You like it or you don't, but you have to admit those matadors have cajones of steel....
UUUMM, not all of them. I had a friend that fought in many bull rings in the US, Mexico, Central and South America. I can't remember if she was ever in Spain or not. She was the first woman to fight in a bull ring in Mexico. She passed away 7 or 8 years ago.
Her name was Patricia McCormick.
This was written of her : " Though she faced the same dangers as her male counterparts, who marveled at the artistry of her cape work, her gender prevented her from achieving greater stardom in a sport dominated by men. “Had she not been born a woman,” one of Mexico’s elite matadors told Sports Illustrated in 1963, “she might have been better than any of us.”
Nonetheless, McCormick demanded to fight on equal terms. Many female toreras fought on horseback, dismounting only to kill (in Spain, women such as the Peruvian legend Conchita Cintron, were forbidden to even to leave the horse). She fought on foot, like a man, and kept her feet planted the whole time, moving only to pivot.
Her bravery came at a cost. She was gored six times. The worst was in September 1954 in Ciudad Acuña, Del Rio’s Mexican sister city. According to newspaper accounts, she turned her back while performing a quite, or a pass, and the bull caught her in the thigh.
“The horn went right up my stomach,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “The bull carried me around the ring for a minute, impaled on his horns. They gave me the last rites there. The doctor said, ‘Carry her across the border and let her die in her own country.’” She then spent six months recovering in a hospital, never wavering on her return to the arena.