O Mangue

Explaining the "Luiza está no Canadá" meme to your gringo friends...

2012-01-19T16:28:00.003-02:00

Been hearing alot about Luiza (who's in Canada), from your Brazilian netacquaintences lately? My pal Regina at Deep Brazil can explain the meme to you:

"Instant Youtube success: Gerardo Rabello, a social columnist from João Pessoa, capital of the state of Paraíba, announces a new construction project and says it is so great that all the family will attend the launching ceremony, apart from his daughter “Luiza, who is in Canada”. The phrase, mysteriously, became viral. In only two days, dozens of “comments” and mockumentaries about it were published on Youtube."

The reason this meme went viral has little to do with the fact that Gerardo Rabello is bragging in an off-handed fashion about his daughter's international travels. It has to do with Brazilian cordiality and family values and also with Brazilian sarcasm when cordiality is taken too far.

Rabello is basically telling us that "Look, I'm putting my family's good name behind this project". This is a traditionalist, kitchy and smarmy sort of thing to do. Maybe it goes over well with the folks from Paraíba, but to the large number of Brazilians living in São Paulo and Rio (the dominant force on the lusophone internet), it sounds like a corny homily to 19th century values. The ad is thus irksome to begin with.

But then Rabello upped the already high smarm factor by explaining to us all why one of his daughters won't be attending this mighty social event of the Paraiban summer. As if we knew his children by name. As if we would wonder why we wouldn't see Luiza at the event. As if we all lived in the same tiny little backlands village or even knew who the hell Gerardo Rabello and his spawn were.

As if, in short, we gave a tremendous fuck.

Urbane, networked Brazil thus responded in false cordial style, dripping with fake bonhomie and neighborly concern.

Suddenly, we all needed to know where Luiza was. What she was doing? Was she eating well? Did she have a boyfriend yet? Was he Canadian...? We demanded that the government investigate why Luiza was still in Canada and worried whether the heartless gringos would deport her. (Certainly not Luiza! Such a nice moça de família!)

And, of course, we're all breathing a hearty sigh of relieved satisfaction now that she's come home to the pátria amada.

People who didn't get this meme or are taken it at face value as a form of instant celebrity manufacture don't understand the depths of Brazilian sarcasm when it combines with false cordiality. There's a reason why "cair na boca do povo" is understood to be a bad thing in Brazil.

The meme is also a good example of why memes become old quickly and how they warp (rather than evolve) into news.

The first folks reporting on Luiza's whereabouts were net nerds who had seen the original commercial first-hand on You-Tube and found it corny beyond belief. They were making arch comments to their friends, who had also seen it. This is precisely the same sort of crowd who loves to wax enthusiastic about the Trololo Guy*. (You know, folks like this...)

Thus was the original iteration of the meme born and it was funny, if not hilarious.

Then legions of script-kiddies and Brazilian adolescents who fancy themselves to be Anonymous got ahold of the meme and started spamming it into everything, making old meme very old, very quickly.

Following this, the Brazilian NORPS** saw the script-kiddies' net graffiti, wondered what was up and had to have everything explained to them. This effectively killed any remaining humor that the meme once had.

Finally, the Old Media got ahold of the Luiza story. The Old Media speaks to people who hardly use the internet at all and whose understanding of memes is on the level of a flatworm's understanding of brain surgery. The only framework the Old Media has for dealing with this sort of thing is to treat Luiza as some sort of minor instant celebrity. And that, friends, is precisely how Globo is dealing with this little bit of internet arcana right at this very moment.

*If you don't know who the Trololo Guy is, remember: there is no such thing as brain bleach.

**NORP = Normal, Ordinary, Responsible Person. The vast majority of internet users who go on-line simply to check e-mail and send each other pictures of their cats - see expanded definition here.

O Caso Big Lixo Brasil 12

2012-01-16T23:06:00.000-02:00

...por Ana Paula da Silva

É com grande horror e espanto que estou acompanhando no que se tornou a grande polêmica do momento: o caso em que, supostamente, um integrante masculino abusou de uma "sister" debaixo dum edredon.

Bom, sou daquelas pessoas que compartilham a opinião que reality show não passa de um lixo eletrônico, da qual me recuso a dar audiência. Mas também concordo que não se pode condenar quem assista e ache bom. O conceito do que é bom ou ruim é bastante relativo. Pode soar como um clichê esta frase, mas acredito que faça todo sentido relativizar, em meio ao absurdo que se transformou esta polêmica.

Soube do suposto estupro pelas as redes sociais e, apesar de não assistir ao programa, acessei o vídeo em que os mais exaltados afirmam ter evidencias de um estupro, sem que ainda tenha havido, uma análise técnica das imagens. É o seu olho e sua imaginação funcionando naqueles sete minutos. Confesso que mal consegui distinguir quem era quem no vídeo, já que as imagens foram captadas no escuro embaixo de um grosso cobertor. Bom, os mais radicais podem justificar que minha internet não é boa e a imagem que eu recebi estava turvada. Pode ser. Todos os que estão alegando que de fato houve estupro aparentemente tenham visto algo que eu mal consegui distinguir acontecendo entre um homem e uma mulher naquela cama.

O que me espanta e me horroriza de tudo isto – e acredito que esta atitude deva ser motivo de punição para a Rede Globo – é sugerir que tal cena seja exposta na TV, mesmo que em canal fechado. Agora o que me espanta mais ainda são as opiniões diversas das pessoas. Desde os machistas (“Ela bebeu, queria o que?”), até os que já defendem prisão e – porque não? – o linchamento do “estuprador” Daniel. Parece que até estamos relembrando os velhos tempos em que homens negros eram acusados de estupradores de mulheres brancas e, portanto, mereciam serem linchados baseados só e unicamente na acusação e não em provas concretas.

Toquei no que acredito ser um drama construído neste evento. Um homem negro, jovem, modelo e uma mulher branca jovem, modelo estão neste programa em busca de fama e sucesso instantâneo e aceitam se transformar nos próximos meses em bichos enclausurados, onde recebem comida e boa vida em troca de fazerem graça a um público ávido em ver situações grotescas e de mau gosto em que se envolvam. Enfim, reality shows se transformaram mundo afora num sucesso de público e no Brasil não é diferente.

Já que sabemos – ou devemos saber – estes programas sofrem pesadas interferências na hora em que são editados. Ler esta reportagem, por exemplo, que discute alguns dos truques mais comumente utilizados para dar mais emoção a esses shows....

Devemos pensar, particularmente, em como os editores constroem estereótipos dentro dos quais encaixam os participantes. Pelo que andei apurando, Daniel já estava sendo colocado pelos editores do BBB como o garanhão e pegador, quase um tarado que corria atrás das mulheres da casa. Você não precisa saber muito sobre a história de raça e gênero em nosso país para entender porque ele foi personificado assim. Outra menina no show já teria comentado que Daniel a bolinou em outro momento. Ou seja, nada mais natural do que alimentar o imaginário que existe sobre homens negros: máquinas sexuais incontroláveis que são capazes de transar até com uma mulher aparentemente inerte, bêbada, depois de uma festa regada a álcool. Quem acha que o conteúdo “raça” deva ser retirado da análise deste drama realmente não entende como o racismo funciona neste país.

A situação deve ser analisada de uma maneira um pouco mais complexa do que os sete minutos de vídeo editado pode mostrar. Simplesmente apontar vítimas e algozes neste caso infeliz, baseado só e unicamente num vídeo que já tem passado pelas mãos de editores cuja principal tarefa é fazer o público delirar é, no mínimo, prematuro. Acredito na irresponsabilidade da emissora em explorar uma situação destas, mas discordo daqueles que tratam o caso como se fosse absolutamente factual, uma situação realista em que estivéssemos assistindo uma festa com pessoas “normais”, numa situação normal, em que uma menina é embriagada e depois sofreu abuso sexual. Há que se ter cuidado sobre os fatos, pelo menos até que haja uma análise técnica de TODAS as imagens captadas pelas sempre presentes câmeras da casa BBB.

Não houve sequer uma análise pericial do vídeo para se saber o quanto de edição e montagem há nele. Neste momento, as pessoas estão assistindo e acusando baseado numa imagem editada da Rede Globo – emissora que tem longa história em manipular a opinião pública através de imagens adulteradas e, as vezes, francamente falsas. Estou impressionada com a repercussão que essas imagens têm feito nas redes sociais e com o alto grau de veemência que está sendo direcionado a Daniel sem ainda sabermos nem a metade dos fatos do caso. Se Daniel for revelado como estuprador, então acho que deve ser punido. Mas conhecendo bem a história da histeria social em torno da sexualidade masculina e negra, acho que devemos insistir numa apuração total e competente dos fatos do caso antes de gritar a favor pelo linchamento do rapaz.

Outra coisa que me assusta é a insistência de que Monique há de se reconhecer como vítima de estupro. A mulher não teve domínio sobre seu corpo antes do evento, durante o evento e agora também não tem direito sobre ele depois. Parece que seu corpo agora pertence a um coro de pessoas que só conhece a situação por via de internet e que querem acreditar piamente que um abuso aconteceu e aos “machistas” que argumentam que Monique merecia qualquer violência que poderia ter acontecido. Ninguém de fato quer ouvir Monique. Ela deve se conscientizar que é uma vítima ou uma vagaba e não pode ter mais alguma opinião sobre o caso. Muito menos devemos dar ouvidos a Daniel, pois este é um estuprador já condenado e linchado pela a opinião pública. Este episódio nos revela o quanto há de moralismo e racismo na discussão sobre gênero e violência no Brasil.

Soube neste momento que Daniel foi expulso do programa sem que se tivesse nenhum tipo de apuração legal sobre os fatos. Gente: essa é uma questão LEGAL e não um concurso de beleza. Se os fatos comprovarem que Daniel, de fato, teve relações sexuais com Monique enquanto ela estava inconsciente, então ele é um estuprador e deve responder por seu crime. Se, uma vez que todos os dados estão apurados, não tiver evidência que um estupro aconteceu, então porque expulsá-lo do programa?

Continuo acreditando que este país acredita em acusações de bruxaria e este fato é simplesmente assustador para uma nação que se diz democrática. Cadê as evidências? Ou vamos continuar vivendo num Brasil onde as emissoras de televisão determinam a culpa e a inocência? Não sei o que assusta mais: o fato da Rede Globo ter criado uma situação esdrúxula como entretenimento ou as pessoas acharem que essa situação pode e deve ser resolvida na base da histeria coletiva.

Poder paralelo no Rio? Ahn, 'tá.

2011-11-13T17:24:00.001-02:00

O Excercito use tanques para ocupar a Rocinha e acabar com o "poder paralelo".

"Poder paralelo"? Ahn, 'tá...

Na recente operação contra a Rocinha, a polícia encontrou 9 rifles e uma "metralhadora" (termo usado pela imprensa brasileira para qualificar o tipo de cópia barata chinesa do rifle de assalto russo AK47 que vende-se por 800 dólares em todos os shows de armas nos EUA).

Ou o "poder paralelo" andava-se singularmente desarmado, ou essas operações de pacificação são para os gringos verem.

Do meu ponto de visto, a relativa facilidade com que a polícia carioca anda "ocupando" por aí indica o alto nível hiperbólico da retórica midiática a cerca do suposto "poder paralelo" que impregnava a imprensa brasileira no período 1995-2008, e não o bom desempenho atual do Estado.

Pessoalmente, acho que o atual "paz" nas favelas é o resultado de uma série de acordos que tem sido contruida entre os donos de poder e seus sometimes parceiros bandidos e semi-bandidos que mandam em nossas favelas. Me chame de gringo cético, mas vejo a criminalidade no Rio como um ADJUNTO ao poder do Estado e não como uma organização paralela do poder. Vejo a estrutura dessa "organização" muito mais semelhante àquela retratada por Foote-Whyte na "Soceidade da Esquina" do que uma verdadeiro esquema paralelo de poder.

Penso na facilidade com que uma organização paralela poderia ter resistido esse atual incursão na Rocinha. Em Afganistão, por exemplo, onde existem vários poderes legitimamente "paralelos", uma tática comunamente utilizada é misturar óleo diesel e fertilizante numa panela de pressão e enterrar o dispositivo resultante numa estrada de acesso frequentado pelos comboios do governo, onde será ativado por vias do controle remoto (tipicamente um telefone celular ligada a algumas baterias). Tal dispositivo seria facilmente construido por nossos atuais "inimigos públicos" urbanos, se eles tivessem a mínima pretensão de montar um poder verdadeiramente paralelo. A bomba caseira, fabricada dessa maneira, não teria nenhum problema em seriamente avariar os transportes blindados LVTP-7 e M113 utilizados nessas operações (e sempre rotulados pela impressa brasileira, com seu habitual hiperbolismo, de "tanques").

E, no entanto, não vemos no Brasil nenhuma das táticas ou tecnologias rotinaeiramente utilizadas pelos pretendentes ao poder mundo afora, mesmo pelas organizações mais pobres e impopulares oriundas das populações mais miseráveis do planeta.

Resta só duas conclusões: ou o CV e seus semelhantes são compostos de integrantes singularmente burros, ou o objetivo desses grupos não é disputar o poder com o Estado e sim vender suas drogas em paz, lucrando-se com o comércio.

Se aceitamos a segunda hipótese, então todas essas ocupações são facilmente organizadas, na grande maioria dos casos, através de tratados temporários que permitem a comercialização das drogas e que focalizam os esforços da polícia em outras atividades de repressão - atividades que não tangem nas interesses dos assim-chamados "gangues do tráfico".

Em outras palavras, para sensivelmente diminuir o nível de violência no Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a única coisa que o Governo há de fazer é declarar uma trégua informal mas efetiva na "Guerra Contra as Drogas". Sendo que o grosso da violência que vara o Rio é oriundo dessa violência, utilizar o poder do Estado para congelar as atuais linhas de batalha entre o CV, os ADA, o TC e seus aliados/adversários milicianos resultaria numa queda imediata nos confrontos armados na nossa cidade.

Minha hipótese é que é isto que está contecendo no Rio. Resta saber o que a história vai mostrar.

Marnia Robinson, Gary Wilson and The Good Men Project Magazine

2011-10-22T18:09:00.002-02:00

Recently, I've been involved in a series of debates over on The Good Men Project magazine with Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson, two self-proclaimed sexperts who (based on their writings around the blogosphere and Marnia's newly published book) seem to believe that orgasm is the root of all evil.

As far as I can tell, Marnia and Gary believe that the chemical reactions created in the brain by orgasms are dangerously addictive. Pornography makes one want to masturbate to orgasm and is thus dangerous. "Internet porography" (by which Wilson and Robinson apparently mean anything at all on the internet that gives you a chubby or that deep, mysterious stirring inside) is particularly evil in this respect because it gives us multiple images on demand and thus causes human beings to masturbate non-stop.

Of course, all of this is so much moral entrepeneurial bullshit, in my opinion. Marnia - an ex-corporate lawyer with as much formal study and training in matters sexual as I have in nuclear science - has a bone to pick about sex and is very good at cutting and pasting links to scientific studies to apparently "prove" her pet theories about human sex.

A few weeks ago, I got into a verbal tussle with "Garnia" (for they never post as a singular entity) as I call them here on The Good Men Project Magazine. I admit to going out of bounds into the realm of ad hominem attacks, because nothing gets my dander up more than people misusing science to create sexual stigmas and push for a particular brand of sexual morality. TGMP's editor Lisa Findley rightly censored me and I shut up.

This week, however, Garnia came back to The Good Men Project Magazine with another article banging the drum of sexual panic once again and telling us all how orgasm and "internet porn" will make slaves of us and our children.

Taking my censorship seriously, I replied to their article in a rational way, staying as far as I could from ad hominems, but not sparing critical commentary when it came to trashing their theory.

Result: more censorship.

I then e-mailed Lisa Hickey to ask what the problem was. Ms. Hickey, The Good Men Project's chief CEO and publisher, gave me the surprising information that Gary and Marnia were being allowed to moderate their own comments section on The Good Man Project and that they considered my attack on their theory to be a personal attack on themselves.

This is quite disturbing news, which should be shared out there among you sex and gender bloggers.

Personally, I have no problem with the fact that two people who I consider to be hucksters and charlatans of the worst sort are posting article after article on one of the only non-MRA-oriented men's issues blog-magazines out there. Hey, it takes all kinds and I'm personally in favor of the complete and free exchange of ideas.

But Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson are moral entrepeneurs with a very specific and radical view of human sexuality (to wit: orgasms are bad) who are wrapping their political beliefs in the trappings of scientific research. Gary and Marnia have block-censored any attempts to engage with their "facts" by pointing out logical and scientific holes in their data.By giving them control over their comments section, TGMP makes it effectively impossible to critique the couple's claims and thus, effectively, gives them a chunk of editorial control over TGMP itself.

Below, you'll find my response to Garnia's latest article, "Can you trust your Johnson?". This went up and was taken down several times on The Good Men Project Magazine before I found out from Ms. Hickey that she'd ceded editorial control over the comments section to Garnia. My response is not a masterpiece, by any shot, but the censorship of it by Garnia, aided and abetted by TGMP Magazine, deserves to be confronted.

I think it shows just precisely how nervous Garnia are about their theory: real science and logic can't be let anywhere near it for fear that it will fall apart like a cardboard suitcase in the rain.

*********************

Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson’s main affirmation is this: “Porn has changed – a lot.”

According to the authors, internet surfing for porn “keeps the reward circuit [of the brain] buzzing” by “spiking dopamine levels”. We look for porn with anticipation and are rewarded when we find it, so we go back and do it again. And again. And again. Literally ad nauseaum.

The authors, it should be noted, have never scientifically studied porn use first hand, although they run a website where they claim to receive many “self-reports” (what scientists properly call “anecdotal reports”) from self-acclaimed “hard-core porn users”. Presuming that Robinson and Wilson’s informants do indeed exist in real life and are accurately reporting their experiences (a very large presumption in these days when kids flood sites such as “Your Brain on Porn” with fake and exaggerated stories simply “for the lulz”), one needs to ask exactly how representative of the porn-using population these people are?

In their article, the authors present what they apparently see as a fairly typical internet porn session:

“Using three high definition screens, with nine windows open, to search for new scenes, genres, whatever, until you find just the right shot to take you home. After a five-minute breather you can search via Google for something you’ve never seen, so you can whack away once more”

Like Gary and Marnia, I happen to know many “porn users”: not a single one of them enjoys sexual imagery in the manner described above. Of course, this is anecdotal, too, but I’d be willing to bet that if all the people out there reading my words were to be honest with themselves, they’d have to admit that the situation above, clearly described as a sort of “baseline” for the kind of “internet porn” Wilson and Robinson are talking about, is extremely rare.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t. This just begs another question: if someone was so “addicted” to “porn” that they would buy three monitors to get themselves off, how is this sort of experience essentially different from accumulating a huge video, DVD or MP4 collection and viewing it on three different T.V. screens?

Wilson and Robsinson would have us believe that there’s some sort of deep “novelty” factor in “internet porn” and this factor “keeps the brain buzzing”. But given the evidence they cite and their extremely open-ended, dopamine-based understanding of addiction, it would make just as much sense for a true dopamine addict to have their own “library” of special images on DvD which they use to get off without having to go through the constant boredom of digging through page after page of crappy, uninteresting images to find just the “right shot to take them home”.

If the real goal was to constantly flood the brain with dopamine, browsing a meticulously selected video collection would be the way to go. And, of course, that sort of “porn experience” has nothing necessarily to do with the internet. The person who was that much of a dopamine junky, using sexual images to get their fix, would probably be very quickly frustrated by what they would consider to be the low quality (i.e. unappealing images) of most internet porn. Put simply, browsing about the internet pornocloud wouldn’t be a reliable enough way to get themselves off in a quick, reliable fashion.

So no, porn has “not changed a lot”. The distribution of it has perhaps changed. I’d be willing to agree that a so-called “porn junky” now has easier access to images and thus a much easier time of it when it comes to building her own library. But that’s not the point the authors are making: they’re claiming that the internet itself has made a difference by offering up appealing images in a much more high-speed way and that this presentation of imagery is in and of itself so radically different that it can easily “addict” the average person. That is simply not true.

This leads us to another huge assumption that Wilson and Robinson seem to make: porn is porn is porn.

Neither of the authors bothers to ever define porn, either here or in any other writing I’ve ever read by them. However, if one were to take their dopamine-based understanding of “addiction” seriously, then the only logical definition of “porn” must be “anything at all that turns a given person on”. Furthermore, Robinson and Wilson seem to think that all sexual imagery is equally titillating to everyone, at least in potential. If it weren’t, their “gradually heavier fixes” model simply doesn’t work.

As it turns out, however, human sexual interest is hardly a “one-stop shopping” affair. People have VASTLY different tastes when it comes to sex. If the men and women I’ve listened to are any indication (and once again, yes, this is anecdotal, so use your own honest experience as a guide), most of the stuff on the internet that’s designed to sexually titillate isn’t very interesting to most people. People tend to have pretty specific tastes when it comes to sexual imagery – sometimes even fetishisticly specific. Yes, they want “new images”: but they want new images of more-or-less the same kind.

A woman who’s into watching gay gang-bang sex doesn’t suddenly become interested in dog and pony shows or Two Girls, One Cup just because they are out there on the internet. The idea that average peoples’ sexual tastes are so flexible that simply offering up images of sexual acts of a radically different nature can change their tastes on a basic level is simply not supported by scientific evidence (and let’s put a qualifier on that) ANYWHERE.

Finally, although Robinson and Wilson distance themselves from this position, their views, if proven correct, do in fact mean that one could “reprogram” a straight person into a gay person, or vice-versa, simply by exposing them to “novelty on demand, surprising and shocking visuals”.

Fortunately, that is not how human sexuality works out there in the empirically-occurring universe. People generally do not grow new sexual interests simply because they are exposed to “surprising and shocking visuals”. Be honest with yourself: you know this and I know this. We know what kind of erotica we like and, when we are interested in looking at erotica, we tend to go back to the same kinds of things again and again. We don’t suddenly become interested in the things we qualify as “yucky stuff” simply because we run across them on the sites we surf. And we certainly don’t become “addicted” to that stuff.

Now yes, I’m aware that there are all sorts of individual exceptions to this rule and that there probably is a small minority of people out there who are exactly as Wilson and Robinson describe them. The problem is, this minority is being held up to the world by the authors as if they were the new norm, being inexorably created by our evolutionary-driven brain chemistry.

But it’s Wilson and Robinson’s emphasis on “addiction as brain chemistry” that’s the really interesting part of their argument. After all, if we take their definition of “addiction” seriously, it’s sexual release itself that is the real culprit here, not porn. Porn is simply the means through which people achieve sexual release. What gets the dopamine flooding, of course, is orgasm.

Now that’s damned interesting, seeing as how the female capacity for multiple orgasms in one sitting (laying?) has been bandied about by feminism for the better part of four decades now as God’s Gift to Womenkind. An entire industry of vibrators and sex toys has been built off of the fact that when the ladies go to it, they don’t even have to take a “five minute breather” before they get back to the serious business of, as we say here in Brazil, “making like a crab” (think about it).

So if Robinson and Wilson are correct, the masturbation-positive emphasis on female multiple orgasms that Western culture has been living since the early 1970s, at least, should have already produced two generations of hopeless female dopamine addicts.

Again, I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide for themselves, based on their own experience, if this is true.

Evolutionary Psychology and Sexuality

2011-10-13T16:43:00.004-03:00

I've recently been having a discussion with Jen Wading regaring evolutionary psychology and its use by one Ms. Amy Alkon on her blog, "Advice Goddess". (The particular posting in question can be found here.)

As some readers might be aware, I have problems with evpsych, not so much as a field (hey, it generates a lot of whacko theories, but then again, so does anthropology. Leví-Strauss and his views on structural cybernetics, anyone?), but the miraculous and myriad uses that its untrained or self-trained proponents put it to in trying to explain human sexuality as some sort of field subject to univeral rules.

