A religious order in Spain has banned two women from carrying shrines during Easter week to prevent any "uncomfortable" brush with the opposite sex under cover of the massive floats.
In towns and cities across Spain each Easter, dozens of people dressed in religious tunics and pointed wizard-like hoods carry the wood and metal floats topped with statues of the Virgin Mary as a form of penance.
But a brotherhood in the southern city of Cordoba is worried that tightly packed men and women may strike "crude postures" as they rub against each other in hot, dark surroundings beneath the two-tonne structures.
"An uncomfortable situation between a man and a woman -- that matters," Manuel Herreros, head of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Sorrows, told state television.
The city's bishop backed the decision, but Spain's governing socialist party said the decision broke the country's new sexual equality law and some members of the brotherhood -- both male and female -- have complained.
"You're not rubbing against anyone or anything like that, this is done out of devotion," female bearer Elisa Marquez said.