE is misogynistic at this time”, “The revision of sexist terms would then help to demonstrate that we defend a modern language, far from the twelfth century”. She also believed that was a priority extensible to the eight academics: “We are more aware because we are women and we put our feelers out to everything that has to do with linguistic sexism”.

Soledad Puértolas, in addition to admitting the misogynistic inheritance of the dictionary (“There are some men who are more interested in eliminating the misogynistic heritage of the RAE than some women”), made a criticism against the institution, “which has always remained quite apart from society” which turns it into” an archaic and elitist temple”.

As a counterpoint, articles were published in which male academics defended the dictionary. The most repeated argument was that the Academy “cannot be politically correct” (e.g. 48-52.) because, if so, as the Mexican writer and academic González Cerolio commented, it would fall into an “unscientific and not very rigorous imposition”; to criticize the Academy for including in their dictionary meanings considered deplorable “is like blaming Mr. Richter for earthquakes”. If speakers use the expression the weaker sex, the Academy cannot remove it for reasons of political correctness, “because this would be an attack on scientific rigour which would have to be applied to any academic work”. The Academy “records what the true owners of the language say and consider normal”, that is, what is “usual, somewhat natural, customary”:

Gonzalo Celorio says that the Academy “cannot be politically correct” (EFE México, 21-IV-17).

In any case, the campaign about the weaker sex not only passed from the social networks to the communication media and became a pan-Hispanic issue but also caused alarms to go off in the political arena and some parties took action; in fact, the proceedings for a draft resolution were initiated so that the Government asked both the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) and the RAE to withdraw the controversial definition.

Parliament asked the RAE and the IEC to withdraw ‘ the weaker sex’ from their dictionaries. (Lavanguardia.com, 15-V-17).

In any case, there is no doubt about the determining role of the social networks in this matter, as six months later, the change.org campaign once again became news because of the signatures that continued to add up10:

The campaign to change the definition of ‘the weaker sex’ exceeds 159,000 signatures. The petition, promoted in February by a young woman from Huelva reaches an average of 4,600 applications in the last few days (Elpais.com, 28-XI-17).

On 24th March 2017, Maria Montero, presenter of the radio programme el Quinto Elemento (Tenerife) started another Equality campaign (#Yosoyunamujerpública) (#Iamapublicwoman), in change.org, requesting signatures for the RAE to modify the dictionary meaning of public women as a “prostitute” and equate it with a public man ‘presence and influence