Ms. Alkon is apparently one of these pop evpsych practicioners and Jen wanted to know more about the holes in her theories. I thought it'd be useful to post our conversation here, because this sort of thing comes up a lot in internet discussions and I'd like to be able to refer people to a set document regarding ev psych and why it isn't a magic key which unlocks the mystery of human sexuality.

Jen started out byindicating she didn't quite understand what biodeterminism was, so I gave her a pocket definition:

Biodeterminism = Biology is the primary and ultimate explanation for our social behaviors.

Ferinstince: Women are naturally less promiscuous than men because, biologically speaking, they have more investment in a baby than men do.

Jen then responded:

So would something such as this be considered biodeterminism?

commenter: "There are all types of men and all types of women and saying there is only one correct way for them to proceed is overly simple."

Amy Alkon: No, it's absolutely not. There are variances in people, but we have evolved human psychology that is more similar than it is different. As a woman, you take a risk in approaching a man because he is likely to devalue you (because his genes are well aware that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, per Daly and Wilson).

My answer follows below...

It is extremely biodeterminist.

It also points out a main problem with evpsych: most of its proponents simply haven't read sweet fuck-all in ethnography so they tend to blithely assume that whatever their own culture does is somehow a transhuman norm.

Take the "higamous, hogamous women are monogamous; hogamous, higamous men are polygamous" crap Amy seems to support. Yes, it MAY be a fact that "women invest more in their children" than men, biologically speaking, but to go from that to "women thus need to play hard to get" in the dating game" ignores a shitload of research in so-called "primitive" societies which shows plenty of examples of women being sexually aggressive and not biologically monogamous. Folks who use evpsych to explain their dating problems tend to presume that "marriage" means "never fucking anyone other than one's husband". But just to pull one example out of a hat, there are many, many societies where women's sexual favors are "given" to guests as a matter of course. Certain traditional Eskimo societies spring to mind, but our own society also tosses up plenty of examples where monogamy isn't the rule...

So how does all this square with the idea that women's sexually is somehow driven by the relative rarity of their eggs?

In fact, there are plenty of serious biologists (Jared Diamond springs to mind) who point out that human sexual receptivity (which is constant) combined with the fact that human women have hidden ovulation may suggest that NOT KNOWING who the father of one's child is may in fact be the glue that held early human societies together. In this reading, it would be biologically in the woman's interest to have an "official" mate and yet also have sex with other guys now and again. That way there'd be one man with a primary interest in her children, but all men in the band would have at least SOME interest in her children.

This is even more likely when one takes into consideration that early human bands were small and very probably inbred, so from a pure "Darwinian transmission of the genes" rule, pulling for the team as a whole became a very solid evolutionary strategy rather than just pulling for one's own whelps. It's also notable in this context that anthropology and psychology have both looked long and hard at the birth of the incest taboo as the possible foundation-stone of "modern" human sociology.

Evpsych people - especially the self-taught amateurs - also generally preume that there's been no substantial biological evolution among human beings for the last 250 thousand years (generally true) and that this thus means we are basically larger, naked, tool-using, walking chimps (largely false). When we learned how to manipulate symbols via speach and especially when culture was born some 40,000 years ago with the birth of abstract thought, we became socially-programmed, culture-bearing animals. Sure, biology still INFLUENCES us. It does not, however, DETERMINE our behavior: culture plays a much larger role than biology in determining what you do and, of course, there is always individual agency to take into consideration.

Take my country, for example. There's no evolutionary reason for anyone to use clothes in a climate like Brazil's and yet everyone I see around me is using them. That's a fact created by our history and society, not our genes. And our sexual behavior - especially our supposed penchant for greater acceptance of "trans-racial" and extra-marital sex - can be much more convincingly traced back to slavery and its consequences rather than any particular combination of genes.

Evpsych people (and again, particularly the amateurs) like to hand-wave everything discovered by sociology and anthropology over the last 200 years as "squishy science" and thus not even worth looking at. They thus miss out on social science's one indisbutable contribution to human knowledge: its dense and varied descriptions of thousands of diversified human societies. And in the field of sexual mores, it's REALLY diverse. One of the things evpsych amateurs ignore is that today's norm of "civilization" is quite well linked, scientifically speaking, to a norm of hypergamous marriage, female subordination and female sexual passivity. Given that the vast majority of the world is now "civilized", evpsych people point to the majority of today's peoples as "proof" that these characteristics are transhuman norms. What they should be doing, were they truly serious about their field, is looking into the vast corpus collected by anthopologists re: "non-civilized" sexual behavior in order to see if it meets their predictions.

It generally doesn't.

This shit is convincing in theory. Where it fails is when we look at what people REALY do as opposed to what evpsych theorists think they should be doing according to there readings of Wilson and Dawkins.

R.I.P. Bennet A. Masel, All-American Activist, 1955-2011

2011-04-30T14:19:00.010-03:00

"I transcend your puny categorization."

What to say about Ben Masel?

Unlike many of the people mourning him today, I was never a close friend of Ben - more like an annoying hanger-on at his house, one of those punk kids on the porch. But Ben had an enormous influence on my life. What always impressed me about him was his ability to never, ever feel that the system would win. He was absolutely convinced that WE were winning, that the system had clay feet, that it could and should be fought. That anything, ultimately, could be done: it was only a question of us going out and doing it. I first met Ben in 1985 when I was a freshman at the UW and I cannot even begin to count the things he, Rob Koenig and Brian Allen turned me on to in politics, history and culture.

The first time I was ever busted, at the 1985 shanty town demos, it was Ben who calmed me down and let me know it was all part of the game. Ben was a true CITIZEN, in the most precise and absolute sense of the word. A person who realized that it is us who make the rules and the power, ultimately, and that we thus need to be responsible for them.

Ben Masel was one of the few really great people I have known in my life and not a week goes by that I don't think of him. Wherever I was in the world, there was always a big portion of my heart that was warmed just knowing that he was out there in Madison, kicking ass and taking names. That no matter how politically isolated I felt, no matter how unreal things seemed, I knew that Benny would look at what I was seeing, smile his sardonic smile, shake his head, and sum up in one pithy sentence an analysis of the problem that a lesser man (like myself) would have to use a thesis to describe. I could always comfort myself with the fact that as long as Ben was out there, someone would understand this shit and wouldn't let it defeat them, no matter how overwhelmingly awful it seemed to me.

Today, all I can think of is what a horrible moment it is for us all - especially those of us who love Wisconsin - to lose him. But then again, that was also a part of Ben Masel: he'd take us to where we could be effective, make sure that the dance was well underway and then he'd smile, go home, smoke a joint, watch T.V... He always knew when to step back. Then he'd return. The morale of any demonstration, occupation - any political event at all - would rise whenever his face appeared. My deepest pain, today, is knowing that we won't have that feeling again. But Ben always trusted that the rest of us would keep the ball rolling. Now that we no longer have him to fall back on, we need to make sure that we don't betray that trust. Big, big hugs out to all of you who are today missing Bennet Masel.

You are not alone.

In memory of Ben, here are two Pete & Lou Berryman videos. While virtually visiting with friends today, I realized that a big part of what I’m missing about Ben is the Madison Wisconsin of the 1970s and ‘80s that he represented so well. The demonstrators and radicals in The War at Home were my childhood heroes and when I arrived at the U.W. in 1984, Ben’s house was a hang out for those folks from that time who were still keeping up the good fight.

I think the first of these two videos represents the world’s sense that Madison at that time was a very magical conjuncture in human history and no one who lived there, then, can ever forget it.

In my dreams, I often find myself back in the old La Chateau Co-op or walking down State Street when it was still the city’s commercial center. Going into the old Pegasus Games, for example, and seeing Laurie behind the counter, passing by the Soap Opera, or studying at Steep & Brew (still there). So this video is very poignant to me, as I'm sure it will be to many old Madisonites.

The second video, however, is for those of you who, like me, are threatened to be overwhelmed by nostaglia and what we in Brazil call saudades. It’s Pete and Lou on the steps of the capitol during the demonstrations a month ago. This is the Madison we all love and remember and it’s so important for us now to keep it in our hearts and not let it die.

Hugs out to all of you who are missing Ben today. Please leave a commentary relating one of your best memories of Ben, so that they can be registered in something a bit more firm than Facebook.

Love to you all.

Ben in an iconic moment, and also as I best remember him.

"A new kind of Republican with nothing to hide"

Ben's campaign for Governor on the Republican ticket

Madison Wisconsin - Pete & Lou Berryman

Pete & Lou on the Capitol steps, 2011

(If you're looking for more information on who Ben was, go here. I'll add more links as other stories come in.)

Daily Kos on Ben.

We take the show to Minnesota, we take the show to Monterey

We fly to Boston on a plane and we drive to Portland, Maine
And we gig along the way
And at the end of each performance we blow the audience a kiss
And when following the show they come up to say hello,
Seems it always leads to this:

CHORUS
So how’s ol’ Madison, Wisconsin, is that Paul Soglin still the mayor
And is Rennebohm's expanding, the Club de Wash still there?
I used to sit out on the terrace and watch my grade point disappear
For the life of me I don’t know how I wound up here

Now I can see us in the future, we take a boat to Bengal Bay
From Calcutta on a train to the Himalayan chain
Takes at least another day
We hike for weeks among the foothills, it feels like 700 miles
We ask a Sherpa, could you please help us carry all our cheese?
And he turns around and smiles:

CHORUS

We leave Mount Everest behind us, we hop a steamer tramp to Perth
Old Australia seems to me's far away as you can be
And remain upon the Earth
But in our Bucky Badger derbies as we survey the billabong
We think we’re really off the map till a local sees the cap
And didgery-does a little song:

CHORUS

We leave Australia in a rocket, we hit the moon and take a walk
The craters all are full of guys with enormous buggy eyes
And they all begin to talk
It sounds like "hey gadeng vadaieda oh yah gadeng vadeida hey"
But we realize pretty soon, they mean 'welcome to the moon,
Have a beer and by the way'...

CHORUS
So how’s ol’ Madison, Wisconsin, is that Paul Soglin still the mayor
And is Rennebohm's expanding, the Club de Wash still there?
I used to sit out on the terrace and watch my grade point disappear
For the life of me I don’t know how I wound up here

Bruna Surfistinha: A Review

2011-04-04T13:47:00.000-03:00

Note: the following review was also posted on Regina Scharf's "Deep Brazil" blog. Hat's off to Regina for letting me repost it here.

A week before Carnaval, Ana Paula and I had an opportunity to see “Bruna Surfistinha“, the new film by director Marcus Baldini, together with sex and gender researchers Gregory Mitchell and Fatima Ceccetto.

The film is loosely based on the writings and experiences of Raquel Pacheco, AKA “Bruna the Surfer Chick”, a paulista prostitute who became briefly famous in the early aughties as one of the pioneers of internet commercialized sex. Long before Craig’s List became notorious as a virtual meeting point for pros and punters, “Bruna” had her own website where she’d describe her day in florid prose and “grade” her clients as to their sexual performance. Punters apparently couldn’t get enough of it, confirming the old saw that what really turns most clients on is the illusion (?) that their sexual prowess impresses even sex workers. Bruna’s blog became an overnight sensation, winning prizes and even earning its author recognition by the Old Media. Surfing on her new-found celebrity status, Raquel retired from The Life, married a client and entered university as a psychology major.

I had to admit that walking into the theater, I had deep reservations about the film. Given the Brazilian media’s current artificially-induced panic regarding trafficking of women and sexual tourism, I expected a tiresome morality play. To a certain extent, I wasn’t deceived: the end of the film shows Bruna leaving prostitution to be reclaimed by society as a good girl and potential future wife. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by all the twists and turns the plot took to get to the predictable denouement. When I left the theater I felt that, while the film has major issues that need to be addressed, it does a better job showing the diversity and ambiguities of prostitution than any motion picture I’ve seen thus far.

The problem with most whore flicks is that they tend to focus on only one experience of sex work: either it’s a rollicking, laugh-a-minute blast (think “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”) or a degrading, humiliating, awful experience akin to slavery (think “Cristiane F”). Few films, if any, deal with sex workers’ main complaints about their jobs: to wit, it’s generally boring work where employees are routinely treated like subhumans, PARTICULARLY by the folks who want to “save” them from “a life of exploitation and degradation”. Even fewer try to show the vast diversity of sex work, which ranges from quick “buck-a-minute” blowjobs to lavish “call-out” services which provide entire sexual fantasy packages for thousands of dollars a shot.

To its enormous credit, “Bruna Surfistinha” attacks both of these cinematographic blind spots head on.

The first half of the film focuses on the day-to-day routine of sex work in almost tiresome detail. Raquel and her co-workers are shown as a diverse group of people who are in the job for a variety of reasons. Sure, there’s the drug addict. But there’s also the single mom, whose kid is the center of her life and the black maid who’s delighted to be promoted to the position of prostitute. And there’s Raquel herself, who found in sex work an escape from a suffocating and patriarchic family. The madame at Bruna’s first job is neither a scheming, exploitative viper, nor a matronly figure with a heart of gold: she’s just a slightly bitchy businesswoman trying to run a knocking shop full of diverse and problematic personalities. The film also shows her kicking workers out for using drugs, something that’s far more common in the sex biz in Brazil than the oft-repeated stereotype that brothel managers use drugs to keep sex workers addicted and passive. (Anyone who’s ever had firsthand experience dealing with someone who’s far gone on booze and coke – prostitutes’ two drugs of choice – can testify as to how ridiculous that particular stereotype is).

And then there are the clients.

At first, I was afraid that the film would follow the tired old stereotype that punters are an evil brood of ugly, sex-deprived, quasi-rapist perverts. Raquel’s first sexual experience with a client is truly horrid, verging on rape. The camera zooms in on her wincing face as the john plunges away, oblivious to her discomfort. However, she soon gets into the swing of her job and as she does, her clients become better looking and more attentive. At first I thought this ridiculous, but afterwards, in a moment of fridge logic, I thought that perhaps this was the director trying to show Raquel’s changing perceptions of sex work: first, all the men are repulsive, creepy and stereotypical; later, they become more interesting, handsome and individuated. The film even shows her having what is possibly her first orgasm-through-intercourse with a client, something that pros from three continents assure me does happen from time to time (if not as often as punters imagine it happening). In a surprise switch, it’s Raquel’s awful and apparently heartless first client who’s always there for her in moments of crisis and who probably saves her life. The end of the film implies that, upon leaving prostitution, Raquel hooked up permanently with him. Now THAT’S a Chekov’s Gun few American directors would have the balls to fire.

Another great thing about Bruna Surfistinha is that it when it comes to showing the diversity of sex work venues, Baldini really gives it the old college try. Raquel is shown working, in sequence, in a small downtown brothel – or privé – as a rent-a-girlfriend at Love Story disco, trading blowjobs for transit-fines with cops, as a high-priced call girl, as an internet-based one-woman brothel and, finally, as an addicted, coked out whore giving it up for 15 reais a shot in a fast foda in crackolândia. (A scene which is responsible for what, IMHO, is the film’s best potential internet-ready meme: “Hoje não estou dando: estou distribuindo.”)

But for all its positive points, there are problems with Bruna Surfistinha. For one thing, in trying to show the diversity of sex work, the director puts Raquel through a veritable rollercoaster-ride of a career which only vaguely resembles the real woman’s memoirs. In real life, Raquel claimed she entered sex work with eyes wide open and a set goal: make a hundred thousand reais to pay for college and get out. She paid for health insurance (including psychological care) and registered as a tax-paying independent worker. Apparently, she did get addicted to coke at one point, but not to anything like the degree shown in the film. Shortly after she became an internet celebrity, she cashed in her chips and retired. By all accounts, Raquel is doing fairly well in the straight work market today.

In the film, however, “Bruna” rises meteorically from privé puta to high-priced call girl in one fell swoop. She then, predictably, falls into the degradation of drugs, trading sex for coke money in São Paulo’s worst zona (all without ever losing her swank pool-equipped penthouse, mind you). This “rise and fall of the whore”-style plot was hackneyed even back when Jesus was a kosher carpenter washing sex workers’ feet. Seeing it on the silver screen today can only make the spectator groan, especially if they’ve actually read Raquel’s book “O Doce Veneno do Escorpião”.

In fact, last Thursday I interviewed a prostitute in Macaé who spared no words in qualifying the film as “trash” specifically because of its “romanticized notion of prostitution as degradation”. “OK,” she said, “yes, there are women strung out on crack and other drugs selling sex. But hell, I’m 44 and entered into the life when I was 40 and I’ve already bought two houses for myself on my earnings. You mean to tell me the Bruna supposedly did all that, got a penthouse apartment and everything, and still didn’t put a single Real away for herself? That’s not how it works”.

But it’s perhaps too early to hope that the cinematographic industry would produce a “true-to-life” pop film about sex work, especially in today’s climate of hysteria regarding trafficking. When it comes to portraying the face of Brazilian sex work, “Bruna Surfistinha“, for all its faults, is a valiant effort and a necessary corrective to 2009’s execrable “Filhas do Sol”, though it’s perhaps not as good as 2008’s indy production :”O Céu de Suely”. With the reservation that showings of the film should be accompanied by readings of Raquel’s book, I can recommend it as a good resource for the professor who wishes to educate regarding sex work in terras brasilis.

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

2011-02-22T18:12:00.000-03:00

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

(by Meredith Menden, shamelessy copied by Thad)

Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET'S SEE....

That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

(This one goes out to my mom, my aunt and uncle Lewis and all the educators who made me what I am today.)

Figleaf on the Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist

2011-02-13T12:04:00.005-02:00

by Thaddeus Blanchette

Anti-sexist, pro-sex blogger Figleaf brings up an excellent point about the male origins of "feminist" male-bashing:

Kind of funny how many of the bitterly anti-male slanders, slurs, and stereotypes commonly attributed to "radical feminism" predate feminism. Sometimes by centuries. Occasionally by millennia! They were already highly common in American and English male-only dance halls and similar entertainment venues back when "mainstream feminism" meant the possibility of women owning property and "radical feminism" was the crazy idea that women might someday be allowed to vote.

I bring this up in no small part due to allegations that these are feminist in nature. And I bring that up in no small part because those allegedly feminist characterizations of men are nettlesome to men in general and extremely nettlesome to men's rights activists and their allies.

M'kay, and now, confronted with that sort of incontrovertible proof that sexist and/or "reverse sexist" stereotypes about men predate feminism and, indeed, often originate with men themselves, a lot of guys who are still nettled will say things like "yeah, well, some feminists still propagate those stereotypes so feminism is still all about hating men".

What's always bothered me about the "anti-male feminist myth" is precisely this point: the people perpetuating male-hating rhetoric are, in their great majority, not feminists at all

Again, I get to hear this sort of crap all the time in my fieldwork here in Rio, where gringo men constantly complain that "feminism" has turned European and North American women into greedy, self-absorbed bitches with an agenda who only want to take men to the cleaners. Typically, these guys say this while holding two prostitutes on their lap who, while generally not bitches, are very much women with an agenda which involves siphoning the maximum amount of money out of the guy's pockets.

And time after time, these guys tell me about how I "don't know what it's like up there" and how it's "impossible for a guy to get laid these days without risking his life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness". And every one of these post-modern Lotharios claims to have met legions of man-hating feminists.

Now, what bothers me is that when I lived in the U.S. back in the 1980s, I was a student at the U.W. Madison in the sociology department. One would be hard put to find a higher concentration of sho' 'nuff man-hating feminists than that time and place and it was hard to run into them even back then. These women had exactly ZERO impact on my sex life. They also had pretty near to ZERO impact on the campus cultural and political life. Mostly, they ganged together in their own café and bookstore, debating whether or not homosexuality was indeed the practice of feminist theory. Most of the lesbians in the community couldn't stand them, either. One only occasionally had to deal with them when they came out of their empowering lavender and pink "girls only" clubhouse for large community events like "Take Back the Night" or the anti-apartheid rallies.

Seriously, even in feminist-friendly, radical 1980s Madison, I would have been hard pressed to point to a more marginalized and irrelevant group than the radical man-hating feminists. These weren't folks that even a co-op-living, feminist-supportive, commie-loving, sociology major boy like me were likely to run into, but yesterday's fraternity Biffs and dormer Billy Bobs are now saying they've met literally tens of thousands of young would-be castrators...?

Do tell, boys.

Now, I'm not saying man-hating feminists didn't have any influence at all. Pretty much every woman I know went through a "man hating" stage at some point - usually for a week or two during their first women's studies course - but that was more venting than anything else. And I do find that a lot of women will sort of unconsciously fall back on this stereotype when confronted with what they feel is an egregious example of male chauvinist pigism. Because of my work with prostitutes, I get to see a lot of American and European womens' knees jerk in precisely this fashion.

But this attitude is actually a good measure of how UNATTACHED these women are from today's feminism. The typical college educated American woman of my generation hasn't thought of feminism in theoretical, philosophical or even practical terms since her school days. ("Prostitutes' rights? What's that?") This is why you'll often the 30 to 50 set reaching for Andrea Dworkin when confronted with male behavior they don't like. It's reflexive form of defence, not some sort of deeply thought out political position and it's certainly not a plot to diminuish men. They just go for the largest rhetorical brick in their arsenal when a male does something they classify as "anti-woman".

That's why I agree that the people keeping the myth of the man-hating feminists alive are generally anything but feminists. Alot of the women who do this sort of thing are actually quite sexist and homophobic and "strategically remember" only those things about feminism that are contextually, rhetorically valuable to them at the time. Sort of a "pick and choose" version of feminism.

You want to see full-on, Dworkin-style man-hating feminist rhetoric? Don't talk to a feminist: talk to a 40-something, middle-class soccer mom with a BA in Comparative Lit (or Anthropology), 4 kids and a bills-paying husband. Tell her that you think that trafficking in women is by-and-large a moral panic and not a multi-billion dollar industry the way the media plays it out to be. Or say that you frequent prostitutes - whether you do or not, just say it. THERE'S your instant "man hating feminist": the woman who's lifestyle is maintained by a male's labour, who would be tossed into penury in an instant if she lost her mate and - worse - who is smart enough to know full well the bind she's gotten herself into. That's the most commonly encountered kind of woman who spouts "man hating rhetoric" these days, if only occasionally. A woman who considers Hillary Clinton to be the greatest statesperson of the age and Princess Diana to be the next step over from Mother Teresa. Someone who once dreamed of a fulfilling career for herself, but who became a professional mom through the force of circumstance of living in a country where the labor of raising a family is considered to be a "private" (read female) responsability.

And who can really blame her?

But dude, if THAT'S the kind of woman you've gone and married, then you've got a big load of blame to shoulder yourself, don't you? After all, you could've done the male version of Lysistrata a long time ago and simply insist that all the women you date pay 50/50 (or at least propostionately based on salary) for your common life together. You didn't do that and now you're bitching that women treat you like an ATM machine and it's all the "man-hating feminists'" fault, is it?

See this, man?

That's the smallest violin in the world and it's playing "My Heart Bleeds for You".

Wagadu Special Issue on Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers

2011-02-02T14:16:00.000-02:00

New stuff hot off the academic press, free and (for a change) in English. Our article is not nearly as good as some of the others, but it's still an excellent collection that deals with many of the issues being raised here regarding agency, power, victimization and peoples' presumptions that they know what's going in places like Brazil, Thailand, or Cambodia because, like, y'know, they watched an Oprah show about it once.

Wagadu special issue on demystifying prostitution.

Amy Winehouse says goodbye to Brazil

2011-01-24T20:49:00.006-02:00

...by Janis Joplin
(translated by Thaddeus Blanchette. The original can be found here. Segue o link para o original.)

Amy Winehouse and an unidentified Brazilian friend enjoy afternoon

cocktails on the veranda of the Hotel Santa Teresa.

Amy's left town already? Her Brazilian tour is over? That's it? Half a dozen pocket shows, a flash of her tits from the hotel veranda, a few other photos showing her looking drunk and lost, a stumble, an attempt to sing into her water bottle as if it were the mike and a few discreet exits from the stage during her performances?

