Brazilian women: beyond the media icons

Video in Portuguese (with Spanish subtitles — no English, sorry).

And if the first thing that came into your head when you read “Brazilian women” was a blond supermodel, or a pair of muscular buttocks wiggling in a teeny bikini, congratulations: You’ve been sucked in by a media bullshit campaign. Brazil’s TV stations are owned by just six families, and heavily invested in promoting (or rather, pimping) just ONE picture of Brazilian women: white, rich, with straight blond hair, tall and slim, heterosexual, usually surgically enhanced…and a constant, parsley-like sexual accessory to the menfolks. (In one scene, a businessman is seen talking away to another man at his desk while his bare foot is fondling the rump of a bikini-clad model lying on a lounge-chair next to him. Yes, really!)

But the “icon” of Brazilian womanhood is being challenged…by Brazilian women themselves. Black, brown, Asian and white, they’ve taken up the fight against this media campaign. The Slutwalk movement, which began here in Canada as a response to a Toronto cop who stupidly told women not to “dress like sluts” in order to avoid rape, has caught on big-time in South America, where women — over-sexualized in the media for decades, and in the minds of church and state for centuries — are now marching and chanting slogans like: “Beware, beware, beware, machista! Latin America is turning feminista!” Women are challenging not only their false image in the media, but capitalism itself…for, after all, that phoney image is there to sell things, by presenting an “aspirational” world that ignores reality, and poverty, completely. And when the media in one country — a land with a population in the hundred-millions — are owned by just six wealthy families, it’s glaringly obvious what the real problem is. And so is why women everywhere — in Canada as well as Brazil — are sick and tired of it.

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One Response to Brazilian women: beyond the media icons

  1. M. Deen says:

    Sorry, but i live in brazil for 10 years now, and the kind of women i expected to find, like everyone else, was promiscuous ligth-skinned black women, like the ones you can see on the carnival – the kind of women Brazilian tv and tourism reveals to the world; the kind of women that makes every male tourist go to brazil. But i found myself in the south of brazil, where there is no black women, no white women, no indian women. Everyone looks the same, latin women everywhere. As a foreigner, i was shocked to realize that the black people in brazil is thrown away to the favelas (poor and dangerous zones) and, only during the carnival (one week per year) they are allowed to go to the city, to pretend they have equal chances as everyone else. This is the real Brazil.

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