That's all?

And people still want to compare her to me? For the free love of God! I recognize that the girl has talent. She's an inspired singer with a potent voice. She has carisma and a good nose for repertoire. But in terms of tossing a world class fit, on or off stage, she still has much to learn.

When I was in Rio, also in search of rehab, I did a lot more than one would expect a marginal pop star to do.

Janis in Rio, 1970.

(And isn't it odd that the Third World is often used as a rehab center by washed up or burnt out stars? Perhaps the audiences there are so thankful for some contact with their idol that they'll applaud even when she forgets the words or spits out her dentures. Maybe now that the BRICs are getting stronger, we'll see Benito di Paula do a tour of the U.S. with semi-V.I.P. boxes going for 300 bucks a head.)

Whatdaya think, Benny?

But like I was saying, when I was in Rio in February 1970 during the Medici dictatorship (and isn't it interesting that HE isn't up here in Heaven?), I really kicked out the jams. I was tossed out of the Copacabana Palace on my ass for swimming naked in the pool. I sang in brothels, mixed barbiturates with caipirinhas and Globo biscuits... I was busted several times for going topless on the beach. And then there was the biggest scandal of them all: I fucked Serguei. Or so they say. And if they say so, I believe it. I certainly can't remember what happened.

Say it loud, Serguei! "I'm a douchebag and I'm proud!"

And just look at how things are now. None of that would even raise an eyebrow today. (Well, maybe fucking Serguei would still shock some folks as an act of exceptional courage.) Excesses and outrageous behavior are the classic script for for a drugged-out rock star. It's what's expected. What no one was really ready for was the sight of Amy at Bibi Lanches on Copacabana placidly eating a bowl of açai fruit with granola.

Today, in order to shock, you need far more than a dose of heroin. A pop star would need to, I dunno, marry Michel Temer, start her show on time, say she doesn't have an e-mail account or declare that she thinks social networking is garbage and a tremedous waste of time.

Or, if she wants to get really radical, she'd at the very least have to refuse to get a pair of silicon tits.

(Hats off to Blog da Janis. Our translation of their material is done volutarily and represents no challenege to their ownership of it.)

Introduction to Macaé

2010-12-12T12:59:00.001-02:00

As some of you may know, I'm now teaching at NUPEM at UFRJ's advanced campus in Macaé, so I'll be writing about this new Brazilian boomtown more in the future. Here's a brief introduction.

Macaé's a bit of an odd bird: a once-sleepy beach town which mostly made its money through ranching and fishing, it's now the primary support port for Brazil's booming off-shore petroleum industry. The city went from under 100,000 inhabitants in 1990 to over 250,000 today, with a regional estimate of 500,000. Actually, however, we don't even have the slightest clue how many people are in Macaé. Uncounted hordes have followed the oil boom and are squatting in hastily erected shanty towns around the region.

To give you an idea of what has happened to the city, here's two pictures of the main beach, a Praia de Imbetiba, before and after the arrival of PETROBRAS:

Macaé is a classic case of Brazil's traditional boom and bust economy in the making, so I'll be chronicling alot about it in upcoming months. Working here is a bit like working in Manaus during the late 19th century rubber boom probably was. On the one hand, there's unmatched poverty and urban confusion brought on by mass in-migration and consequent growth without attendant urban planning. On the other hand, money often almost literally rains from the heavens. Not a month goes by, for example, but a new builiding springs up from nothing in the off-shore pole where our university is located. These constructions are usually built in that soulless, post-modern big-box style one associates with U.S. suburban developments. Consequently, the best in-a-nutshell description for Macaé is an American highway beltline shopping strip surrounded by a Haitian shanty town.

Missing comments mystery, solved! Oh, and new comments policy...

2010-12-04T14:04:00.001-02:00

by Thaddeus

For about three months now, I've been baffled as to where certain comments have gotten to. Stuff that I and other commentators have written has simply vanished into the ether and I've been accused of censoring it.

Needless to say, this is frustrating to me as I'm not at all in favor of censorship.

Well, Blogspot finally solved my issue. Apparently, the missing posts were going directly into Blogspot's newly created spam filter.

Basically, here are the three things that seems to have turned the spam filter on:

1) Multiple postings in a short period of time. Both Mira and I got caught with this one. If you post TOO much during a given day, Spam Filter thinks that you're a bot.

2) Long blocks of text with no punctuation or capitalization and little if any formatting. Spam Filter thinks this is random spam on the order of dick-enhancement ads. Several of the less-literate Anonymi got caught with this one. You know the type: folks who spew on and one for lines at a time with no regards to capitalization or what not.

3) Large blocks of swearing. Again, certain Anonymi got caught here, particularly the guys who spew "motherfucker" and "shit" in every other sentence.

In order to avoid the Spam Filter in the future, I've now turned on the blog moderating option. This means that your comments will not immediately appear when you send them in, but hopefully if they disappear, you will now know why.

Over the following days, we'll be combing through the spam bin in order to see if anything there deserves to be saved. Please note that not everything appears to be IN the spam bin, so your comment may have been lost for good. Also note that if your comment is basically an illiterate rant, we may choose to not publish it in any case. We'll just have to see.

O Mangue's comment editting policy is as follows:

In general, we support anyone's right to write anything as long as our commentators avoid gratuitous dumb-fuckery. "Gratuitous dumb-fuckery" is a state of affairs that will be determined by Ana and I on a case-by-case basis and we'll let you know why your comments have been classified as such if we choose to use our soverign power as censors. If you think you've been unfairly classified as a gratuitous dumbfuck, please give us a rational reason as to why we should rethink our classification and we'll review your arguments.

Regarding my tiff with Menelik Charles and my ban from Abagond...

2010-11-12T13:25:00.014-02:00

by Thaddeus

Several folks have commented on my recent banning from Abagond, so I feel I should put some thoughts down regarding that situation. The following is unpleasant and somewhat personal, so those of you who don't like intertubes drama should stop reading here.

I was a prolific commentator on Abagond's blog for almost exactly a year and was recently banned there for getting into a hissy-fight with an exceptionally sexist poster who goes by the handles of Menelik Charles and Malarki5. In real life, this active blog commentator is reputedly a 40 year old Trinidadian-Brit and, apparently, an ex-employee of the Headstart Bookshop, a now-defunct outlet for Pan-Africanist products and publications in Tottenham in London. For a couple of years now, he's been stalking young black women on the internet, paying particular attention to those who defend the idea that black women should date white men if they feel like doing so (i.e. so-called "swirling"). Charles has relentlessly harrased these women, calling them "insane" and far worse. Ironically enough, a couple of the women Charles routinely harasses (who also post on Abagond) are people who dislike me and whom I find to be what we in Brazil would call "excepcionalmente levianas". But hell, they are undergrads just out of their teens! They're SUPPOSED to be "leviana". Lord knows I was. That is no cause for some frustrated, aging black nationalist to call them names.

Charles is smart enough to normally keep his comments within bounds on Abagond, but he's engaged in a stalking campaign on other black and anti-racist blogs, following young swirlers around and publicly chastizing them. To make matters worse (and even more creepy), he routinely comes on to black women who agree with him that "swirling" is a bad idea. I think that the front page of his Youtube channel gives a pretty good idea of where Menelik Charles is coming from when he talks about his undying respect for black women...

Menelik Charles' (AKA Malarki5) Youtube channel. Dedicated to taking on The Man and providing the internet with crotch shots of scantily dressed young black women.

Menelik's main theory seems to be this (taken from here):

"I think if we're being fair, many Black men are tired of dealing with women who aren't particularly feminine. Sure, most Black women are emphatically female-looking (even the ghetto/hoodrat types)but whatever the class of sister, it's not common they'd be feminine.

Maybe something to do with female-dominated homes...even when a man is present."

In short, Menelik blames overly-strong black women for de-masculinzing the black household. These black matriarchs, in turn, raise man-hating daughters who perpetuate the cycle, pushing "good, upstanding brothers" like MC away from the family. It's interesting to point out in this context, based on what MC has written around the net, that his mother lost her husband when Charles was a boy and that he was raised by a perfectly acceptable step-father. It's also interesting to note that Charles has a young daughter himself and is separated from her mother. So this man who blames the so-called "death of the black family" on women is himself the product of a non-traditional family and is raising his daughter in another non-traditional family.

MC and I got into the shit several times over at Abagond, but what really twisted my titties about Menelik Charles were his attempts to intimidate me by claiming that he could "beat six types of shite" out of me because he's a boxer. (Internet tough guy syndrome, anyone?) I welcomed him to go ahead. I mean, it's not like I'm anonymous or anything: that's my photo and real name down below, there. If he wants to crawl over my DSL cable - or even buy a plane ticket to Rio - in order to commit felony battery on my person, hell, who am I to stop him? I pointed out that I was posting under my real name while he was hiding behind an alias and that this was hardly courageous behavior. Charles then claimed that he was posting under his real name and identity and had no problems with being "outted" on the internet.

At that point, it seems that MC jumped the shark as my mailbox started filling up with people dropping docs on the man, including photos, real name, current address in Islington... the works. I did my part to help spread this information around to some of the women he was stalking. Shortly after this, the man started losing his cool on Abagond. Tempers flared, Chuck went nuclear and I just couldn't resist one last dig under his short ribs, in spite of a warning from Abagond to cool it.

So I got banned.

Now, Abagond runs his show the way he wishes and, in spite of my being banned from his blog, I have quite a lot of respect for the man. It is almost impossible to find anti-racists who are willing to listen to anything but the most dogmatic of views on race and repression and Abagond gets full marks from me for being one of these.

I think the major tiff between Abagond and myself has to do with the fact that I tweaked him about his sexism and Catholicism on several occasions, particularly with regards to the fact that he's separated from his wife (we'd just say "divorced" here in Brazil). The way Abagond describes her, she was quite a piece of work and I'm sure he has good reasons for not being with her anymore.

Nevertheless, I always found it odd that someone who was so willing to parse any statement into tiny little pieces in order to perceive its racist foundations could be so blind with regards to his own sexism and homophobia. And then there's the Catholicism. Abagond is a merciless and generally correct critic of "white" power structures but he gives a pass to the Church, which any historian of slavery and race will confirm as one of the most enduring of those power structures, one which played more than a small role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Many times on Abagond, I was struck by the fact that, as a white, heterosexual male, I had been socialized to critique my presumed identity along several axises - gender, sexuality, race and class. Meanwhile, many of the black, het males on Abagond - including the blog's owner himself - seemed to be rather complacent with regards to any privilege other than that created by race.

And, unfortunately, their blindness is often transformed into chauvinism.

Tweaking Abagond about his beliefs regarding religion and gender was probably, eventually, going to get him very angry. I thought it would be a useful excercize because Abagond seems to feel a certain mercilessness when it comes to tweaking white people about their beliefs regarding race and yet has enormous blind spots of his own. Given my tweaks, however, it was a matter of time before Abagond would use the first convenient excuse to ban me and he did indeed give me fair warning.

My year-long experience as a commentator on Abagond has underlined, for me, why critical race theory has become increasingly detached from reality as it's really lived. While we were discussing to what degree today's whites were responsable for the crimes of the whites of the 16th century, or whether or not "swirling" was an appropriate black female response to black male chauvinism, the Tea Party came along and blind-sided America, with hardly any commentary at all by the people who make up Abagond's blog.

As someone who was brought up in a midwestern, white, working class community that voted heavily for Obama and also heavily for the Tea Party, I feel that the "Let's shame whites into critiquing their privilege" strategy engaged in by people like Tim Wise and bloggers like Macon and Abagond is extremely short-sighted and is based on an erroneous reading of social repression that focuses exclusively on race. The white poor and working class do not like being talked down to and they understand, very clearly, that they are not the people who have created the current situation in the U.S. By casting white history as hegemonic, effectively homogenous and unrelentingly privileged, people like several of the commentators on Abagond end up destroying any possible alliance with white groups or individuals unless these groups or individuals are willing to ignore any factor, other than race, as having significance in social and political relations.

In short, many anti-racists tend to end up painting themselves into a corner by presuming that any white person who disagrees with them about anything needs must be effectively the same sort of person as a member of Stormfront or the KKK.

Sorry for the longwinded post, but a couple people seem to feel I need to say something about Abagond and my year there, so... Abagond's blog will continue to be linked here as I still consider it to be a very worthwhile forum - just don't poke your fingers in the owner's sensitive spots if you want to continue commenting there!

As for Menelik Charles, the gentleman who was the proximate cause of this feud, a bit of advice: I suggest that you use your 'l33t boxing skills to work out some of that aggression towards assertive black women that you're carrying around on your shoulder. Nothing on the internet ever really dies and 12 years from now, your daughter is going to have access to all of these comments you're making regarding black women. Something tells me that she's going to be less than impressed, Menelik.

In Spite of You, Tomorrow Must Be Another Day

2010-11-05T22:17:00.004-02:00

A rose in a Coke bottle in an ex-jail cell in memory of those who died

or were tortured during the Brazilian military dictatorship, 1964-1984.

The old headquarters of the political police in São Paulo, DOPS, is now a

museum dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the crimes

of authoritarian government.

This one is for my American friends and relatives who are bummed out by the far right's apparent win in this week's elections in the United States.

"Apesar de Você" is a samba that was written and originally interpretted by Brazilian singer/songwriter Chico Buarque de Hollanda in 1970, during the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship. The song was banned from airplay by then President General Médici for its rather explicit criticism of the Brazilian far right.

Chico Buarque #4, banned in Brazil in 1970

In March 1970, Chico returned to Brazil from exile in Italy, having heard from a friend that things "were getting better". They were not. In fact, the period from 1968 to roughly 1974 in Brazil is now known as the "years of lead", when the nascent revolutionary movements in the country were squashed through mass arrests and torture. Chico expressed his disgust with the situation by writing "Apesar de você" - In Spite of You - a full-throated critique of the military regime thinly veiled as quarrel between lovers. When he sent it in to the censors to be vetted, Chico never imagined it would get through - but it did and it sold 100,000 copies.

As soon as a word-of-mouth campaign had put the news out onto the streets about what the song's target really was, Chico was denounced and "Apesar" was banned from the airways. Government officials invaded the record factory and destroyed what copies remained of the song. The censor who approved it was canned and Chico was dragged into political police headquarters and asked at the point of a truncheon who the "you" in the song referred to.

"Oh, it refers to a very pushy and authoritarian woman," said Chico. But everyone in Brazil knew that it referred to the generals.

Because of "Apesar", Chico - who many consider to be Brazil's finest living poet - was marked out by the censors as an irredeemable smart-ass and his later records and poems were gone over with a fine-toothed comb and scissors. Because of this, Chico had to write and record under a pseudonym in order to get his material past the government.

At the same time Chico recorded "Apesar de Você", a 27 year old woman was rotting away in prison. A young socialist daughter of Bulgarian immigrants, Dilma Rousseff had joined the nascent revolutionary movement against the dictatorship and, together with her comrade Carlos Minc, had allegedly stolen a safety deposit box containing 2.5 million dollars belonging to the ex-governer of São Paulo, Ademar de Barros, reputably one of the most corrupt men in modern Brazilian history. Dilma was caught in an anti-guerrilla round-up in 1970 and was taken to the headquarters of Operation Bandeirante, the military government's political police facility. There she was tortured for 22 days. Her tormentors employed beatings, electric shocks and most likely sexual abuse.

Dilma Rousseff on occasion of her arrest and before she endured 22 days of torture.

In the very unlikely event that Dilma heard Chico's song while she was in jail, the future it proposed could have only seemed to be a very cruel dream, the kind of thing a drug-addled hippy would come up with, perhaps.

On Sunday, October 31st 2010, Dilma Rousseff was elected President of the Federal Republic of Brazil, on the Workers' Party ticket. She will be sworn in as our 36th president in early 2011, Brazil's first female president and, according to some, the most powerful woman in the world. Her old revolutionary comrade Carlos Minc, a leading light of the Brazilian Green Party, is currently our Minister of the Environment and likely to retain that position in Dilma's administration.

Dilma Rousseff, 36th President of Brasil.

So you see, there really is a future. In spite of them.

You can listen to "Apesar" here, complete with some extremely touching photos from the times.

Apesar de Você
Chico Buarque de Holanda (1970)

Today, it's you who rule
What you say goes
No talking back
Today, my people talk in low voices
With lowered heads
See?
You who invented this state
All this darkness
You invented sin
And forgot to invent forgiveness.

In spite of you
Tomorrow must be another day
I ask myself where are you going to hide
From the enormous euphoria?
How are you going to stop
The rooster who insists on crowing?
New water springing up
And us loving without stopping?

When the time comes
You'll pay me back for all this suffering
I swear it
All this repressed love
These contained cries
This samba in the dark
You, who invented sadness
Have the courtesy to uninvent it
You're going to pay in double
For every tear I shed
In my pain

In spite of you
Tomorrow must be another day
I'm going to pay to see
The garden break out in flowers
Just like you didn't want
You're going to rue
Seeing the sun come up
Without asking your permission
And I'm going to die laughing
Because this day is coming
Sooner than you think.

In spite of you
Tomorrow must be another day
You're going to have to see
The morning be born
And spit out poetry
How are you going to explain yourself
When the skies suddenly clear
With impunity?
How are you going to muffle
Us singing in chorus right in front of you?

In spite of you
Tomorrow must be another day
You're going to come to a bad end
Etc. and so on
Lalalalala...

New article on the etymology of "gringo"

2010-10-18T22:25:00.000-02:00

(I don't know who's in this picture, but the t-shirt is worth a thousand words...)

Here's an excerpt from the first draft of an article I just finished on the etymology of "gringo". If you'd like to help critique the article and make it better (in exchange for a beer and my thanks in the footnotes), post an e-mail in the "comments" and I'll send you a copy.

In early 2001, shortly after defending my masters thesis, Gringos (Blanchette, 2001), at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, I participated in three exchanges which brought home everything I had earlier written about the term “gringo”, its origins and its contemporary meanings, at least in Brazil.

The first occurred while I was lunching one day in the Museum’s cafeteria. A young housekeeping worker walked into the cafeteria and was greeted by the man behind the lunch counter with “Hey there, gringa! What are you doing down here today?” Both the housekeeper and the cafeteria employee were what U.S. Americans would call “black” and both were working class native born Brazilians. When I asked the counterman why he’d called the housekeeper a gringa, his response was quite interesting: “I’m from Rio and she’s from Pernambuco,” he said. “So she’s not from around here and she talks funny. Here in Brazil that means she’s a gringo. Gringos are people who don’t talk like us.”

A few weeks later, I was at a party with two American university students and their Brazilian translator. The Americans were in town on a three week long junket to “learn about life in the favelas ” and were excited that they were in daily contact with people they described as “real Brazilians” (by which they apparently meant the poor). At a certain point in our conversation, I referred to the pair as “gringos” (after several times referring to myself as such) and was immediately corrected: “Oh, we’re not gringos,” one of the young women said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because I’m Mexican-American and she’s Korean-American. We’re not white.”

This statement was interesting from a Brazilian raciological perspective, because both young women were at least as phenotypically “white” as me. They obviously presumed that “gringo” was a racialized term which presumably only applied to people who were “purely” white, unhyphenated U.S. Americans.

“But here in Brazil, you are gringas,” I said. “Any foreigner is a gringo here”.

The women’s Brazilian translator and friend (a white, upper-class college student) then chimed in. “That’s true, but they’re not gringas like you’re a gringo. She’s latina and she’s a japa”, he said laughing ironically as he used the terms.

Finally, in early 2002, while enjoying a beer with some colleagues from the Museum’s Anthropology Department, I was treated to yet another mobilization of the term gringo. I was seated with Martin, a Swedish resident of Brazil roughly comparable to me in terms of build and coloration, discussing my thesis with two Brazilian-born colleagues, Cecilia (who had the same mentor as Martin) and Patricia (who was being oriented by Giralda Seyferth, my mentor). I had claimed that, although Brazilians thought they could spot out the gringos among them by looks alone, this wasn’t so easy. As Patricia got up to place our order, Cecília turned to me and said “Oh, but that’s not true, Thaddeus. I could identify you as a gringo from a block away! You just don’t have the jeito brasileiro . Now, Martin here, he could pass as a Brazilian, but not you…”

At this point, however, Patricia came back to the table and, not having heard Cecília’s comments, broke into the discussion: “Of course we can tell who’s a gringo and who isn’t. I mean look at Martin: there’s no way anyone could ever mistake him for a Brazilian. You blend in, Thaddeus, but most gringos are like Martin and are easy to spot.”

These three encounters illustrate some of the ways in which one hears gringo applied in Brazil. The uses may differ from each other but they are linked to the word’s historical meanings from its first recorded use in the Iberian Peninsula on up to today. The present article is an attempt to present some of these meanings within a Brazilian context, while highlighting gringo’s potential as emic or analytical category that aptly describes an increasingly numerous class of people in today’s glocalized world.

"Class Média": Max Gonzaga's X-Ray of the Brazilian Middle Class

2010-10-15T16:41:00.004-03:00

"I can guarantee, Mr. Sebastian, that according to these statistics,

Brazil can consider itself to be a middle-class country."

"Ya see, woman? Ain' it great?"

A great song by Max Gonzaga in this electoral year here in Brazil. Also combines nicely with the recent release of Tropa de Elite 2....

Here's the video.

I'm middle class
I repeat everything I hear on the T.V. news
I believe that weekly newsmagazines are impartial

I'm middle class
I buy clothes and gas on my plastic
I hate to ride the bus
I drive my car that I bought on credit

I have to pay taxes
I'm always redlining my bank account
I hardly travel
Maybe a CVC package tour every three years

But I don't care
If drug dealers rule the favelas
I don't care
If people die or Itaquera floods
I'd like to see the urban periphery get blown to pieces

But I get pissed
At the State when anything bothers me
Like the starving beggars who ask for handouts
Or the street windshield cleaners who soap up my car
Or street vendors with their trinkets and candy
Or the jugglers who perform for change at the stoplights

But if it's a burglary in Moema
Or a murder in Jardins
Or an executive's daughter gets raped to death
Then the media will shout their regressive opinion to the skies
And call for the death penalty or a reduction in the age limits for imprisonment

And I, who am quite well informed, agree and join demonstrations
While the T.V. audience booms and papers sell like mad

Because I don't care
If drug dealers rule the favelas
I don't care
If people die or Itaquera floods
I'd like to see the urban periphery get bown to pieces
Tragedies are only real if they knock on my door
Because it's much easier to condemn someone who's already serving a life sentence.

Sou classe média
Papagaio de todo telejornal
Eu acredito
Na imparcialidade da revista semanal
Sou classe média
Compro roupa e gasolina no cartão
Odeio “coletivos”
E vou de carro que comprei a prestação
Só pago impostos
Estou sempre no limite do meu cheque especial
Eu viajo pouco, no máximo um pacote cvc tri-anual
Mais eu “to nem ai”
Se o traficante é quem manda na favela
Eu não “to nem aqui”
Se morre gente ou tem enchente em itaquera
Eu quero é que se exploda a periferia toda
Mas fico indignado com estado quando sou incomodado
Pelo pedinte esfomeado que me estende a mão
O pára-brisa ensaboado
É camelo, biju com bala
E as peripécias do artista malabarista do farol
Mas se o assalto é em moema
O assassinato é no “jardins”
A filha do executivo é estuprada até o fim
Ai a mídia manifesta a sua opinião regressa
De implantar pena de morte, ou reduzir a idade penal
E eu que sou bem informado concordo e faço passeata
Enquanto aumenta a audiência e a tiragem do jornal
Porque eu não “to nem ai”
Se o traficante é quem manda na favela
Eu não “to nem aqui”
Se morre gente ou tem enchente em itaquera
Eu quero é que se exploda a periferia toda
Toda tragédia só me importa quando bate em minha porta
Porque é mais fácil condenar quem já cumpre pena de vida

On why I have my doubts about the acquaintence rape panic...

2010-09-17T20:57:00.000-03:00

Two young men getting ready to take advantage of each other while drunk.

In a word, I have my doubts about the date rape panic because many of the people who are beating this particular drum seem to support a dual sexual morality.

This dual morality says that men and boys are absolutely, one hundred percent responsible for their sexuality, even when shit-faced drunk, but that women and girls are not. It claims that any story of sex and rape, when told by a woman, must ipso-facto be true while men's testimony is entirely composed of self-serving lies.

Now, before someone splits a seam out there and demands that I turn in my feminist secret decoder ring, let me salient, underline, MAKE PERFECTLY FUCKING CLEAR that I am not defending date rape, nor am I saying that people who get out-of-control drunk deserve to be raped.

OK? Got it? Are we on the same page now?

What I am saying is that a sex-gender system which presumes that women should be chaste or assexual until marriage/love occurs and castigates and stigmatizes women who aren't, while not teaching its young women how to be responsible sexual beings, is going to generate a lot of sexual repression, guilt and false morality. Faced with this, a certain number of women are going to use booze as an excuse to have sex and then attempt to not face the consequences of their acts the next day by claiming that they were taken advantage of.

Is this the majority of women? Probably not. Is it even the majority of women who report date rate? Almost certainly not.

But in spite of the heart-felt claims of my sisters-in-struggle that women do not lie about date rape, I must insist that at least some of them do. I know this, because I have seen it with my own eyes on at least three seperate occasions.

Let me relate the last time I saw this occur, because I find it to be the most shocking...

A few years ago we had a young, self-declared lesbian woman who was here in Rio learning Portuguese in a gringo class at a local school. This young woman, Clarissa, was quite the LGBT activist and most in-class reports by her, as well as most of her critiques of Brazilian culture, were manifestos against androcentrism and homophobia. In spite of her at times shrill politics, we became fairly good friends.

One night, while we were out drinking, Clarissa told me a horrible story about how she had recently suffered a date rape in her home town. According to her, she went out to a bar and some guy slipped roofies in her drink. When she woke up at home the next day, she couldn't remember a thing about what happened after midnight. Her vagina was sore and puffy and her girlfriend immediately deduced that she had been date-raped. They thus went down to the hospital and took samples and evidence, then went to the cops. No suspects were arrested and according to this young lady, that was a clear indication of the kind of crap-sack, misogynist world in which we live.

Fast forward to Clarissa's last night in Brazil. She insisted that we all go drinking at a gay club, even though she's the only homosexual in the group. No problem: the bar she wanst to go to is a fun bar, so great! We go. While there, she proceeded to get drunk - so drunk, in fact, that she starts hitting on the gay men at the bar. My roomate at the time, Jorge (who's gay) met us at the club, saw what was happening and told me "Thad, you better get your gringa friend out of her before she causes a fight".

We thus all troop out to a taxi and move the party over to Emporium. In the taxi, out drunken lesbian friend starts feeling up one of the guys in the group ("John", a colleague from her Portuguese course) and by the time we reach our destination, Clarissa's swarming all over him. The public make-out session goes on for over two hours until the bar closes. On the way out Zeke, a mutual friend asks me to keep an eye on Clarissa because of her earlier experience. The happy couple and I thus go off to yet another bar, where we have water and diet coke and chat for an hour. Clarissa is completely lucid and what I would describe as "tipsy": certainly not "out-of-control, falling-down drunk". I offer to walk her home. She says "No, John's going to do that!" and laughs.

When John goes off to the bathroom I say "Listen, I'm worried. You guys have been making out for hours and he's obviously expecting sex. Seriously. You know this right? He's going to want to have sex with you if he walks you home and will probably try to push things, at least a bit, given all the tonsil-wrestling you two have been doing."

"No, duh!" responds my supposedly lesbian friend.

"So I just want to make sure," I push on. "You're cool with me leaving you with John, even though you guys are almost certainly going to wind up having sex?"

"Of course!" Clarissa replies. "I'm not a kid. I know what I'm doing."

I raise my hands. "OK, then. Have fun."

And I split for home.

The next day, I call Zeke and tell him what happened. It turns out that Zeke has been asked over to our Clarissa's house to help with her packing. He gets there and finds her neck is covered in hickies. Our lesbian friend says she can't remember what happened the night before and that she thinks she must have eaten something odd because look at how she's broken out in a rash. Zeke sits her down and says "Clarissa, those those are hickies and what you were doing last night was making out with John. We all saw it and Thad walked you guys halfway home and gave you every opportunity in the world to back out graciously. He says you looked pretty damned in control of yourself and you told him you were up for sex with John, which is what you apparently went off and had."

To Clarissa's credit, she believed us and was very shaken, even rethinking her earlier experience of supposed "date rape". Talking to her over the following months, Zeke found out that she had been sexually abused as a kid and that her first stable loving relationship was with her current girlfriend. She just assumed then, that she must be a lesbian. And because her girlfriend's social circle despised bisexuals and so-called "daddy's money lesbians", Clarissa heavily repressed any heterosexual feelings she had. Drinking and acting out on those, and then lying to herself the next day about what occurred, was her way of dealing with this situation.

So this is one of THREE similar experiences that I have had, as opposed to four experiences where I'm damned certain a person I know went through acquaintence rape. I've heard many accusations from both sides - people (generally women) demanding that all claims of date rape MUST be treated as true and other folks (generally men) insisting that date rape is complete and utter bullshit. But for the seven cases in which I personally have been involved and got to see the evidence in some detail, three weigh out with the accused being innocent and four point to their guilt.

That's about a 43% innocence rate.

This is why I will not join the "all date rape claims are true" bandwagon. Women, like men, fool themselves, lie to themselves and lie to others. There is absolutely no convincing evidence that I've seen, to date, that women or men always tell the truth about ANYTHING. In a falsely moral, intensely hypocritical society such as the United States, which has a very deep fear of human sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular, it is no wonder that many people are going to be screwed up when it comes to sex. Date rape absolutists, on both sides of the issue, want to restrict this problem to the "other" gender - whichever that is.

Unfortunately for them, both genders lie.

Bullshit Patrol: One in Four College Women Will Be Raped Before They Graduate, According to Justice Department Study... Really?

2010-09-06T19:44:00.004-03:00

It's back-to-school in the United States, so that means it's time to whip up the parents with stories of all the evil things which will happen to their progeny once they've left the nest. On the top of the heap this semester, we have a report by The Huffington Post that CBS news claims that one in four female college students will be raped by graduation day. Here's what CBS says:

A recent study fom the Department of Justice estimated that 25 percent of college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate within a four-year college period, and that women between the ages of 16 to 24 will experience rape at a rate that's four times higher than the assault rate of all women.

There are a couple of problems with this report.

First of all, this is old, not recent news: the study which discovered this was published 10 years ago by Fisher, Cullen and Turner, in 2000. The current publication simply refers to that study: it is not itself a study, but a handbook regarding acquaintance rape. The original study can be found here. The handbook which ABC mistook for a recent study can be found here.

Secondly, the study does not indicate that 25% of all college women will be raped, but rather about half that number (13,75%). Ariana Huffington's krewe apparently has a hard time discerning between "rape" and "attempted rape".

Furthermore, a methodologically similar study undertaken by the same Justice Department indicates a rape rate 11 TIMES LESS than that indicated by Fisher, et al.

Finally, Fisher et al note that only 46% of the 86 women who they classified as having suffered a rape believed themselves to have been raped. Basically, what these researchers are saying is that the women themselves do not agree with the way the researchers are classifying these incidents. Fisher et al haven't a clear idea of why this disharmony in classification occurs, other than "Well, maybe the women don't understand what rape is or don't want to talk about it" (odd, given that the women had to agree in writing to specifically participate in a survey on sexual violence and rape on campus). Call it anthropological belief in one's informants, but I think we can take it as a given that a person knows when they've been raped, folks. I think we should take their word on it primarily.

Part of the problem here may be a rather fuzzy and imprecise definition of rape which guided the researcher's analysis: "Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force." "Psychological coercion" is open to a wide range of subjective interpretations and the researcher's understanding of this might not coincide with that of their informants.

If we were to take Fisher et al's informants on their word, however, and classify as rape what these women say was rape, then we find that, far from 25% of all female college student's being raped by graduation day, as the headline implies, we're looking at (13.75 x .46) 6.32%.

It should be pointed out here that Fisher et al's study is pretty responsible and transparent (though they could have given us better information on how they were classifying rapes in opposition to their informants' classifications by presenting us with a series of case studies). Irresponsible scientific reporting is the problem here, with the media multiplying by 2 to 4 times what the study shows.

6% is, in any case, still a very high number. It's about 4 times the national average and indicates a significant problem. But one wonders, then, why so many people think they need to exagerate this number beyond all reasonable bounds? Most people who have gone through university, male or female, are going to have a "bullshit" reaction when they see that 25%. Ultimately, this sort of exageration ends up making people DISMISS the issue of acquaintence rape.

This problem, of course, is found wherever research runs up against public policy. People believe that there is a problem - rape on campus, say, or trafficking of persons. Researchers go out and find that the problem does indeed exist, but is quite complicated. Politicians and moral entrepeneurs then get on the bandwagon and distort and simplify the findings so that they seem more alarming. Then the old media comes along and distorts the findings some more, because "if it bleeds, it leads". Finally, bloggers and new media close the process by incorrectly citing the media's take on the politicians' understanding of the original findings. At each stage in this process, estimates of victims go up, up, up.

The end result is this: a Department of Justice study found 34 women who claimed to have been raped over a seven month period out of a total of 4,446 women surveyed. Applying their own etic version of "rape", the researchers more than doubled this number to 74. By including attempted rapes, the number was pushed to 123. Then, by presuming that this rate is stable for the entire five year period of a woman's college career, it was reported that 25% of all college women will be raped or suffer an attempted rape during their school years. Desperate for "back-to-school" scare stories, CBS picks this up and broadcasts it to the four winds as "new research" when, in fact, it's the same old research of ten years ago in a new wrapper. Finally, the Huffington Post reports CBS' coverage and drops the "attempted rape".

Boom: a political meme is born: 25% of American female college grads are rape victims.

Sarah Palin ganha premiação de pior mãe da América

2010-08-21T12:22:00.006-03:00

All content here is owned by Mrs. Betty Bowers. My use and translation of her material is not intended to be a challenge if ownership, but a homage.

Betty Bowers, também conhecida como "A Melhor Cristã da América", premia a Sarah Palin com o trofeu para a pior mãe da América, no jantar anual da B.I.T.C.H. (Bringing Integrity To Christian Homemakers).

Confere: "Sarah Palin Wins Worst Mother in America Award".

Segue abaixo a minha tradução bruta desse momento histórico...

BETTY BOWERS: [bafafá] Quieta, senhoras. [tiros] Guarde o revolver!

Boa noite, donas de casa cristões verdadeiras e bemvindas aos prémios B.I.T.C.H. para a "Pior Mãe na América", apoiado por Rifles Remington e Xanax!

Meninas, foi uma corrida competitiva esse ano e muitas figurões públicas – e até algumas pessoas sem shows de realidade – têm se relutado de cotovelo para essa premiação. Mas o prêmio foi assegurado pelas notícias de que Willow Palin está continuando a tradição baixa-calão de sua família de bebida e de investigações policiais abafadas!

(Tem algumas perdedoras amargas lá na mesa três que afirmam que nossa prestigiada não é a pior mãe da America. Bem, amenos que Dina Lohan consegue se capotar por uma overdose antes da chegada da sobremesa...)

DINA LOHAN: [Palavra não cristão]-se! [cheirada]
BETTY: Nossa! Embora nossa premiada talvez seja somente a quarta ou quinta pior mãe na América, ela ganha nosso trofeu com honra e mérito pelo fato que seus discursos sobre ser mãe não tiveram nada a ver com sua práticas.

Como uma ex-amiga da ex-Patsy Ramsey, pode ter confiança em mim: conheço mãe podre. Então é com muitíssmo prazer que dou o prêmio e tiara para “A PIOR MÃE NA AMÉRICA” para aquela emergente-política e ensaista-de-alguel, Sarah Palin.

Sarah, sua determinação incansável para ignorar sua família (enquando você não está cuidadosamente a explorando) é inspiração para todos os figurões públicos egoístas que são forçados a fingir que amam seus entes queridos. Enquando você se ausentou de sua casarão em Alasca fazendo – e dizendo – absolutamente qualquer coisa para atrair atenção (ou dólares) suas crianças piradas ficaram absolutamente selvagens, uma atrás da outra, embriagando-se em festas e cheirando cocaina. Você sabe o que dizem: sempre tem menos neve em Alasca quando as crianças Palin estão por aí!

E desde que a ganhadora deste prémio está nós cobrando $50,000 dólares por hora para estar presente para esta honra...

SARAH PALIN: Cadê a porra de minha premiação?

BETTY: ...realmente não temos tempo para detalhar por inteiro a amplitude de seu abondono doméstico, mas vamos dar uma olhada nos pontos altos, neh?

[Prop # 1 "O Primeiro Cara"]: Sarah, antes que John McCain amarrou seu burro a uma estrela cadente, aquela famosa piscada sua de cocote já era um convite para participar num verbo, soletrado com quatro letras (que não são, por sinal, V-O-T-E). Você não só teve sexo antes do casamento com seu marido futuro [1º filho concebido um mês antes do casamento], você tambem o traiu com seu parceiro de negócios. E como vai a sua vida de vagabunda e piranha, Sarah?

[Prop # 2 "Track"]: Sempre estamos ouvindo falar que seu filho mais velho, Track, está no excercito, fato que você esfrega constantemente em nossas caras através daquela brochinha estrelhada que você use em todos os lugares – igualzinho a uma fanzoca de Justin Beiber com uma crachá laminada para o camarim. Mas nunca ouvimos falar de porque seu filho está servindo o país: é porque ele foi servido – com um mandato de preso, no colégio. Sim, o marginalzinho foi mandado ao Iraque como punição pública após de ter roubado uma garrafa de vodka de uma loja de bebidas e ter vandalizado 44 onibus escolares, cortando os cabos da embriagem dos veículos que levem os filhos de seus vizinhos à escola! Que heróico!

Talvez ele estava chapado por causa de toda aquela cocaina e oxycotin que cheirou? Afinal das contas, as crianças não precisam de um sistema de saúde pública quando carregam farmácias inteiras em suas mochilas!

[Prop # 3 "Bristol"] Como todos sabemos, você e sua filha virgem-nascida-de-novo Bristol adoraram transar antes do casamento – até o momento em que foram forçadas a se posicionar contra. Você até deixou Bristol dormir em sua casa com Levi Johnson. E qual foi sua resposta maternal previsível quando você descobriu que se engravidou? Você mandou a piranhinha para viver com parentes, para que o comportamento dela não refletisse negativamente em suas ambições políticas. A única “abstinência” em que você acredite, Sarah, é de absterse de ser mãe.

[Prop # 4 "Willow"] E parabens! O Willow é agora sua 3ª criança a ser presa. Enquando você estava andando por ai em sua busca narcissicista para a atenção pública, Willow estava invadindo casas fechadas para organziar festas de sexo e bebida com seus coleguinhos de colégio. Sarah, já posso ver a sala de estar de sua casa, cheia de fotografias polícias de suas crianças em quadros bonitos e caros de Olan Mills!

[Prop # 5 Trig"] Presumindo ilogicamente que o Trig é de fato seu filho, após do início de seu parto na gravidez problemática, o que é que você fez? Você deu uma palestra em Texas e viajou 9 horas num avião apertado, sem médico! Honestamente, Sarah, e você afirma que você é anti-aborto? Eu tenho visto viciadas em craque que demonstraram mais preocupação e carinho para seus filhos não-nascidos.

[Prop # 6 AKA "A bandeira americana"] É isto, meu bem: você pode se embrulhar em bandeiras e nos peles de criaturas ameaçadas de extinção, pode se virar papagaia de pirata do Tea Party e incentivar hordas de racistas fulminantes e semi-alfabetos a tentar votar com balas, mas você não pode gerenciar uma casa ordinária, muito menos uma Casa Branca. Para dizer a verdade, existem puteiros que são gerenciados com mais decoro e com menos visitas da polícia!

Então é meu prazer aceitar essa premiação para "A Pior Mãe da América" em nome da Sarah Palin, que está lá sentada nos fundos, na mesa 17. Não, não se levanta, meu bem.

SARAH: Ninguém bota uma baracuda de escanteio!

BETTY: Taffy, bala nela.

SARAH: Insisto naquela tal da liberdade de expressão!

BETTY: Querida, quando você cobra $200 dólares para cada palavra mal-escolhida, seu speech não é nada free. Seguranças, pega nela e confiram que não está roubando os talhares. Ela pode fazer seu discurso de agradecimento mais tarde... após de levar os pratos sujos à cozinha.

Que diversão. Taffy, querida, vamos rezar para riquezas.

Gringo Gear: The Kick-Ass Kindle

2010-08-08T16:52:00.002-03:00

by Thaddeus

XKCD rightly compares the Kindle to another famous electronic book...

This is a new feature here at O Mangue: reviews of products which make gringo life that much easier.

When I first came to Brazil in 1984, I hit a wall I hadn't anticipated. I am a book worm. A serious bookworm. I go through two or three books a week. Not all these books are high-minded texts: in fact, most of them are pulp fiction. But if I don't have reading material of some sort on me all the time, I start getting jumpy.

So back in 1984, when I didn't yet know how to read Portuguese, I rapidly ran through all the books I had brought with me. At the time, I was living in Riberão Preto and this was long before anyone had invented the term "globalization". There was one English-language book outlet in Riberão - at the mall - and it had about 50 books, all on sale for the equivalent of 6 times their American price. Even so, I was desperate. By the time a year had passed in Ribeirão (and I had learned enough Portuguese to read stuff like Feliz Ano Velho and A Queda para o Alto), I had bought pretty much everything in that store that I could stomach and had read through The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich four or five times. Things got so bad that every time I left Ribeirão to visit another city, I'd spend my first day searching for English-language book stores.

When I came back to Brazil in 1990, things hadn't changed much. In fact, I got my first job in Brazil, working for Devir Livraria, as a direct result of an all-weekend English book quest in São Paulo. One of the best perks at Devir was being allowed to order my own reading material (and getting a 20% discount to boot).

A pity that Amazon.com's Kindle didn't exist back then. God knows how my life would have been different.

As most Americans reading this probably know, the Kindle is Amazon.com's e-book reader. I was an early adaptor, buying my first one back in early 2008. I'm now on my third.

There are several book readers on the market and the Kindle is the only one I've used so far. I have no wish to change to something else for two reasons: the device's electronic paper screen and the fact that it's backed up by Amazon.com's distribution empire.

For those who've not yet seen a Kindle, it's a plastic device about the size and weight of a large paperback. You read books on a grey and black electronic paper screen. This is crucial: electronic paper emits no light and the words are physically present. This means that the experience of reading is exactly as if one were reading printed text: no headaches from looking at LEDs for hours on end.

The Kindle 2 in all its plastic glory. A newer version called the DX is also available.

You turn pages by pressing on buttons at the side of the device. Pages flip slightly slower than with a regular book, but not enough to bother me - and I'm a fast reader. The Kindle also allows you to turn the corner of virtual pages to mark places in the text as well as write notes in virtual "margins". Text can also be highlighted. Both notes and highlights go to a .txt file where they can later be downloaded directly to your computer. The Kindle also allows you to search text - not only in a book, but in your whole virtual library. The device comes with a built-in 3G system that allows you to buy and download books from Amazon.com at will. In the first editions of the Kindle, this feature was blocked in Brazil. In my new second edition machine, however, it's fully operative. Last Friday, in fact, I sat down next to the Pará River in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, and downloaded three books while waiting for my breaded filhote. Sure, Belém's not the middle of the rainforest, but when I recall scrambling to find English-language reading material in 1980s Brazil... Well, the Kindle's nothing short of miraculous to me.

Though the Kindle supposedly only reads proprietor-format Amazon.com texts, there are now plenty of programs on the 'net which allow you to freely transcribe texts back and forth between various other formats. I now routinely translate colleagues' Word and PDF papers into Kindle format and read them virtually. It saves time and paper.

The best thing about the Kindle, however, is that it allows you to port virtual libraries with no effort at all. Last winter, Ana and I took over 50 books along with us on our vacation to Visconde de Mauá.

In terms of user-friendliness, it took me about two hours of reading to be able to completely ignore the fact that I was not reading a traditional book. The interface is VERY intuitive and I'd be willing to bet that even such confirmed technophobes as my 67-year-old mother could use the device with little difficulty.

The Kindle does have a few downsides, however...

In the first place, it isn't very good for academic work where one needs to be constantly zipping back and forth in a text. It has no page numbers (only location markers) and this also makes attributing quotes difficult. Finally, of course, not all texts have been digitalized (though this is something that's rapidly going to change with the growing popularity of digital reading devices), so you might find that what you need isn't available.

For light and entertainment-based reading - as well as a portable reference library - the Kindle is fantastic. For serious academics, I think we're probbly never going to get completely away from paper.

If you're a gringo or an immigrant far from home, however, and you love reading, investing in a device of this sort is an absolute must.

And for those of you who are unscrupilous criminals, entire collections literature can be found for the Kindle, for free, at The Pirate Bay. But we here at O Mangue would never wish to be seen as supporting file piracy, so please don't go there. Oh, and ask yourself "What Would Jesus Do?" (always presuming, of course, that Jesus wanted to get ahold of some high-quality Jenna Jameson porn without paying for it...)

“Seleção Brasileira de Cristo” versus “Seleção Brasileira de Baladeiros”: o que estes dois estereótipos de times futebolísticos têm a dizer sobre o Brasil

2010-07-04T14:41:00.008-03:00

Felipe Melo: um típico brasileiro atavico...?

Perdemos mais uma Copa do Mundo e obviamente temos que caçar os culpados, pregá-los a fogueira e queimá-los vivos com requintes de crueldade. Isto significa linchamento moral, verbal e, se tiver uma oportunidade, agressão física, por que não? - e o máximo de execração pública nos mais diversos veículos de comunicação.

Isto é uma “tradição brasileira” e faz parte do nosso calendário de malhação do Judas fora de época. De quatro em quatro anos, se a seleção canarinho perde uma Copa iniciamos todo o processo de achincalhamento, dos mais odiosos, para que depois possamos sair com a alma lavada. Todas as que ousaram perder uma Copa passaram por isto. As de “antigamente” tiveram a seu favor o fato dos meios de comunicação se resumir aos jornais e mais tarde a televisão. As de “hoje” convivem com uma rede quase infinita de informações e que para a nossa sublime posição de carrascos podemos humilhá-los das mais diferentes maneiras. Vitória da tecnologia!

A seleção da vez é a de Dunga que com seus “meninos de Cristo” está metodicamente passando pelo o ritual do linchamento público e já com a fogueira armada para que seu nome vire apenas pó na história. Diga-se de passagem, nada muito diferente do que aconteceu em Copas perdidas anteriormente.

A seleção perdedora da vez, no entanto, não está sendo criticada baseada nos dias de glória dos “timaços” de 58-62-70, a tríplice aliança dos títulos que para alguns mais exaltados e amantes do “verdadeiro futebol” e do “futebol-arte” representam os únicos títulos que o Brasil ganhou jogando com decência.

O tetra e o penta sempre são tratados como títulos menores de um grupo de jogadores medianos e ruins que estavam em busca do futebol de resultados e cravaram a morte do “futebol-arte” em nome do “futebol-força” ou a “europeização do nosso futebol” que representa o esporte praticado de maneira “feia, sem a ginga e malemolência” de outrora, características, segundo os super entendidos e adeptos da sociobiologia, qualidades inatas ao povo brasileiro e, portanto, o feijão com arroz do “futebol-arte”.

No cardápio atual, soma-se, um item novo ao linchamento. A comparação com a “Seleção Brasileira de Baladeiros” de 2006. Aquela chefiada por Carlos Alberto Parreira que ficou conhecida como o “time boate”. Jogadores “estrelas, beberrões, cheiradores e farristas” que foram a Alemanha festejar e mostrar ao mundo toda a nossa “malandragem” e muita irresponsabilidade. Na volta para casa, um tsunami de críticas quanto a este pouco profissionalismo e disciplina. Eles escancararam ao mundo a nossa porção “vira-lata”, aquele que, por fora até parece bonitinho, mas como Gilberto Freyre descreveu em “Casa Grande e Senzala”, quando se observa bem, não passávamos de “marinheiros mulatos e cafuzos” com um aspecto medonho, resultado de uma “mistura maldita” e fadada a contínua “degeneração”. Era preciso mudar.

Para isto, era necessário instaurar a “ordem” para ocultar o nosso “viralatismo”. Como Batista de Lacerda nos ensinou, a mistura não é todo ruim, desde que o resultado dela, “o povo brasileiro” seja disciplinado, controlado e saneado. Estava aberta a temporada de “saneamento e limpeza” dos vira-latas.

Para isto convocaram um disciplinador, Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri, o Dunga . Ex-jogador de futebol conhecido mais por sua truculência em campo de que seus méritos como atleta. Teve altos e baixos na carreira. Em 1990, foi responsabilizado pelo mau futebol apresentado e conseguiu alguma redenção em 1994 com a conquista do Tetracampeonato. Feito que o Brasil não fazia há vinte anos. Desta vez, o ex-atleta foi chamado para colocar freio nos trilhos e teve “carta branca” para modificar a seleção do jeito que quisesse, desde que levando em consideração o processo de saneamento, disciplinarização e busca de profissionalismo extremo que faltou a seleção de “baladeiros” da Copa anterior.

Ao observar os jogadores de futebol brasileiros, Dunga teve que lidar com dois personagens com quem insistimos enquadrar os meninos brancos, mestiços, negros e pobres que sonham com uma vida digna para ele e suas famílias ao escolherem seguir a carreira do jogador de futebol: os “bad boys” e os “atletas de cristo”. Estes personagens caricatos são a garantia da diversão de uma sociedade que historicamente não está acostumada a ver os negros, brancos e mestiços pobres como cidadãos que podem alçar ao sucesso e a fama com dignidade. Este grupo de pessoas, apesar do dinheiro, é fadado, no imaginário social, aos quartos de empregadas, a limpeza das latrinas e a caixas de supermercado e lojas de onde nunca deveriam ter saído. Como num script de novela construímos estes personagens e como uma “profecia que se cumpre” cada um destes meninos ocupam seus personagens nas tramas de suas vidas. O "bad boy" pode virar um "atleta de cristo" e vice-versa? Pode. Aliás, a troca de papéis garante a audiência desta novela da vida real.

Em tempo de “saneamento e disciplinarização” e aversão aos “baladeiros” de 2006, Dunga fez sua escolha: banimento dos "bad boys" e ascensão dos “atletas de cristo”. Seguindo à risca o combate ao atavismo brasileiro, instaurou-se um regime autoritário e de exército muito semelhante ao que foi feito na preparação da Copa de 1958 que ficou conhecido como “Plano Paulo Machado de Carvalho” e que incluía um regime disciplinar extremo àquela seleção que colocou Pelé (versão clássica do “atleta de cristo” contemporânea) e Garrincha (versão clássica do "bad boy" atual) a irem para o banco de reservas para combater o ativismo próprio do “brasileiro degenerado”. Participaram do campeonato no momento em que se acreditou que estes dois personagens estavam devidamente “saneados e controlados”.

Sem maiores comparações em termos técnicos, mas apenas em termos de discursos o que se buscava em 1958 era semelhante ao que se procurou em 2010. Comprovar que os “vira-latas degenerados” sob uma forte disciplinarização e profissionalismo poderiam alcançar o sucesso. Com uma brutal diferença, 1958 saiu vitoriosa e 2010, não. E, somado, a Copa atual, o técnico brasileiro resolveu comprar briga com a imprensa brasileira ao não permitir que nenhum tipo de distração atormentasse e tentasse o sono dos “atletas de cristo”. Como todos sabem, meninos negros, mestiços e brancos pobres são os mais suscetíveis a corrosão da degeneração e mais passíveis a deixarem a porção vira-lata medonha incontrolável e degenerada aflorar com maior rapidez. Dentro desta “filosofia”, Dunga proibiu sexo, drogas, rock e aparições nas mídias. Apenas, foram mantidas as orações em campo e fora dela para demonstrar que ali estavam “os atletas de cristo”, devidamente saneados e controlados rumo ao sucesso. Ele não veio e repetiu-se o mesmo fiasco da “seleção de baladeiros” de 2006.

Agora como numa novela que não deu a audiência necessária é preciso mudar o script. Entoam as vozes de que devemos trazer de volta à cena os "bad boys", os exímios “baladeiros, cheiradores, farristas, macumbeiros e maconheiros” para agora à la Gobineau, comprovarmos ao mundo que um pouco de “sangue bárbaro” nesta “mistura maldita” é o que nos faz ser “diferentes” positivamente da chatice monocórdia da “pureza racial”. Aqui está o segredo do nosso sucesso, do “futebol-arte”, da alegria e felicidade inzoneira. Seguimos em busca desta “fórmula científica” que produza a “mistura ideal” ou o “tipo nacional” adequado: aquele que é saneado e controlado, e que pode ser libertado da degeneração. Ele pode ser branco, afro-brasileiro ou afro-indígena brasileiro, etc, etc, etc, dependendo das “ideologias raciais” que se quer seguir, desde que, tais discursos consigam expurgar “o vira-lata” e a “mistura maldita” que habita em cada um de nós e que dolorosamente pode ser escancarada ao mundo a qualquer momento seja com os “bad boys”, seja com “os atletas de cristo”.

Este parece ser o drama inscrito nas seleções de 2006 e 2010 que pode ser entendido como um drama nacional. Como chegar a esta "fórmula científica" exata que expurgue de vez “o vira-lata”? Desde que as teorias raciais fizeram moda em fins do século XIX no mundo “civilizado”, para fazermos parte de tal “mundo”, estamos à procura do tipo nacional adequado. Para isto, financiamos projetos “raciais” mirabolantes que nos livrem da degeneração. Parece que sem muito sucesso pelo visto, pois sempre estamos em busca de um novo discurso racial que promova a “cura” definitiva deste mal à brasileira.

Para finalizar, não tenho respostas prontas, as linhas que escrevi são mais divagações e dúvidas que surgiram diante de mais um linchamento em praça pública dos jogadores de futebol e comissão técnica que perderam uma Copa do Mundo e que acredito que, só pode ser entendido a partir de uma análise do que significa esta busca incessante ao tipo nacional adequado brasileiro.

Trabalho Final do curso: Olhares estrangeiros: raça, sexualidade, gênero e nação em perspectiva/2010

2010-05-16T14:04:00.002-03:00

[Mensagem para os alunos de Ana Paula, USP, turma de "Olhares Estrangeiros".]

Olá turma,

Estamos chegando ao final do nosso curso e com ele o último trabalho. Aqui vão a prosposta e instruções para a sua elaboração.

Escolha uma (1) mídia e faça uma análise comparativa e crítica com três (3) autores da bibliografia do curso. As mídias são:

- Filmes:
Olhar Estrangeiro. Lúcia Murat, 2006.
Pierre Verger: mensageiro entre dois mundos. Lula Buarque de Holanda, 1998.
Reportagem da Rede Globo, JN, sobre turismo sexual em Fortelza, clicando aqui.

O texto deve ter no máximo dez (10) páginas com notas e bibliografia, em espaço 1.5, corpo 12 em Times New Roman.

A data de entrega é: 21/06/2010.

Abraços,

Ana Paula

Como (não) se Faz um Brasileiro

2010-05-11T00:08:00.001-03:00

Cartaz racista e anti-imigrante, retirado de um blog brasileiro. Obviamente, O Mangue não apoia estes sentimentos. Muito pelo contrário. Mostramos o cartaz para desmentir a visão ingênua que muitos brasileiros têm do Brasil como país "acolhedor de imigrante".

The above poster is racist anti-imigration propaganda taken from another Brazilian blog. We post it here not to give support to these sentiments, but to show our Brazilian freinds, students and colleagues that the recent sentiment afoot in Arizona in the U.S. has a well-nourished counterpart in our country. We think this sort of attitude sucks the big one and have blacked out the police hotline numbers for that reason.

[O artigo a seguir é da autoria de Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette e foi publicado na Revista Travessia, no janeiro de 2008. Estamos re-publicando ele aqui como subsidiário para o debate sobre o recente projeto de lei SB1070 em Arizona, nos EUA. Nos últimos dias, temos conversado com vários brasileiros e gringos que acham que a situação no Brasil é boa e achamos que essas pessoas devem saber melhor...]

Como se (não) faz um brasileiro

Nos dias de hoje, marcados pelo recrudescimento das fronteiras nacionais e as guerras contra substantivos (tipo “drogas” e “terrorismo”), onde populações e até religiões inteiras são marcadas como ameaçadoras e dignas de exclusão, ainda existe uma tendência de pensar no Brasil como uma espécie de refugio: talvez o último país que ainda aceita o imigrante com braços abertos. Até os membros dos movimentos negros e indígenas, sempre atentos aos preconceitos homogenizantes forjados no nome do nacionalismo, afirmam que o Brasil ama o imigrante – tendo uma preferência para ele, talvez, em detrimento de seus filhos nativos.

Os que acham a política de imigração brasileira liberal demais podem ficar sossegados. Longe de ser o mais acolhedor de todos os países, o Brasil detêm um estatuto de estrangeiros antiquado e vago – porém excepcionalmente flexível – que permite aos imigrantes menos direitos do que os nos Estados Unidos. Se for verdade que o país ainda não fechou suas fronteiras, é igualmente verdadeiro que, uma vez fincado em terras brasilis, o imigrante está à mercê de uma burocracia arbitrária e freqüentemente corrupta. Ademais, ele se vê cercado por uma série de preconceitos, amplamente fundidos entre a população, cuja característica principal é sua incontestabilidade. Finalmente, enquanto na Europa e nos Estados Unidos, o imigrante encontra movimentos nativos que o apóiam e que militam em favor de seus direitos, no Brasil, a sociedade civil tem quase esquecido dele, acreditando que migração para o Brasil é coisa do passado.

Tenho acompanhado a jornada de um estrangeiro que tem se lutado para se naturalizar e, enfim, se tornar brasileiro. Pode-se dizer que sou íntimo com os detalhes de seu caso, mas o tratarei aqui como informante e, como todo informante, protegerei sua identidade, lhe dando o nome falso de “Jude Thoreaux” . Escolhi o Jude para esse empreendimento porque, além de conhecer bem seu caso, ele se configura como aquilo que tem sido entendido historicamente no Brasil como o “o bom imigrante”, seguindo a observação feita por Giralda Seyferth (2000:98). Jude é homem, branco e oriundo dos EUA. Não é criminoso, tem se esforçado para se assemelhar ao seu meio social e cultural (aprendendo português e evitando contato com outros americanos), trabalha, é detentor de educação universitária e foi casado duas vezes com brasileiras. Crucialmente, nunca ficou ilegalmente no Brasil. Deve ser, enfim, seguindo as leis e a grande maioria dos preconceitos de classe, gênero, cultura e raça presentes em nosso país um “imigrante ideal”. Ademais, Jude é detentor de uma bagagem cultural que permite ele a navegar a burocracia da Divisão de Estrangeiros do Ministério de Justiça com um alto grau de competência. As experiências dele em suas tentativas de se naturalizar podem, então, melhor ilustrar algumas das falências múltiplas que atualmente assolam as leis imigratórias no Brasil do que as de um informante mais socialmente marginalizado.

Jude Thoreaux tem 40 anos e é estrangeiro residente no Brasil desde 1992. É natural da zona rural do meio-oeste dos EUA e veio ao Brasil, pela primeira vez, em 1984 como aluno de intercâmbio, passando um ano no interior de São Paulo. De volta para os EUA e ingressando-se na universidade, Jude entrou no Programa de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros de sua escola e passou três anos se especializando em português, sociologia e estudos da América Latina. Em 1990, retornou-se ao Brasil e cursou três anos na Universidade de São Paulo como aluno visitante.

A aproximação inicial do Jude ao Brasil foi privilegiada. Como aluno de intercâmbio, ele disponibilizava de uma estrutura de apoio, que incluía advogados, para intermediar suas interações com a burocracia imigrantista. Sua situação como intercambista, hospedada numa família brasileira, lhe providenciou uma excelente chance de se assemelhar e aprender português. Essa sua habilidade com português, por sua vez, o ajudou na volta para os EUA, providenciando sua inserção num departamento de estudos avançados, possibilitando uma bolsa, e – finalmente – a volta para o Brasil através da USP.

Todavia, apesar de ser relativamente privilegiado, Jude ainda encontrou dificuldades típicas de imigração. Em primeiro lugar, migrar não era sua intenção original. Após de três anos na USP, porém, Jude não estava preparado para voltar aos EUA porque tinha novas oportunidades em São Paulo e uma rede de relações interpessoais que relutava em abandonar. Portanto, precisava ter condições de reproduzir sua vida no Brasil e isto, por sua vez, significava encontrar trabalho. Jude logo arranjou um emprego como tradutor de inglês – ironicamente, um dos principais “guetos étnicos” de trabalho para anglo-falantes no Brasil (BLANCHETTE, 2000). Como muitos outros imigrantes, ele trabalhava ilegalmente, pois seu visto de estudante proibia o exercício de funções remuneradas. Seus empregadores, portanto, não podiam lhe colocar na folha de pagamento da empresa e conseqüentemente, ele estava trabalhando sem benefícios, seguro saúde, ou aposentadoria.

Com o fim de seus estudos na USP, Jude enfrentou outra barreira encontrada por imigrantes. Em 1992, ele se encontrou numa situação difícil, por causa de uma mudança súbita no processo de cobrança de multas para situação irregular no Brasil . Jude atrasou 30 dias em pedir a renovação de sua vista de estudante em função das provas finais de semestre e a corrida natalina em seu emprego. Quando finalmente apareceu na Polícia Federal para regularizar sua situação, foi informado que seu visto tinha sido cancelado e que precisava retirar-se do Brasil.

Como Jude lembra da situação, “Até aí, não era grande coisa, pois no passado, isto implicava o pagamento de uma pequena multa e uma rápida viagem ao Paraguai para renovar o visto”. Todavia, mudanças na contabilização das multas para a irregularidade complicavam o quadro:

Antes, a multa era USD80. Isto mudou para USD20 por dia, sem limite e retroativa. E mais: se você já tivesse sido irregular antes, a multa era dobrada. Por causa disto fui multado em USD1200, que tive que pagar antes de puder regularizar minha situação – ou seja, 4 vezes meu salário mensal!

Jude ficou chocado com a natureza abrupta das modificações:

Essas novidades não eram mudanças de leis e sim transformações de como as leis já existentes eram administradas. Pelo que eu saiba nada foi discutido no Congresso. Quando fui ao Consulado Americano pedir ajuda, nem eles sabiam das novidades. A mudança pegou todo mundo de surpresa. Eu pensava ‘Meu deus, todo mundo crítica o sistema imigrantista dos EUA, mas você jamais poderia fazer algo assim lá sem alguma cobertura na mídia’. E em SP, nada: nenhuma notícia, nenhuma discussão. Era como se estrangeiro simplesmente não existia na cidade.

Jude viu situações de desespero na fila da PF:

O pior de tudo era o fato da multa ser retroativa. Tinha uma turca na minha frente que tinha imigrada para o Brasil em 1956. Seu marido, naturalizado brasileiro, tinha tomado conta de tudo para ela. Ela não sabia nada sobre sua situação frente à lei. Mal falava português. Acontece que o marido tinha morrido e ela estava tentando negociar o inventário e descobriu que seus documentos não estavam em ordem. Foi a PF e foi multada por 36 anos de irregularidades. Você pode imaginar a situação. A única coisa boa era, como tinha filhos brasileiros, ela não podia ser deportada.

Jude foi avisado por um funcionário da PF que a solução seria pagar a multa e fazer uma rápida viagem ao Paraguai, entrando no país com um visto novo. No entanto, ele e sua namorada Carla, uma brasileira, desconfiavam que tal solução seria insuficiente: “Resolvemos, então, casar. Antes de eu partir para Paraguai, fomos ao cartório para marcar a data”.

No Paraguai, Jude descobriu que sua desconfiança tinha base: ele tinha sido desinformado pela PF de São Paulo. Uma mudança adicional na lei proibia os americanos de pediram vistos para o Brasil fora de seu país de origem: “No consulado brasileiro do Puerto Iguaçu, eles me diziam que era uma mudança recente e por isto a PF de São Paulo não deveria saber dela. Tive sorte, porém: quando mostrei ao vice-cônsul que meu casamento já estava marcado, ele teve pena de mim e soltou um visto temporário de 15 dias. Consegui, então, voltar ao SP, casar com Carla e, no dia seguinte, dei início a meu processo de permanência”.

Tenho explorado em outro artigo o dilema vivido por Jude em sua decisão de casar, que é bastante comum entre imigrantes de todos os tipos (BLANCHETTE, 2003). Basicamente, neste caso, um relacionamento afetivo pré-existente foi subitamente transformado em casamento pela pressão das leis regulando imigração. Frente a uma mudança abrupta no regime imigrantista brasileira, Jude, então, lançou mão a um recurso familiar a todos os imigrantes ilegais e irregulares. É interessante notar que, nesta crise, seus vários marcadores macro-sociais de status (ser homem, branco, americano, classe média, etc.) não providenciaram nenhuma saída: caso que não tivesse a ajuda de Carla, ele teria que ter ido embora do Brasil ou ser transformado num imigrante ilegal. De fato, ser americano atrapalhou Jude na medida em que os americanos – diferente dos europeus ou latino americanos – não podiam pleitear visto renovado em Paraguai, tendo que retornar a seu país de origem.

Após da crise de 1992, Jude fixou residência no Brasil por longo período sem problemas. Recebeu o status de estrangeiro residente em 1993 em função de seu casamento e logo em seguida, regularizou sua situação frente às leis de trabalho. Nas palavras de Jude, “Não pensava mais em ser estrangeiro e começava a me encarar como brasileiro nascido no exterior. As pessoas ao meu redor, no trabalho e no bairro, apoiavam essa definição”.

Em 1999, porém, já separado de Carla, Jude voltou à universidade, pleiteando e ganhando uma vaga num programa de pós-graduação conceituado no Rio de Janeiro. No entanto, mudar de cidade e de círculo profissional ressuscitou uma série de alteridades que Jude pensava ter enterrado. “Em São Paulo, já tinha meu lugar e, embora gringo, eu era ‘aquele gringo’. O gringo da turma, vamos dizer. Era tratado como pessoa e não como um anônimo. Mas quando cheguei no Rio, a coisa mais óbvia para meus novos colegas era o fato de eu ser americano”.

Ser visto como americano em seu novo meio-ambiente implicava confrontos com uma série de preconceitos: “No mundo editorial, eu era razoavelmente bem conhecido e não estava competindo com ninguém. No Rio, eu estava sendo inserido numa profissão competitiva, com pouquíssimas vagas em seus níveis mais altos. De repente, notei que as pessoas estavam me classificando como estrangeiro e usando isto para me desqualificar”.

Jude lembra particularmente bem de uma ocasião no final de seu primeiro semestre de estudos quando, numa reunião social, uma colega decidia confrontá-lo publicamente:

Essa mulher tinha reputação de ser uma intelectual anti-racista e eu admirava muito seu trabalho. Acontece, porém, que ela achava ‘um absurdo um americano estar em nossa universidade, ocupando uma vaga que deve ir a um brasileiro e gastando nossos impostos’. Eu pensava ‘Nossos impostos?’ Porque, pelo que eu sabia, ela não trabalhava enquanto eu tinha sido contribuinte por seis anos. Pior: ela tinha acabada de voltar de uma temporada de estudos nos EUA, com bolsa americana, e em nossas aulas vivia falando sobre os preconceitos contra os imigrantes naquele país. Fiquei de boca aberta. Teve até professor – gente em favor das cotas raciais, que se posicione como lutador para a redução das desigualdades no Brasil – que dizia, entre os alunos, que as bolsas de todos os estrangeiros deviam ser cortados. E novamente, lá ‘tava eu, pensando ‘Peraí. Quem é estrangeiro? Sou residente. Tenho os mesmos direitos que qualquer brasileiro frente ao sistema educativo.’ Mas o pior foi uma aluna mandar um e-mail acusando os alunos ‘estrangeiros’ de roubaram recursos do Brasil para depois irem embora do país. Todo isto estava acontecendo num departamento das ciências sociais, num contexto em que a gente discutia a instalação de ações afirmativas, o racismo institucional e etc., mas quase ninguém se tocou quando o preconceito era o nativismo.

Os preconceitos que encontrou em seu novo meio social foram um dos fatores que empurrou o Jude a buscar se naturalizar como cidadão brasileiro: “Decidi se eu tinha que ser o alvo de nativismo, pelo menos ninguém poderia me acusar de não ser brasileiro”. Então em 2004, já divorciado de Carla, ele começou o processo de naturalização.

A papelada foi terrível. Além de uma série de atestados legais, comprovando que Jude não era alvo de nenhum processo no Brasil, era necessário arranjar atestados de seu país de origem, mandar validar esses no consulado brasileiro mais próximo ao local de seu nascimento, e depois os traduzir juramentadamente. Levou um total de 40 dias para organizar somente os documentos brasileiros e foi preciso uma viagem aos EUA para conseguir os atestados americanos. O custo total da papelada (sem contar a passagem para os EUA) foi em torno de 2000 reais.

“O pior não foram os atestados,” diz Jude:

O pior foi o fato de que os documentos só tinham validade de 90 dias e alguns atestados levavam um mês ou mais para serem emitidos. Ou seja, eu tive que orquestrar a organização da papelada de tal forma que meus atestados brasileiros seriam colhidos antes que meus atestados americanos perdessem sua validade – algo complicado quando você está tratando com burocracias em dois continentes diferentes!

Jude conseguiu juntar seus papeis e deu entrada ao processo, mas logo encontrou outro empecilho. Antes de se divorciar de Carla, ele tinha se informado com a Polícia Federal sobre o efeito que o divórcio teria em seu status como estrangeiro residente. “A funcionária principal do setor de naturalização da PF do Rio tinha me dito que eu não perderia minha residência, sob hipótese alguma, dado o fato que eu e Carla éramos casados por quase dez anos. Todavia, uma vez entregue a papelada, a situação revelou-se diferente”.

A mesma pessoa que tinha confirmado que Jude não perderia sua residência agora lhe avisou que, pelo fato do divórcio ter eliminado a justificação de residência no Brasil, a Polícia Federal do Rio de Janeiro não concederiam um aval positivo ao seu pedido de naturalização. Pior ainda: a PF estava revogando seu status de estrangeiro residente. “Neste momento”, dizia Jude, “eu tinha fixada residência no Brasil, constantemente, por 15 anos, sendo residente permanente por 13 desses. Era doutorando numa universidade federal, professor substituto em outra universidade, bolsista de CAPES e, para a PF, tudo isto não constava 'prova suficiente de ligação profissional e/ou afetivo com o Brasil'.

A chefe do setor de naturalizações até encarou o fato de eu ser estudante como uma prova de que eu estava mentindo sobre minha situação. 'Estudante?! Com quase 40 anos nas costas, como é que você pode ser estudante? Isto não acontece. Isto é muito suspeita'. Apresentei documentos comprovando minha situação como aluno, bolsista e professor, cartas de colegas, da minha orientadora, exemplos de artigos que eu tinha escrito... tudo. Mas como essa gentil servidora pública decidiu – arbitrariamente – que um homem de 38 anos não podia ser um estudante, todas essas provas foram sumariamente desconsideradas. E aí começou uma série de eventos estranhos...

Em conferência com a responsável pelo setor de imigração, Jude foi informado que sua residência seria revogada caso que continuasse pedindo a naturalização. Todavia, como “favor”, a PF arquivaria o processo, “garantindo” que nada progrediria e, assim, salvando Jude da ameaça de deportação. Ele desconfiava da proposta:

Na reunião que tive com a chefe do setor de imigração, ela avisou que foi informada pela chefe do setor de naturalizações que meu casamento com a Carla tinha durado somente dois anos em vez de quase 10 e que eu não tinha nenhum vínculo com o Brasil. Quando tentei falar sobre minha situação, a chefe do setor de naturalizações me cortou, sussurrou no ouvido da chefe do setor de imigrações e a reunião acabou. Aí, então, já de saída do escritório, perguntei a ambas 'O que devo fazer para resolver essa situação? Devo contratar um advogado?' E a resposta foi categórica: 'Se você contrata advogado, vamos cancelar sua residência e te deportar imediatamente.' Eu sabia, então, que não podia confiar nesse povo. Elas estavam violando meus direitos, tinham ignorado todas as informações comprovadas em minha ficha e agora estavam dizendo que tinham o direito de me deportar, arbitrariamente e sem apelos! Como poderia confiar que a PF, de fato, iria arquivar meu processo, dado a truculência ou incompetência que seus funcionários estavam demonstrando? Então no dia seguinte, contratei um advogado.

A interação do advogado de Jude com a Polícia Federal do Rio de Janeiro também suscitou dúvidas sobre as intenções das burocratas envolvidas no caso:

Quando meu advogado foi apresentado para as duas, uma virou para a outra e comentou ‘Olha só: o Sr. Thoreaux contratou advogado. Agora vamos ter que deportá-lo, mesmo'. Graças a deus, meu advogado foi um profissional excelente. Ele as ameaçou com um mandato de segurança e a conversa logo tomou um rumo mais cordial: 'Ahn, se a gente sabia que o Sr. Thoreaux queria realmente contratar um advogado, era só ele falar com a gente. Poderiamos ter avisado ele sobre com quem falar e teriamos evitado essa discussão'. Meu advogado classificou esse papo como abertura para um suborno.

Após de mais duas reuniões com a Polícia Federal, o advogado de Jude conseguiu frear o processo de revogação de residência e convenceu a chefe do setor de imigração a transformar sua avaliação do pedido de naturalização de “negativo” em ”neutro”. Todavia, o processo levou mais de um ano e custou perto de 4000 reais. Finalmente, em 2006, após de mudanças na PF do Rio de Janeiro decorrentes de um escândalo de corrupção, o processo de Jude foi reavaliado por outra equipe de burocratas com aval “positivo” e mandado para o Ministério de Justiça em Brasília. “E aí aconteceu o desfecho frustrante do processo,” como Jude afirma. Em função da longa demora entre o início do pedido de naturalização e seu desfecho, todos os documentos e atestados originalmente apresentados no caso perderam sua validade:

Em dezembro, 2006, 15 dias antes do final do ano, recebi uma carta do Ministério de Justiça dizendo que tive que refazer toda minha documentação dentro de um prazo de 30 dias ou meu processo seria arquivado. Liguei para Brasília, mandei cartas e faxes tentando explicar minha situação e pedir uma extensão, mas nunca recebi resposta. Portanto, agora estou com um processo de naturalização arquivado em Brasília e nenhuma noção de como proceder no caso. Meu advogado pense que a nossa melhor opção é processar o governo federal por violação de direitos constitucionais. Afinal das contas, como residente no Brasil por mais de 15 anos, tenho o direito a cidadania – isto, de fato, é um dos únicos direitos que a constituição brasileira concede ao estrangeiro. Mas tenho que confessar que, após de afundar quase 10 mil reais e 4 quatro anos nesse processo, meu entusiasmo para a naturalização já perdeu um pouco de seu vigor. Afinal das contas, como uma das funcionárias da PF comentou, quem mandou eu tentar ser brasileiro?

O que mais perturbe Jude, porém, não é o fracasso do processo:

Durante todo o processo, os funcionários do setor de imigração ficavam me dizendo que eu deveria ser feliz, pois ser estrangeiro no Brasil é bem melhor que ser estrangeiro nos EUA. Obviamente, esse povo é bem cínico, neh? Mas o que me irrite, profundamente, é ter que ouvir esse mesmo sentimento de amigos e até colegas brasileiros, estudantes das ciências sociais. Não é o fato que a burocracia não funciona que me decepciona e sim o fato que tantas pessoas, que deveriam saber melhor, continuam imaginando que o Brasil aceita o imigrante com braços abertos. Que o sistema está quebrado é fato óbvio. Porque, então, continuamos imaginando que ele funciona bem – melhor até do que na Europa ou nos EUA?

O principal empecilho encontrado por Jude – tanto na crise de 1992 quanto no processo de naturalização – é a natureza plástica das leis brasileiras que regulamentam a imigração e parece encorajar atitudes arbitrarias por parte dos oficiais da Polícia Federal encarregadas com sua supervisão. A atual Lei dos Estrangeiros, por exemplo, concede a permanência mediante ao casamento com um brasileiro, mas estipula que esse status só continua válido enquanto o casamento dure. De acordo com a letra da lei, uma viúva estrangeira poderia ser expulsa do país após de 40 anos de residência seguindo a morte de seu cônjuge brasileiro. Obviamente, tal situação seria extrema, mas nada na lei, como ela é escrita, a impeça. De acordo com os advogados da área de imigração, um estrangeiro que fique casado por um período superior a cinco anos antes de uma separação ou divórcio pode ter sua situação analisada pela Divisão de Estrangeiros. Todavia, as bases para essa “analise” não são explícitas e o processo é completamente opaco. No caso de Jude, isto nem foi oferecida como opção pela PF, que o informou que a expulsão seria “automática” e, aparentemente, tentou usar a vulnerabilidade do americano a essas arbitrariedades para solicitar uma propina .

O fato de Jude ter falhado em sua busca para se tornar brasileiro é, de certa forma, mais revelador das ideologias, estruturas e preconceitos subjacentes a burocracia que regula a imigração no Brasil do que um caso envolvendo outro tipo de imigrante, menos privilegiado. Afinal, como o próprio Jude reconhece, ele é longe de ser o alvo dos piores preconceitos que existem dentro do campo imigratório no Brasil: “Não posso reclamar que sou um excluído. Em geral, tenho sido bem tratado, talvez por ser classe média, educado na universidade, lusofalante, branco e americano. Mas fala sério: se eu tenho encontrado todos esses problemas que encontrei, imagina-se, então, um nigeriano, boliviano, ou chinês, particularmente se o cara fosse pobre, analfabeto, ou ilegal. Que chance ele tem? Se eu não consigo me tornar brasileiro, quem pode?”.

É uma pergunta que merece ser levada em conta nas discussões, agora em pauta no Congresso Nacional, sobre a renovação da Lei dos Estrangeiros no Brasil.

Whitening Theory in Brazil

2010-02-19T12:55:00.003-02:00

Modesto y Brocco's 1895 painting, The Redemption of Cain, offers a graphic representation of whitening theory. In it, an old black woman praises God for the fact that her grandson is white.

Over on Abagond’s blog, I was asked a pretty interesting question regarding Brazilian racial neuroses. In the question, however, there was a statement which sort of sums up American prejudices regarding Brazil. I thought it might be a good idea to address this statement as simply as I can, hopefully to give the internet a resource which explains Brazilian Whitening theory and practice to smart folks who aren’t specialists. If any colleagues or students of mine are reading this, a warning: This is off the top of my head, without references and it is a very abstract gloss on what we all know to be a complex topic. What follows below is a simplification of an extremely touchy issue for Americans who are interested in Brazil but who in general still think our country’s capital is Buenos Aires.
The comment was from a poster named eshowoman and this is her understanding of how race works in Brazil. I really like this comment because it puts in a very small nutshell, the most commonly held prejudice out there regarding Brazilian history:

Brazil is a place that promotes sex with black and native women as a way to “lighten up” the country.

As is the case with almost every stereotype or prejudice, at the bottom of this statement lies a hard core of truth which is then distorted and twisted around so that the result is a parody of history. Yes, it is true that Brazil (like the U.S.) is historically a deeply racist and white supremacist nation. And it is also true that, as in the U.S., the Brazilian white power elite spent a lot of time thinking about how to resolve their black and Indian “problems” – the "problem" in both countries ultimately being that blacks and Indians existed and the “solution” to said problem being their elimination.

My dislike of the phrase above, however, stems from the fact that it forgets that racists in both the U.S. and Brazil (and, indeed, in most nations in the Americas) have historically wished to “lighten up” their populations. What makes Brazil fairly (though not exclusively) unique in this respect was the fact that a certain portion of the Brazilian elite believed that this could be accomplished through correct breeding rather than through what their white American counterparts euphemistically called " competition” (i.e. killing or exile). From roughly 1880 on, a certain portion of the Brazilian power elite believed that the nation could be “whitened” and thus “improved” if whites were to mate with blacks and Indians.

"Whitening theory" in Brazil was hegemonic from about 1880 onto, maybe, 1940. 60 years out of the 500 that make up Brazilian history. To truly understand it, one needs to look at the context of the times. This period was the heyday of scientific racism in the United States and Western Europe and most of the world's top biologists looking at human race believed that intermixture between the races (i.e. miscegenation) led to immediate and utter devolution: the creation of "mixed" people who were morally, physically and intellectually inferior to their parents. (Something certain white and black Americans still believe unto this day, apparently…)

Well, this presented Brazil with a quandary. A huge portion of its population was black or native and even more of what was left was mixed. If the racist presumption regarding intermixture was true, then Brazil was doomed to be a degenerate, sub-evolved mongrel nation (again, sort of like what certain Americans - black and white - believe it to be today).

Now remember, racist scientific theory wasn't just an academic debate at this point in history: it was widely believed by everyone as representing the key to human behavior. It was very pop. Hell, even such black luminaries as W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey apparently bought into it, going on their comments at the time. If I recall correctly, Garvey once made the claim that North American blacks were more "evolved" than other types because of "evolutionary pressure" from "the highly aggressive Anglo Saxon". Everyone thought that biology held the key to explaining human social behavior and almost everyone believed that "purity of race" created an unbeatable evolutionary advantage.

Faced with this consensus, Brazilian scientists split into two general groups: those who agreed with racial purity and those who sought other information from the biological sciences to question it.
The first group believed that "natural competition" from the "superior white race" would eventually eliminate blacks and Indians in Brazil. Obviously, then, Brazil would have to import more whites to make up for this fall-off. The United States, by the way, was these gentlemens’ model because, according to them, the U.S. was well on the way to eliminating its "black problem" through actual physical elimination (though they usually used the euphemisms of their American counterparts and said things like "out compete"). I call these boys (and they were almost exclusively male) the "kill the bastards off" crowd.

The second group is perhaps best represented by João Batista de Lacerda. This group took a long, hard look at what little information existed about genetics and interbreeding at the time and concluded that there was no scientific basis for the notion that racial purity was inherently superior. They looked at dog breeders and plant breeders and concluded that, with the proper management, hybridism could in fact create a super race. For this group, the question then became "well, what is the proper mix for the future Brazilian super race?" Given that they were indeed racists (as even most Black scientists were at the time) and also white supremacists, it was pretty much universally agreed that Brazil had "too much black blood for its own good" and that importation of white blood from Europe via immigration was called for. The members of this crowd were the real "whiteners" in that they actively encouraged interracial mating and marriage.

Now, these groups were locked in a struggle and neither one could truly be said to have achieved hegemony within Brazilian thought until Gilberto Freyre came along in the 1930s and kicked the blocks out from under both by proclaiming, in Casa Grande e Senzala, that blacks were historically the most “successfully competing” race in Brazil in pure biological and cultural terms and that there was no reason at all to see them as necessarily inferior.

Neither the white purists nor the miscegenists were able to enact significant legislation of any sort in Brazil. Their debate provided an intellectual pastime for the Brazilian elite during the Belle Époque, but it had very little impact in the way of national – or even local – laws. This needs to be emphasized because I’ve met many Americans who seem to think that Brazil actually engaged in some sort of effective national eugenics policy during the “whitening” period. In fact, Brazil’s migration and colonization policy stayed firmly anchored to the country’s economic need for cheap agrarian labor, no matter what the ethnicity. Brazil imported immigrants from Europe during this period, but also from Japan, because that was primarily where people were migrating from and those nations (again, in the case of Japan) were willing in many cases to subsidize immigration.

In other words, Brazilian law makers and scientists might have talked a nice line about applying eugenics, but the country's immigration policy was, in general, more concerned with picking up field laborers on the cheap from wherever they could be had at a decent price.

For all its supposed import in the eyes of Americans, it is difficult for me to see whitening theory as really having had much of an impact on life as it’s lived in Brazil today. Long before the theory became popular, interracial sex was fairly common in Brazil. The theory seems to me to have simply put the best possible gloss on Brazilian reality in order to contradict the purist eugenicists who were dominant in Europe and the U.S. at the time and whose theories condemned Brazil to eternal degradation. Most of the people who were having heterochromatic sex in Brazil at the time probably never even heard about the debate.

Furthermore, Brazil was a racist and white supremacist nation long before whitening theory came into vogue. Whitening theory certainly didn't cause Brazilian racism and may be seen, ironically enough, represent Brazil's first tentative step away from classic white supremacy, in that its at least postulated some sort of incorporation of blacks, Indians and mestiços into the body of the nation. While Lacerda himself didn't believe this (stating in 1911 that Brazil would eventually indeed become entirely white through selective breeding), other "whiteners" believed that the process would create a truly unique and new race, a "Brazilian" race, that was neither black nor white. This was ultimately the view of Lacerda's student, Edgar Roquette-Pinto, who would be an immense influence on Gilberto Freyre and who go on to found Brazilian national public radio.

O Luar no Arpoador

2010-02-06T19:13:00.002-02:00

Deixa me encantar, com tudo teu, e revelar, lalaiá lá
O que vai acontecer nesta noite de esplendor
O mar subiu na linha do horizonte, desaguando como fonte
Ao vento a ilusão desce
O mar, ô o mar, por onde andei mareou, mareou
Rolou na dança das ondas, no verso do cantador
Dança que tá na roda, roda de brincar
Prosa na boca do tempo e vem marear ( Eis o cortejo... )
Eis o cortejo irreal, com as maravilhas do mar
“Das maravilhas do mar, fez-se o esplendor de uma noite”
G.R.E.S. Portela 1981

....por Ana Paula

Ontem, sexta feira, 6/02, 42 graus durante o dia, a noite 32 graus fiz um dos melhores programas deste verão escaldante e que comprovam que o Rio de Janeiro é uma das melhores cidades do mundo para se viver, morar ou simplesmente admirar.

Fui as 22h00min horas tomar banho de mar no Arpoador, eis minha surpresa: água agradável, iluminação excelente e uma quantidade absurda de gente se banhando naquele horário. Muito mais democrático que durante o dia. Entrei no mar de calcinha e sutiã de cores diferentes e que não combinavam nada e ninguém me reparou por isto. O que certamente aconteceria durante o dia, caso eu fizesse o mesmo. Fiquei um bom tempo dentro d’água aproveitando o fresquinho do mar e o ventinho que volta e meia chegava. Uma delicia só comparável aos meus dias de criança quando fazia alguma coisa fora do meu dia-a-dia e que me deixava extremamente feliz. Olhar o mar limpo com peixes pulando a toda hora e depois observar uma lua minguante amarela no céu acompanhada por um exército de estrelas me deu a certeza que esta cidade é capaz de oferecer aos mais simples dos mortais a sensação de que fora abençoado em algum momento por ter o privilégio de presenciar um belíssimo espetáculo da natureza com não sei quantas pessoas ao seu redor de todas as cores e classes. Uma das maravilhas do mundo!

Espero que os Eduardos Paes e Sérgios Cabrais da vida não destruam o que o Rio tem de melhor: sua capacidade de se reinventar através de situações casuais e que são transformadas em eventos pitorescos que fazem desta Cidade uma das melhores em termos de diversão, arte, “mistura”(não no sentido da produção de igualdade) e porque não...PRAZER. Espero que políticos como estes não matem estes sentimentos em nome da higienização e disciplinarização. Torço para que esta nova onda “Pereira Passos” que o Rio vem passando seja mais uma dentre tantas a naufragarem no curso da história.

Hey J.C! How 'bout some hay for the donkey?

2010-02-01T17:11:00.001-02:00

E você sempre quis saber porque todos na última ceia estavam virados na mesma direção...

(Shout out to Helen Lawson and her excellent blog!)

A Morte de Howard Zinn

2010-01-28T02:04:00.001-02:00

por Thaddeus

O historiador americano Howard Zinn teve uma influência tremenda na minha vida e sob minha visão dos Estados Unidos através de seu livro de seu livro A Peoples’ History of the United States (Uma História Popular dos EUA). O fato que seu livro, que revolucionou a historiografia americana, nunca foi traduzido para português é um sinal triste de quão pouco o Brasil conhece as coisas realmente importantes daquele país.

Nascido em 1922 numa família imigrante judaica e operária de Nova Iorque, Zinn lutou na Segunda Guerra como membro da tripulação de um avião bombardeiro B-17. Saiu do Exército transformado em pacificista convicto. Trabalhou nas estalagens de sua cidade natal e usou seus benefícios de veterano para se educar nas universidades de New York e Columbia, onde formou com seu PhD em história em 1958, com 36 anos (coragem, para vocês que, como eu, entraram nessa carreira tardiamente).

Entre 1956 e 1963, Zinn era um professor na universidade negra e feminina Spelman College em Atlanta Georgia, onde se envolveu na luta para direitos civis. Por causa de seu apoio às alunas de Spelman e sua crítica da ênfase da universidade em formar “jovens senhoritas” num momento em que as mulheres negras e universitárias engajavam-se na luta contra a segregação racial, o Zinn foi demitido de sua posição. Em 1964, empregou-se na universidade de Boston, da onde aposentou-se em 1988. Até o final de sua vida, continuou ser educador, escritor e militante.

Zinn era inimigo feroz do militarismo americano, se opondo ativamente às várias guerras dos EUA nos últimos 50 anos. Sua obra maestra, A Peoples’ History of the United States, recupera a história da luta de classe e do anti-imperialismo nos EUA e é leitura obrigatória para qualquer um que quer entender aquele país.

Sem dúvida alguma, foi o exemplo de Zinn (entre outros) que me deu ímpeto para ir atrás de meu próprio PhD e virar professor. Agora que ele se foi, o mundo ficou um pouco mais escuro e as chances da humanidade de sobreviver as próximas 50 anos minguaram uma tiquinha a mais.

Adeus a Howard Zinn, uma das poucas pessoas sobre qual podemos dizer, sem ironia alguma, “He was a great American”.

Satan responds to Pat Robertson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

2010-01-21T22:17:00.001-02:00

As you may have heard, Pat Roberton claims that Haiti's pact with Satan caused last week's earthquake. What you may not have heard is that Satan responded to Pat in the Minneapolis Star Tribune today. We present the following transcript of the Prince of Darkness' missive as a service to our readership.

(Tip o' the hat to Lily Coyle, who was apparently the first person to recieve Ol' Scratch's message.)

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

Black tourism in Brazil

2010-01-07T11:39:00.004-02:00

Capoeira, perhaps the single image most associated with Brazilian blackness by the English-speaking media.

Tourism Black and Blues

by Ana Paula da Silva

When African Americans talk about travelling to Brazil, two types of tourism tend to be discussed. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in so-called “heritage tourism” to Salvador da Bahia, supposedly Brazil’s blackest city. On the other, there’s the “scandal” of what author Jewel Woods has called black America’s best kept secret: black male sexual tourism in Rio de Janeiro. In recent articles and books, these two types of tourism have been set up as diametrically opposed faces of middle-class black America’s recently conquered global mobility. However, as an African Brazilian woman who is also something of a professional gringo watcher, what strikes me about these two forms of tourism is not their differences, but their commonalities.

Both are predicated upon structures which not only reserve global mobility to a privileged few, but which also reserve the right to represent and interpret what is seen and experienced to those same few. Simply put, both sex and heritage tourists are empowered to forge interpretations of Brazil which – given the English language’s global reach – end up drowning out the diversity, ambiguity and complexity of Brazilians own views of themselves and their country. To cop a metaphor from anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt, both forms of tourism end up engaging and empowering an “imperial eye”, which rearranges the landscape according to its satisfaction and, in so doing, creates interpretations which are widely seen as “more authentic” than native realities themselves.

It’s easy to see this black imperial eye at work in the context of sexual tourism. Jewel Wood’s recently published Don’t Blame it on Rio records several examples as does W. J. Cobb’s famous Essence article. Wood’s informants and Cobb himself often project as fact their preconceived fantasies of Brazil and Brazilians on the spaces and people through which they transit. According to these men, Brazilian women are supposedly more natural, easy-going and sexy than their American cousins, with no weight issues due to a better diet and more exercise. This will come as quite a shock to anyone who lives in Brazil and is confronted by our country’s growing obesity problem and high incidence of elective cosmetic surgery. It will also surprise Brazilian sexologists who report that Brazilian women have fewer partners, less sexual fulfillment and more conservative attitudes towards sex than most of the other women of the Americas. Finally, I’m sure that Brazilian men will find the descriptions of Brazilian women as “non-confrontational” and “non-feminist” to be amusing, to say the least.

These illusions are fairly easy to spot and critique, but what about the more subtle fantasies of “roots Brazilian culture” which are often articulated by heritage tourists?

To hear African Americans talk, heritage tourism is a more respectful form of wandering about the world, one which involves learning about “our history”.

Wait a minute: “our history”…?

Listen, I am down with the idea that there is a Black Atlantic, but it is a diaspora and diasporas are defined by cultural, political and historical diversity and yes, power imbalances. Though I may be deeply inspired by the history of the U.S. American civil rights movement, it is not my history. If it were my history, I wouldn’t need to be interrogated by immigration agents every time I visit New York, now would I? And yet Brazil’s history – which most Americans, black or white, can hardly be bothered to learn – is now somehow a part of black U.S. heritage.

The idea of heritage is itself disturbing to me. It’s one of those buzz-words which doesn’t translate well into Portuguese. What precisely is heritage, as opposed to history? Having pestered many Americans about the topic, it seems to me that heritage can best be described as a myth-making attempt to fix claims to certain elements of history as personal or collective property. It thus disturbs me when black Americans come to Bahia in search of their heritage. What they seem to be saying is that Bahia – and by extension, Brazil – makes no useful sense on its own terms and holds little interest for them except as it fits into their personal mythologies of identity.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the forms of “Brazilian black culture” which will be visible to most heritage tourists are those which most closely fit preconceived ideas of “African culture”. Capoeira and Candomblé will thus get the nod as “roots” and “real”, whereas Jiu Jitsu or evangelism will be seen as regrettable breaches of ethnic purity – if they’re seen at all. “Black Brazilian music” needs must have an “African” or “Latin” beat (whatever that means), because black Brazilians don’t play rock, European classical music, or (perish the thought!) heavy metal. And as for black Brazilian literature, well, it’s just not on the agenda at all. The next black American heritage tourist I meet who’s read Machado de Assis – let alone Cruz e Souza – will be the first and believe me, I’m not holding my breath.

Think about what this sort of attitude implies about black Brazilians. It implies that we have not participated in the modern world, that the only cultural forms which we can call our own are those which have supposedly been handed down from African ancestors. There is nothing wrong with traditional cultural forms, but since when has the be-all and end-all of blackness been tradition? Imagine African Brazilians flocking to the Carolina Sea Islands and declaring the Gullah to be the only “real” black culture in the U.S. Imagine a North America where jazz was not recognized as a black invention, where Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were unknown entities, where the black churches were seen as “sell-outs” because they didn’t openly acknowledge the Orixás. Many times I have heard African Americans describe Brazil as “backwards” simply because things here aren’t done the same way they’re done back in the U.S.. Hearing this, I have wanted to shout “But isn’t that precisely why you’re here? Because you believe that we belong to another time and world, one that is not your own, but one which you feel free to define for us?”

American tourists of all colors recognize their own diversity and yet often reduce Brazilians to a superficial singular type. Of course, all peoples the world over engage in this sort of behavior – it’s practically a defining characteristic of being human. The problem is not that it happens, but that American structures of power, prejudice and pride are so strongly imbedded in the global scene that they almost completely drown out anything Brazilians have to say about themselves which does not fit into the limitations predefined by Americans.

And this, my friends, is where the “nasty” African American sexual tourist and his supposed opposite, the “respectful” heritage tourist, meet and shake hands: smack dab in the middle of imperial privilege. While it might seem ludicrous to decry African American privilege, given the deep and abiding white supremacy that still characterizes mainstream U.S. culture, it must be recognized that African Americans are playing a growing role in designating what is “really black” and what is not in the world beyond the Empire’s borders. Whether it’s playas with a couple of months of accumulated experience in Copa’s red light district expounding on what it means to be female in Brazil, or earnest social workers back from two weeks in Bahia, rhapsodizing about the Boa Morte Sisterhood as a “living document of African culture”, black Americans are determining what is to be seen and what is to be overlooked in Brazil. In so doing, they are ascribing to themselves – consciously or not – the role of purveyors of black Brazilian authenticity. And black Brazilians, as was traditional in the days of the casa grande e senzala, are left to cater to strangers’ fancies, whether these be carnal or of a more rarified nature.

Personally, I have no problem with either breed of tourist. I’m happy Brazilians can make a buck selling dreams to Americans. But I reserve the right to call “brother” and “sister” those people who attempt to step eyond fantasy, who are willing to accept me as an equal on my own terms and who recognize that I and the peoples which surround me have histories which cannot be reduced to the building blocks of U.S. American heritage – whatever its color.

Photos: Geographer Milton Santos, dramaturge and Senator Abdias do Nascimento, symbolic poet Cruz e Souza. Three of the many icons of black Brazilian modernity which are largely off the black American radar screen when it comes to thinking about Brazil.

Tossing flowers to Iemanjá

2010-01-01T15:30:00.006-02:00

Hoje é dia de festa, hoje é dia de festa
É dia de levar flores para o mar
É dia de dar presentes para Iemanjá
Sabonete, colônia, água de cheiro
Batom, esmalte, rouge, pente, grampo, escova, jóias e espelho
"Hoje é Dia de Festa", Jorge Ben Jor

On Tuesday afternoon (29/12/2009), Ana Paula and I biked down to Copacabana to participate in the annual celebration/invocation of Iemanjá, the Afrobrazilian goddess of the sea by Rio de Janeiro's main candomblé and umbanda centers.

Tradionally, the festival occurs on New Year's Eve or one day before that. In the last few years, however, the city's preparations for their blow-out New Year's party has made it difficult to find a calm and open stretch of beach for a night's worth of drumming and singing. Additonally, increased religious intolerance on the part of Rio's ever-growing evangelical Christian community has made having the celebration on a fixed and pre-determined date without police support a Bad Idea. For five years now, Iemanjá's have had toi work together with the city government to assure that their celebrations won't be interrupted by fanatics spewing filth in Jesus' name.

So we'd had our ear to the ground for a couple of weeks and finally discovered on Saturday that this year's event would occur on Tuesday evening.

Basically, the Barco de Iemanjá is put together by several of the city's main terreiros and is set up principally for the faithful. Other events will be put on for other groups during the New Year's party, but these are mainly for gringos to see. The terreiros set up camp on Copacabana and start their rituals at about 5PM. There's singing and dancing and free consultations with the various divinities that show up and take possession of the faithful. People make their own altars in the sand and give offerings to Iemanjá, typically cheap champagne, perfume and flowers. Finally, a boat is put to sea filled with the terreiros' offerings to Iemanjá. The event opens a cycle of religious activity in Candomblé/Umbanda which will close on February 2nd, Iemanja's "official" day.

Offering boat.

We arrived at the beach at 5PM, just when everything was started, and set up our altar close to the waves. The wind was so strong that we couldn't get our candles lit, even after place them in a foot-deep sandpit. We eventually had to pile them all together and light them at once, as it was the only way to get and keep them going.

The faithful begin to gather.

Members of one of the various terreiros set up their "official" altar.

Our sad excuse for an altar.

Post-modern Pai de Santo, complete with Tommy Hilfinger bag....

It's interesting to note that while Rio's terreiros proudly display their African roots, they still insist on portraying Iemanjá as a white woman. Compare Iemanja´s portrait in New Orleans, for example, and her icon at the head of the main altar (shaped like a sea horse) during the 2009 ceremony in Rio:

The ironic thing about that New Orleans image is that it's an almost perfect copy of a typical Brazilian image sold all across the nation, except for the fact that Iemanjá is portrayed as brown. Below is a copy of the Brazilian original of that painting, set next to an African-Brazilian portrayal of Iemanjá. What this means is that somewhere in the past, some gringo voodoo practicioner came to Brazil, bought the most commercial Iemanjá image s/he could find, took it back to New Orleans and did a brown-skinned version of, essentially, a white lady. One wonders why this person didn't just pick up a black Iemanjá in the first place? What's more lulzworthy is that said Iemanjá image probably gets passed off to tourists as an "original" based on "slave drawings" or what have you...

At about 6PM, the singing and drumming began with a recital of Brazil's national anthem. This might sound odd to some folks until one remembers that African-Brazilian cultural phenomena such as candomblé, capoeira and even samba were seen as being "backwards" until they were enshrined as "national culture" by the Vargas administration in the 1930s and '40s. Since then, events of this sort have gone to some pains to emphasize their essential patriotic nature as "organic expressions of true Brazilian culture".

Shortly after the anthem, however, Iemanja's sister Iansã apparently got narked off and decided to piss all over us - or, as Ana puts it "Iansã wanted to mark the celebration with her blessings", In any case, the heavens opened up and poured rain. We beat a hasty retreat to a nearby beer kiosk, along with some 200 other faithful. The terreiro people took refuge under their tents and immediately started sending up prayers to Iansã. About an hour later, Saint Barbara decided to reduce the rain to a drizzle and we decided to head out for some Arab food.

"Look! Blessings!"

After dinner, I decided to head back to the celebration to snap some final photos. The terreiros were still thanking Iansã who was still raining blessings down from on high, though albeit not as violently as earlier. Many of the altars had been lit and were now beautifully ablaze, in spite of the drizzle. Also, the Orixá (who'd apparently also taken a powder in the beer tent during the downpour) had shown up and were dancing and giving out consultations.

Altars near the sidwalk, blazing away.

Woman praying at an altar.

Woman praying at the main altar.

Woman consulting a Preta Velha, apparently regarding some problem that her child is having.

One consultation went on for a long time and apparently involved a Preta Velha and some problem that a woman was having with her young daughter. Or it could be that the woman simply wanted the Preta Velha's blessing over her daughter. Only Umbanda has "Preto Velhos". Candomblé - at least the more traditional variants - tends to hew closely to the original African orixá. Here's what Wiki has to say about "Preto Velhos", the original "magical negros"...

They are wise, peaceful and kind spirits that know all about suffering, compassion, forgiveness and hope. They also often prescribe herbal remedies. The female counterpart of this spirit is the Preta Velha ("old black woman") who demonstrates maternal compassion and concern [can you say "mammy"?]. In the beginning of Umbanda, Preto Velho introduced himself as an old slave who died after being flogged for some unjust accusation; today, Pretos Velhos introduce themselves as old slaves who died in persecution after they had run away from the plantation.

It's no wonder that Umbanda tends to be seen as "whiter" than Candomblé (racists in Umbanda will even sya that it's "more evolved").

I wanted to talk to Exú, but the lines were just too long and I was worried that Ana would be wondering where I'd gotten to if I didn't get home on time. I avoided a rather nasty mugging while biking way home across Flamengo, so Exú was keeping an eye out for me, in any case and he has my most sincere thanks.

Pornography and objectification

2009-12-29T02:49:00.003-02:00

....by Thaddeus

Every half-bright college grad whoever took a freshman women’s studies course to kill a breadth requirement can tell you that pornography’s greatest sin is that it “objectifies women”. For years, I’ve considered this argument to be so much half-baked horseshit, but lately, Ana Paula’s research has caused me to revise my thinking, though not, perhaps, in the ways conservative feminists would expect.

I still have my doubts about porn as something which has the power to turn women into objects. In the first place, porn is most certainly not exclusively directed towards het men anymore: women and gay men now have their porn, too, so at the very least, objectification has become more democractic . Secondly, human sex and love relations under conditions of late capitalism are objectifying in general. When both women and men qualify potential mates in terms of whether they are “winners” or “losers” and feel that happiness with a partner can be guaranteed by crossing off a check list of characteristics, then we can truly say that objectification – the treating of human beings as if they were instruments, things, or (better yet) items of consumption – has become the central motif of our dating culture. It’s always been my belief that porn reflects this culture rather than causes it, given that so many people who wouldn’t dream of watching icky porn size up potential partners with a gimlet eye as to their imagined (often wholly imagined) qualities and defects, as critical as any basement dwelling nerd whoever said of Jenna Jameson, “yeah, she’d be cute if she just got bigger implants”.

Objectification is late capitalism’s main erotic impulse, so my view has been that one should either reject it entirely or roll with it: it’s useless to try and calve off Buttman 15 from Titanic when it comes to talking about objectifying sexual fantasy. As my friend Sadakni once cogently observed, “I’m not so much against porn as I’m in favor of the production of better porn. The current porn bores the hell out of me”.

However, Ana’s recent research has shown me that porn may very possibly be objectifying in a way that other sexual/affective fantasies aren’t.

By “objectifying”, however, I don’t mean treating a person as a thing or object without regards to their personal characteristics (the traditional feminist critique of porn). I mean that porn is objectifying in that it ends up transforming a subjective and ultimately abstract concept (sexual pleasure) into something concrete and measureable.

Reading her straight male informants’ descriptions of their sexual experiences with prostitutes, Ana and has been struck with how often what’s classified as a “first-class” sex sounds as if it came right out of the script for a straight-to-video porno film. “Good sex”, for most of these men, starts with a striptease, moves on to oral, then to vaginal and concludes with anal or oral, together with a face shot or with swallowed ejaculate (the woman, it goes without saying, is the “catcher” for all this activity). There are no descriptions of feelings of pleasure in these men’s reports, of tastes, smells, textures – of, in short, the vast majority of sensual experience which make up the warp and weft of sexual pleasure.

It is not that these men can’t feel these aspects of sexual pleasure: I’m very sure they do. But sexual enjoyment is a very private, subjective and even perverse thing. For men who invest a big portion of their male identity on being able to share with other men the details of sexual exploits, discussing sexual pleasure is a risky affair. What if one’s tastes are not understood?

And this is where porn comes in: it gives a simple and easily understood grading system for sex whereby experience can be shared and compared with other men. It gives men a common language and script for describing and judging sex in a way that – perversely (given that it’s porn) – can’t be considered perverse.

One could say that this insight is a fruit of our research with men who have sex with prostitutes, but a brief comparison with the ways men describe “good sex” in general, outside of prostitution contexts, should show that porn-as-model-for-description holds true generally throughout the west. It’s certainly the case among the men I deal with in general in Brazil or the U.S.

For the better part of a generation now, it’s been presumed that male sexuality is visual and performatic. Now I wonder if that’s so true, however. I wonder if it perhaps ends up being that way because it’s so important for men to be seen as sexually normative by other men and the visual spectacle of performance is simply the easiest way such normativeness can be constructed, discussed and shared.

Rudy Giuliani and the majestic equality of the law

2009-12-28T22:22:00.006-02:00

The poor have to labor in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

- Anatole France

Rudy sees a panhandler and imagines bloody murder.

Well, it’s official. The city of Rio de Janeiro will probably hire Rudy Giulani to tell us how to clean up our town for the Olympics. Let me tell you why this is a bad idea.

Rudy’s good at tooting his own horn and, to hear the man talk, he got rid of crime in the Big Apple in only 6 years by instituting a “zero tolerance” policy. According to Rudy, “It’s the logic of the broken window. You should fix it first before another is broken. In New York we tackled problems showing the population that disorder is not the example to be followed.”

Wonderful theory. In practice, however, what it means is that what Rudy did was simply apply Anatole France’s “majestic law” by basically outlawing poverty in Manhattan. “Disorder” was simply defined as behaviors that poor people engage in far more often than rich people and the police were then set to crack the heads of the “disorderly”.

Panhandling – asking for spare change on the street – was declared disorderly, as was being homeless or sleeping in subways and pissing on the street. Jaywalking was declared disorderly, as was prostitution and graffiti writing. Manhattan was thus made a free zone for those who had the disposable income to follow every city ordinance to the letter. Those who didn’t quickly learned to stay away.

And, by god, it turns out that in a capitalist society, if you get rid of the lumpen and ride tight herd on the working class, why crime does indeed go down – at least crime of the squalid, individualist sort (white collar crime unfortunately probably grew during the period: ain’t that right Bernie Madoff?)

But did Rudy really rid New York of crime? Let’s take a look at the facts…

Rudy was Mayor of New York from 1994 to 2002. Crime had already been dropping nationwide and in the New York region for several years before Giuliani took office and it continued to do so throughout Giuliani’s terms as mayor. The most intensive phase of Giuliani’s “zero tolerance”, however, occurred under the reign of Police Commissioner Bill Braton, from 1994-1996. Now take a look at what happens to crime in New York City and the neighboring city of Newark New Jersey from 1994 to 1996: it drops a bit in NYC but leaps up in Newark. For Brazilian readers not familiar with American geography, let me point out that Newark is just across the river from NYC. What was going on here was that a significant amount of criminal behavior seems to have migrated across the river from New York City.

In the following years, however, one can see that even crime in Newark took a big drop downwards. By 2002, at the end of Giuliani’s time in office, crime stats had dropped by about 50% in each city. Hold on, though: those stats are somewhat misleading. Note that in both non-Giuliani Newark and Giuliani-led NYC, violent crime dropped by almost exactly the same amount over the same period. Meanwhile, even in chaotic, poorly-administered, crime ridden Washington DC, violent crime dropped by about 30% during the same period. So while Rudy’s policies after 1996 may indeed have impacted upon crime, it’s doubtful whether they were responsible for the majority of the decrease, which seems to have been caused by an improving economy and demographic changes (i.e. more rich people living downtown and more poor and desperate people being shunted off to jail or to suburbs, where social chaos doesn’t impact on major city crime stats).

But the big thing Rudy introduced in New York and which most analysts seem to agree has had an impacted on crime has been CompStat. Those of you who have watched the hit T.V. series The Wire should be aware of what I’m talking about. That’s right: Rudy was responsible for bringing that CompStat into the world.

CompStat – or computer statistics is a management tool which pretty much allows police departments unprecedented control over crime statistics. Proponents claim that it allows police to quickly see and get atop of emerging crime patterns. Detractors claim that it can easily be abused to manipulate crime data so that improvements appear to be occurring where none actually occur.

CompStat vastly increases sensitivity to crime statistics all up and down the policing hierarchy and this, in turn, creates the sensation that “the numbers are everything”, which can lead to some fast and tricky play with the books. For example, a department which records 100 aggravated assaults and 400 cases of simple assaults in a year can easily create an illusory sense of improvement by using CompStat meetings to push for the qualitative reclassification of these crimes. If police manage to reclassify 75 aggravated assaults as simple, they can create the illusion of a huge drop in crime when, in fact, not much has happened.

In fact, CompStat has already been implemented in Brazil – in São Paulo – and, true to expectations, crime stats have dropped drastically. CompStat true believers will, of course, say this points out the system’s excellence. Anyone who understands the history of policing in Brazil, however, has cause to doubt that such a huge drop could, in fact, occur practically overnight simply through the implementation of what is effectively crime mapping. An integral component of the CompStat process is that it creates an enormous amount of “accountability” and thus competition between departments. The temptation to doctor statistics in such an environment is enormous and, of course, there’s no independent oversight to the process: we basically accept – or don’t accept – what the cops tell us.

But hey, the Military Police of Brazil would never lie to us, the citizenry, would they? Just looking at their corporate history should be enough to quell the doubts in any loyal citizens heart. If you know what’s good for you, that is…

Compared to Rio and São Paulo’s cops, the NYPD is a model of liberality and respect for human rights. Even so, the implementation of “zero tolerance” and CompStat on Mayor Rudy’s watch led to a distinctly human rights unfriendly environment. Several unarmed suspects were tortured and killed by the NYPD on Rudy’s watch, the most notorious case being the that of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was brutally sodomized by New York’s finest with a broken broomstick after being picked up for disorderly conduct in 1997. The general atmosphere of the Giuliani reign in New York was one of extreme disrespect for the rights of any human being who couldn’t afford a top-notch lawyer.

So this is the model which we are about to import to Rio de Janeiro, a city whose record of police violence and corruption is extremely well-documented. To the PM’s armored cars and assault helicopters, we shall now add an official ideology that sees any infraction as tantamount to murder and a computer statistics management program which will allow the police an unprecedented amount of control over the crime rate (on paper, if not in actuality).

What we are set to see is another assault on the poor of this city in the name of “hygiene” and “order”, the likes of which has not been seen since the Pereira Passos period in the early 20th century.

Is it too much to wonder whether the result will not be another revolt on the order of the Revolta da Vacina…?

Feliz Natal para todos!

2009-12-24T17:30:00.000-02:00

Black women and white men

2009-12-24T17:27:00.002-02:00

by Thaddeus
A recent trip to the U.S. really brought home the bi-racial dating issue to me. On our last three voyages to the U.S., Ana and I've noticed quite a few bi-racial couples, but always and without exception white women with black men. On this trip, we had a 24 hour layover in Atlanta and went out to see the city. Returning via MARTA to the airport after a long day, I leaned up against Ana, laying my head on her shoulder and closing my eyes. 10 minutes later, when I opened them again, the entire car was scowling at us.

It freaked Ana out more than me, to be sure. And what really freaked her out was the fact that all the passengers were black: "It was as if I was betraying the race," she said. "And yet I never see those kind of looks directed against black men - white women couples. What, because I'm a woman I can't sleep outside the race? Is that the deal here?"

Ironically enough, I'd just bought a library's worth of books about miscegenation, black women and interracial relationships in the U.S., so I've been reading up on this topic. Furthermore, Ana's recent line of research at USP ("What is it about Brazilian women?") touches on this point as does my on-going work with prostitutes and clients on Copacabana.

To put it simply, many authors have noted that one of the main differences between the Brazilian and American flavors of race relations is that heterochromatic relationships have traditionally encountered more (though far from total) acceptance in Brazil. This has led many Brazilians to conclude that Brazil is "less racist than the U.S". Meanwhile, Americans - and especially Black Americans - often feel that Brazilian tolerance of heterochromatic sex and marriage is, in fact, an expression of deepset and unchallenged white supremacist values. One can easily see these positions illustrated when one looks at both countries' literature, cinema and T.V. programing. Regarding sex between white men and black women, almost every single pop source I've ever seen in the U.S. situates these in a context of rape or extreme sexual exploitation. Meanwhile, Brazilian pop sources generally understand the same thing to be an expression of love which radically transcends the social limitations imposed by racism.

My view of the subject has yet to jell, but I feel I know enough to conclusively reject both the common American and Brazilian views regarding sex between black women/white men to be so much myth-making bullshit. Obviously, unequal power relations in both countries during and after slavery created massive opportunities for sexual exploitation and violence and just as obviously, the history of sexual and affective relations between black women and white men cannot be reduced to an unending sequence of rape and prostitution.

I`ve just finished reading J.W. Cash`s The Mind of the South (1940) and have found his views on the south's "rape complex" to be very illuminating and I can't help but wonder if this doesn't somehow play into current American views on sex between black women and white men. Basically, Cash takes a look at the claims and counterclaims regarding supposed black rape of white women in the south (remember that he was writing in 1940). While basically believing that such rapes were very few in number, Cash artfully sidesteps the whole issue by focusing on another point entirely. According to Cash, though "the actual danger [of black on white rape] was small, it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the [white] South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held off". This because, again according to Cash, the idea of virginal, pure, white southern womanhood was central to the notion of southern identity and "with this in view, it is obvious that the assault on the South would be felt as, in some true sense, an assault on her also."

We strike back to the fact that this Southern woman's place in the Southern mind proceeded primarily from the natural tendency of the great basic pattern of pride in superiority of race to center upon her as the perpetuator of that superiority in legitimate line, and attached itself precisely, and before everything else, to her enormous remoteness from the males of the inferior group, to the absolute taboo on any sexual approach to her by the Negro.... If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage?

What the Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the condition of Reconstruction was a passage for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a condition, moreover, which logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the term "rape" stood as truly as for the de facto deed. (Cash, 1940: 116)

Now, what I'm wondering is if something like this isn't what's currently operating in the U.S. today when we turn to black women and white men dating.

I do not wish to claim that Black American notions of peoplehood are simply a rerun (or a photo negative) of Southern White notions of the same: there are obviously many differences. However, it seems to me that there are certain general continuities between the two which might usefully illustrate the topic at hand. First and foremost, Black Americans' notions of identity are generally American concepts and by this I mean that Black Americans have not escaped from belief in blood, heritage and purity which have traditionally informed American notions of self and Other. More importantly, it seems to me that Black Americans have deeply imbibed from the well of American belief in exceptionalism and manifest destiny.

In short, like their Southern White cousins, Black Americans have a tendency to see themselves as a people marked by an essentially homogenous past and set of experiences which transcend class, region and even history. Furthermore, this sense of "peopleness" is characterized by a belief in the blood transmission of said identity. Finally, like Americans in general, Black Americans tend to believe that, as a people, they have a special relationship to God or Destiny - that they are a chosen people, in other words.

(I should take a moment here to point out the obvious: I am speaking in generalizing terms here, creating ideal types which might help us to discuss large-scale social phenomena. I am most emphatically not saying that everyone of such and such a type or nationality or whatever behaves in such and sort a way. I'm talking here about patterns and trends, not determinist laws. What I think we can say is that when you see a theme repeated a gazillion times in T.V. sitcoms, paperback romances, or on Oprah, one can say that it's a theme that has a certain impact on a given society, whether or not every single individual within said society agrees with it.)

Given all this, it seems to me that one of the things that makes black women's relationships with white men a relatively taboo subject in the U.S. is this abiding belief in Woman as the Mother of the Race, a belief whose ultimate matrix is precisely that southern enobling of womanhood as the centerpoint of racial identity that Cash talks about. Now, as far as this goes, this isn't such a peculiar thing: many anthropologists, after all, have pointed out that women are understood to be the "womb of the people" the world over. However, it seems to me that what gives this question a particular vehemence in the U.S. is the generalized American belief in themselves as an expansionist people with a particular covenant with God. In this sort of situation, marrying or dating outside of one's race can never be seen as a personal choice, but as an act which materially decreases the possibility that God's People will finally encounter salvation through the creation of heaven on Earth.

Aviso para os alunos de IFCS de Prof. Thaddeus, 22.12.2009

2009-12-21T16:11:00.000-02:00

Gente,

Fui ao IFCS hoje e descobri que o prédio estava fechado - uma supresa para mim, sendo que fui informado que ele estaria aberto até dia 22 de dezembro!

Temos, então, dois problemas:

1) Os alunos que furaram o prazo para entregar os trabalhos finais e que estavam esperando me encontrar hoje e amanha para conseguir entregá-los para uma nota reduzida. Visando a situação e excepcionalmente, estou aceitando trabalhos entregues por internet ATÉ DIA 24 DE DEZEMBRO no seguinte endereço: macunaima30@yahoo.com.br

2) Os alunos que queriam receber seus trabalhos de volta. Estarei na IFCS no dia 7 de janeiro, de 12:00-18:00hs, para devolver seus trabalhos e responder a quaisquer perguntas our dúvidas que vocês podem ter.

Quaisquer perguntas, podem fazer-las nos comentários, abaixo.

Abraços e boas festas para todo mundo!
Tadeu

Artigo de Milton Ribeiro sobre o caso Geisy

2009-11-13T22:42:00.004-02:00

Milton Ribeiro postou um artigo excelente sobre o caso Geisy aqui. Nos o traduzimos e esperamos que o Milton não veja problema com isto!

Milton Ribeiro has posted an excellent article on the Geisy case and we have taken the libery of translating it.

I spent most of this morning reading about Geisy Vila Nova Arruda, the girl who was virtually bitch-slapped and almost lynched and is now expelled from Uniban University in São Bernardo do Campo. 20 year old Geisy showed up at school for her classes in tourism dressed in a hot pink micro-skirt. This provoked the ire of the student body who tried to push her out of the school. The young lady needed to be taken under police protection and was removed from Uniban's corredors to shouts of “whore, whore!” It's not as simple as all that, however. Students accuse her of showing her ass in the corridor, provoking them and acting like a prostitute outside the classroom.

I say "So what?"

Let me talk a bit about from my own experience here. There are many attractive girls like Geisy from the lower classes — and indeed from all social classes — who reinforce their finances with certain paid activites in nightclubs. They not only pay for their provocative clothing with these activities, but also pay the expensive tuition of their private universities. I believe that this is not an exclusively Brazilian phenomenon and I do not believe that the students of Uniban have the right to expel or lynch one of their colleagues. In fact, I believe that the students of Uniban are not entirely adverse to nightclubs which sell sex, nor are they against Playboy, the bottle dance, dirty jokes or television in general. However, if Geisy really did show her ass to her classmates, then I think the university should act because doing such a thing is going too far in our culture, which only allows asses to be seen in silhouette or in "casual" attire on the beach.

Certainly, the situation is not as simple as all that. Geisy seems to be one of these women who has a desperate desire to appear in public. She's a natural candidate for a Big Brother Brasil, struggling against her lower-class origins with the weapons God has given her (and which don't seem to be all that potent, given what I've seen). In other words, what's shocked Brazil is the paradoxical expression of that which our society itself promotes: the social ascension of people who have little professional preparation through their use of beauty, hypersexualization and self-promotion - things which our country normally tolerates on a daily basis. Geisy's natural trajectory is either to find a son of the nouveau rich who likes that sort of thing, a career in the nightclubs, appearances in BBB and Playboy, or depression due to not being pretty enough to succeed at any of the above. Maybe because she feared that last possibility, Geisy also decided to invest in studying for her degree.

Look, folks: all of these options are fully within her rights!

What is unacceptable is the attitude of the Uniban administration, which decided to expell the young lady for the conflicts she supposedly created. Look, my dears, these administrators created the conflict themselves when they decided to take a powder when Geisy appeared in her dress and provoked the reactions that she did. I do not believe that Geisy would have shown her ass if there weren't students lined up to see it... We all know that the anonymity of the mob not only gives its masculine members a hard-on, but suffocates the superegos of all and sundry.

Geisy isn't a saint and probably went to school dressed the way she did in order to provoke the effect she produced and achieve the goal she's effectively achieved. At that point, when the riot was just getting underway, Uniban's administration should have intervened. Instead, the university allowed itself to become an extension of the nightclub, a situation which was Geisy and the rest of the participating students' evident responsibility and error. The students were apparently attracted to Geisy's forms in the same way that neonazis are attracted to homosexuals. Seeing as how she probably passed over the line of the socially acceptable and seeing as how her colleagues evidently felt themselves aggrieved, the natural terndency of the situation was an escalation towards violence.

Who is to blame? Those who can't impose a minimum measure of control on the corredors of the school they supposedly run and now think that they can hand-wave the problem away with a simple expulsion.

No, my dear deans! That is not the solution. The moment you created the situation, you, the university (and any university, it must be said, should be in the vanguard when it comes to tolerance and democracy) needed to embrace Geisy and talk to her in a civilized fashion, calm the mob down and secretly (quite secretly!) hope that she'll quickly be recruited by T.V. and thus disappear - something which, I assure you, will now definitely happen! Uniban, however, is run by fools. Fools so clueless that they've managed to mobilize the wrath of all of society against themselves, including the feminists and the biggest victims of violence and sexual intolerance, the gays.

The poor lads who run that school are not very smart, are they?

Image from satiro-hupper.blogspot.com

Discoteca Help to continue on into the new year / Cabral dá um help na Help

2009-11-12T21:34:00.004-02:00

Following discussions with ALERJ, Hizzoner da Gub'nor Sérgio Cabral has magnanimously allowed Help to continue until after the New Year and possibly until after Carnaval. On Monday, November 16th, we'll see if it's true.

Aw... Doesn't it make you just feel all warm 'n cuddly about Cabral? Note in the stories that all they discuss are the 200 club workers - not the estimated 1000 garotas de programa who make a living by using the club to sell sex. Apparently, these women are beneath the state's notice...

Upon hearing the news, Mongers worldwide shit a rainbow so big it can be seen from space.

A informação pode ser visto no Grobo de hoje....

Uniban bota p'ra fuder.

2009-11-12T20:47:00.005-02:00

O mais que pensamos sobre o caso, o mais que acreditamos que o fator de menos importância na história é o tamanho do vestido da Geisy. O que importa, sim, são as questões morais envolvidas - questões que, até agora, poucos agentes da mídia têm levantado, muito menos discutido.

Uma das histórias que se conta por ai é que alguém descobriu que a moça é garota de programa. A notícia espalhou-se pela a universidade e culminou com sua ida de vestido pink curto, como uma espécie de tapa na cara de seus difamadores. Logo em seguida aconteceu o quase linchamento da aluna sob o coro: "puta, puta, puta".

Caso seja verdeiro, este dado demonstra muito claramente como o estigma funciona. Ser prostituta não é ilegal no Brasil, mas é moralmente execrável frente a sociedade dita "normal". A atitude dos alunos da Uniban acaba sendo legitimada pelas correntes conservadoras de ONGs e religiões que tentam "salvar" as mulheres da vida e do próprio Estado que prega a "limpeza" e "higienização" das ruas - leia-se o confinamento das prostitutas em inferninhos onde são controladas por cafetões.

Dentro deste contexto, por que não "limpar" a universidade também? Uma prostituta deve ter o direito de frequentar escola? Por que ela não fique em seu cantinho, longe dos homens e mulheres "de família" que pagam mensalmente a faculdade para terem seus diplomas? Ela precisava "sair do armário"?

Para os alunos, funcionarios e todos aqueles a favor da expulsão da aluna, esta é a atitude correta. Se interpelados, provavelmente diriam que nada tem contra as garotas de programa, desde que estas fiquem em seu lugar: bem distantes do ambiente em que transitam pessoas "normais". Esse pensamento é corroborado pelo políticos como o atual Prefeito do Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, que diz ter nada contra as garotas de programa, desde que essas permanecem em pequenas zonas restritas . Ele é refoçado por ONGs salvacionistas que afirmam que as prostitutas só precisam de treinamento com empregadas domésticas ou babás para deixar a "degredação" por trás.

Devemos estar falando sobre a dupla moralidade em que a mulher ainda está infernada. Se um homem é sexualmente ativo, a sociedade acha fantástico. Se ele consegue que as mulheres o pagassem para seus dotes sexuais, mano, demaaaaaaaais! Mas que malandro, hein? O cara tem um pau assim, ô!

Mas se uma mulher é sexualmente livre, continua sendo uma sem vergonha: enfim, uma puta. E puta não é cidadã em nossa sociedade, nem dono de seu próprio corpo: é de quem quiser.

Esse foi o preconceito que a Geisy enfrentou na Uniban, e não uma reação ao cor, nem a corte de seu vestido.

Gotta love that collar. Amirite, amirite?

Sem querer levar a situação levianamente, o Thaddeus acha que o melhor comentário sobre o caso, até agora, encontra-se no blog de humor Kibeloco: "Estreando em Brasileirinhas em 5, 4, 3, 2..." Quer dizer, vamos torcer para que a moça sabe gerenciar bem seus 15 minutos de fama, neh?

Hitler gets upset with comparisons between Nazis and UNIBAN

2009-11-12T15:58:00.002-02:00

This is making the rounds on Youtube. Yet another in "The Bunker" series....

Hitler desabafa sobre a crise UNIBAN (clique aqui para o vídeo).

Aluna da Uniban é expulsa por usar saia curta

2009-11-09T11:33:00.013-02:00

Geisy Arruda, 20, e a saia que abalou Uniban.

Estamos assistindo, abismados, toda a situação da aluna Geisy,da Uniban que culminou com a sua expulsão sumária. Tudo porque a moça estava com um vestido vermelho curto.

A história começou quando a aluna foi para a faculdade com o tal vestido e os alunos se revoltaram e quase a lincharam. A instituição, além, de não conter os colegas de Geisy ainda decidiram expulsá-la.
Aqui vai uma série de reportagens sobre o caso retirados do "O Globo" e também da "Folha de São Paulo"...

Os linchadores da Uniban

    SÃO PAULO - A notícia da expulsão de Geisy Arruda pela Uniban é estarrecedora. O informe divulgado ontem pela direção da universidade, por meio do qual a aluna ficou sabendo da decisão, é um panfleto obscurantista que requer análise. Ele transforma a incitação ao estupro de uma jovem acossada na universidade por algumas centenas de marmanjos em "reação coletiva de defesa do ambiente escolar".
    Eis o que conclui a "sindicância" da Uniban: "Foi constatado que a atitude provocativa da aluna buscou chamar a atenção para si por conta de gestos e modos de se expressar, o que resultou numa reação coletiva de defesa do ambiente escolar". Geisy, diz a nota, ensejou "de forma explícita os apelos dos alunos" e foi expulsa por "flagrante desrespeito aos princípios éticos, à dignidade acadêmica e à moralidade". O título do informe agrega ao conteúdo um toque de humor negro: "A educação se faz com atitude e não com complacência".
    De que educação falam esses farsantes? Devemos chamar essa fábrica de açougueiros de instituição de ensino? Que princípio ético ou dignidade acadêmica podem sobreviver a uma escola que pune a vítima humilhada para respaldar a brutalidade e a covardia de uma turba excitada com a própria fúria?
    Como se sentirão agora as garotas que estudam na Uniban? Estarão os rapazes liberados pela direção a agir sempre assim em defesa do "ambiente escolar"?
    As cenas são conhecidas: "Pu-ta!, pu-ta!", "vamos estuprar!", "solta ela, professor!". Um aluno chutou a maçaneta da porta da sala em que a moça estava encurralada; outros tentaram colocar o celular entre suas pernas para fotografá-la.
    A Uniban invoca um zelo pedagógico que não tem para satisfazer a vontade fascista da maioria e preservar os negócios. Com sua decisão, ela deu chancela institucional aos atos de barbárie praticados em suas dependências. Mais do que isso: ao linchar Geisy, a universidade consuma o serviço que os alunos haviam deixado pela metade.
________________________________________

MEC vai questionar expulsão de aluna
Pasta pedirá esclarecimentos à Uniban e pode solicitar que a universidade se comporte como "instituição de educação"
Ministra Nilcéa Freire (Políticas para as Mulheres), também criticou a medida, que, para ela, demonstra intolerância e discriminação
    O MEC (Ministério da Educação) anunciou ontem que pedirá esclarecimentos à Uniban sobre a expulsão da estudante Geisy Villa Nova Arruda, 20, que foi hostilizada por outros alunos ao usar um vestido curto para ir à aula do curso de turismo, no campus da universidade em São Bernardo do Campo (Grande São Paulo).
    Também ontem, por meio da Agência Brasil (agência oficial do governo), a ministra Nilcéa Freire, da Secretaria Especial de Políticas para as Mulheres, afirmou que irá interpelar a universidade -segundo ela, a atitude demonstra "absoluta intolerância e discriminação".
    Ontem, a Uniban publicou em jornais de grande circulação de São Paulo comunicado informando que Geisy "desrespeitou os princípios éticos, a dignidade acadêmica e a moralidade" e, por isso, foi expulsa.
    Entre seis e oito alunos (a Uniban não soube precisar) foram suspensos por participarem do tumulto, em 22 de outubro. A aluna teve de deixar o campus escoltada pela PM.
    "Vamos analisar o que ocorreu e, em vista dos esclarecimentos da universidade, o MEC pode recomendar que a universidade se comporte como uma instituição de educação", afirmou Maria Paula Dallari Bucci, secretária de Educação Superior do ministério. ""É um absurdo. A estudante passou de vítima a ré", disse Nilcéa.
    Segundo Pedro Estevam Serrano, professor de direito constitucional da PUC-SP, a Uniban pode ser desativada caso fique comprovado que foi intolerante ou discriminou a estudante. "Não é uma mera sindicância que pode levar à expulsão. A universidade deveria ter aberto um processo administrativo e dar a ela o direito de defesa."
    O MEC pode suspender a prerrogativa de autonomia da instituição -impedindo-a de criar cursos ou abrir vagas- e até descredenciá-la. "Mas é a pena mais grave, e é até leviano eu falar isso", diz Bucci.
    De acordo com ela, a Secretaria de Educação Superior não tem poder para fazer com que a Uniban reintegre Geisy, mas isso pode ocorrer. "É raríssimo acontecer de uma instituição não se abalar com a recomendação. Normalmente, a instituição responde e diz que quer se adequar."
    Para o assistente jurídico da Uniban, Décio Lencioni Machado, o MEC não pode interferir nas questões administrativas da instituição. "Foi uma decisão interna, cumprimos o nosso regimento." Ele diz ainda que a universidade deu à estudante direito de defesa, mas que ela não quis indicar pessoas que pudessem defendê-la.

Inquérito
    João Ibaixe Júnior, advogado de Geisy, afirmou ontem que pedirá a abertura de um inquérito policial na Delegacia da Mulher de São Bernardo do Campo para apurar o tumulto.
    Segundo ele, há a possibilidade de os envolvidos -incluindo os alunos que a hostilizaram e funcionários e responsáveis da universidade- terem cometido sete crimes: difamação, injúria, constrangimento ilegal, ameaça de prática de mal injusto, cárcere privado, incitação ao crime e crime contra a dignidade sexual. A pena total pode chegar até a oito anos.
(LUISA ALCANTARA, TALITA BEDINELLI E SILVA E ALENCAR IZIDORO)
________________________________________

A barbárie na universidade
ARTHUR ROQUETE DE MACEDO
ESPECIAL PARA A FOLHA
    A expulsão da aluna Geisy Arruda da Uniban foi o epílogo de uma sucessão de equívocos marcada pela intolerância, pela falta de educação e pela ausência de política educacional e administrativa compatível com as responsabilidades, as finalidades e as diretrizes de uma instituição universitária. Ao ver na TV as cenas deprimentes, a impressão é que estamos numa instituição localizada em outra época e outra parte do mundo e não no século 21, num país com as características do Brasil.
    Pelas informações conhecidas, a instituição puniu sem desfaçatez a vitima de um assédio coletivo brutal, colocando que "a aluna tem frequentado a universidade em trajes inadequados". Quais as providências tomadas para impedir o acesso da estudante com os trajes definidos como inadequados? Existe na universidade um manual de conduta? A instituição tem condições de avaliar a obediência a este manual?
    Em outra argumentação a instituição diz que: "a aluna fez um percurso maior que o habitual, aumentando sua exposição". Pelo visto, na universidade, a autonomia para ir e vir, há tanto consagrada na civilização ocidental, não é assegurada. Seria indispensável saber se não há mecanismo que impeça que uma horda de estudantes intolerantes e mal-educados possam molestar um ser humano, colocado em uma posição totalmente indefesa, tanto que foi preciso proteção policial para que pudesse sair em segurança.
    A presença entre os estudantes de meninas mostra o desconhecimento da luta das mulheres para conquistarem o direito de frequentar, em igualdades de condições com os homens, os mais diferentes espaços da sociedade contemporânea.

ARTHUR ROQUETE DE MACEDO é membro da Academia Brasileira de Educação, ex-reitor da Unesp e já integrou o Conselho Nacional de Educação
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Culpar a vítima: essa foi a estratégia

HÉLIO SCHWARTSMAN
DA EQUIPE DE ARTICULISTAS
    Culpe a vítima. Essa foi a estratégia utilizada pela Uniban para, vá lá, "reduzir os danos" provocados pelo "affaire" Geisy. Acho que não chamaram ninguém do Departamento de Marketing para a reunião que definiu a expulsão. Nem da Pedagogia, nem o professor de Ética (se é que têm um).
    Chamaram apenas alguém do Jurídico, o qual concluiu que a agora ex-aluna violou o artigo 215 e seguintes do Regimento Interno da universidade, ao usar "trajes inadequados" e fazer "percursos maiores que o habitual".
    Não é preciso pós-graduação em astrologia para perceber que o impacto da decisão não é dos mais auspiciosos para a universidade.
    Conseguiram transformar o que já era um pesadelo de relações públicas naquilo que o pessoal das Letras Clássicas chamaria de "defaecatio maxima" -e que o pudor que faltou aos dirigentes da instituição me impede de traduzir.
    A provável ação indenizatória que Geisy moverá contra a escola acaba de ter seu valor majorado. A Uniban também deve ter perdido potenciais candidatos a estudante. Eu, pelo menos, pensaria várias vezes antes de matricular meus filhos numa faculdade que busca proteger um bando de arruaceiros atacando o elo mais fraco.
    A estratégia de culpar a vítima é bem conhecida. Se uma garota foi estuprada, ela é pelo menos parcialmente responsável por seu destino: de alguma forma, provocou o estuprador, seja por utilizar roupas insinuantes, seja por meio de atitudes libidinosas. Afinal, nada acontece "de graça".
    A psicologia explica tal atitude como um autoengano que visa a nos manter em posição de controle: se eu não me comportar "mal" como a "vítima", não estou sujeito ao mesmo risco. Tal operação mental nos permite persistir na crença de que o mundo é um lugar justo. Não é, como a Uniban acaba de demonstrar exemplarmente.
________________________________________

Saiômetro

A patrulha da roupa curta vai além da Uniban; o Folhateen foi a sete faculdades conferir o que se usa (e o que se fala) em dia de aula
    E não é que, passadas quase cinco décadas da invenção da minissaia, as pernas de fora ainda são motivo para saia justa?
    Após o já clássico episódio que correu a internet na semana passada, em que uma garota foi às aulas na Uniban (em São Bernardo do Campo) com um vestido curto e saiu de lá escoltada pela polícia sob xingamentos de outros alunos, o comprimento das saias e dos shorts das colegas se tornou assunto obrigatório em qualquer rodinha universitária. Como, aliás, acontece todos os dias.
    Na Faap, por exemplo. "Aqui, pelo menos, as meninas se vestem bem. Mas tem uma menina que é meio "vaga". Na verdade, acho que ela tem problemas. Ela usa "sainha" de ir à praia para vir à escola", dizia Daise Davanzo, 22, estudante de economia, na noite de sexta-feira.
    Carolina Fôlego, 25, que faz arquitetura na Uninove, acha "ridículo tamanho de saia ser assunto" no ambiente universitário. "O pior é que, se aparece uma menina crente, de saia no pé, também ridicularizam. As pessoas se preocupam demais com os outros. Estamos aqui para estudar."
    Na mesma noite de sexta, o Folhateen visitou FGV-SP, Mackenzie, Faculdades Oswaldo Cruz, PUC-SP, USP, Uninove e Uniban. Em geral, os estudantes (inclusive os da Uniban) afirmaram que condenam a atitude dos colegas da estudante xingada, mas as opiniões deixam claro que o excesso de vigilância não é exclusivo daqueles alunos de São Bernardo.
    No curso de direto da USP, no Largo São Francisco, Maira Pinheiro, 19, se ofendeu com o tratamento dado a uma aluna, dois anos atrás. "Ela foi de short a um debate sobre a eleição do centro acadêmico e uma pessoa da oposição teve a pachorra de perguntar se ela foi de short para ganhar mais voto", relata, indignada.
    Ana Carolina Aggio, 19, do curso de artes cênicas da USP, diz que ali esse tipo de piada ou ofensa coletiva não aconteceriam. "Lá no departamento [na Escola de Comunicações e Artes], a gente sempre toma banho de mangueira, ficamos só de sutiã. Se isso [discriminação] acontecesse aqui, seria na Poli [Escola Politécnica]."
    Marcelo Canovas, 20, e Adonis Maitino, 20, do curso de engenharia de produção, estrilaram com o comentário e disseram que os futuros engenheiros são respeitosos e tolerantes "com a diversidade".
    Rita Catunda, 19, estudante de cinema na Faap, combinava na sexta-feira meia-calça roxa e short jeans. "No meu trabalho, já fui discriminada por causa deste short", conta. "Me aconselharam a ir mais vestida no dia seguinte, em tom de brincadeira. É mais que roupa. Conta também o lugar e, mais ainda, o comportamento."
    Sobre o caso da Uniban, muitos estudantes falaram em "linchamento" e "covardia" de pessoas que se tornam agressivas quando estão protegidas pelo anonimato da multidão.
    "É como no "bullying" da escola. Quem tem coragem de começar? Ninguém. Mas, depois que um fala, todo mundo vai atrás. Na hora em que a polícia quiser saber, ninguém vai assumir quem começou. Com o apoio coletivo, veem que não vão se ferrar sozinhos", diz Fernanda Naresi, 19, da publicidade do Mackenzie.
(CHICO FELITTI, DANIEL BERGAMASCO, JAMES CIMINO e TARSO ARAÚJO)

Benvind@s ao Mangue!

2009-11-09T10:57:00.003-02:00

Este é um blog voltado para discutir as temáticas, raça, sexualidade, gênero e suas intersecções não só sob o aspecto sócio-antropológico, mas tentando mapear todas os pontos de vista e perspectivas possíveis. São bem vindas opiniões e contribuições de pesquisadores e interessados nestes temas.

The Hottest Spot North of Havana: Why Gringos Come to Rio for Sex

2009-11-06T12:07:00.004-02:00

Americans often ask, “Why are so many men going to Rio de Janeiro for sex?” This is often followed by another question:“What is it that Brazilian women have that American women don’t?”

It is this second question – the presumption that Brazilian women are somehow sexually unique – that ends up obfuscating the first.

To put it bluntly, Brazilian women do not “have” anything in particular that is attracting American and European men. Brazil – and more particularly, the city of Rio de Janeiro – attracts foreign men not because of the quality of its women, but because of a series of deeply rooted, socio-culturally constructed fantasies about tropical destinations in general and Rio and Brazil in particular. These fantasies are then combined with opportunities – opportunities provided by one of the most well-established legal, international prostitution scenes in the western hemisphere – to construct a sort of sexual never-never land, where male desires regarding women are apparently fulfilled by female realities. Note that "apparently".

In Rio, American fantasies meet with Brazilian realities to create a virtuality: the “Brazilian” woman. Said virtuality, however, is overdetermined by a long-standing Euro-American cultural tradition which associates Brazil and the city of Rio de Janeiro with tropical beaches, exotic femininity and free and easy sex. It is also overdetermined by a very jaded carioca view of foreigners as gullible innocents who are deeply influenced by just such a view of the world.

Long before the sexual tourist arrives in Brazil, he has a vision of the country. That vision might best be presented, in capsule form, by a refrain from the old Barry Manilow song, Copacabana:

Copa, Copacabana, the hottest spot north of Havana.

The fantasy view of tropicalist sex and love is so deeply embedded in Euroamerican conscience that usually, all I have to do is mention to a group of foreigners that I study Copacabana and someone will start singing that above refrain. (Jewel Woods even has it as a lead in to one of the chapters of his book, Don't Blame it on Rio: Why African American Men Go to Brazil for Sex.) The interesting thing about the song, however, is that Copacabana is, of course, NOT to the north of Havana, but far to the south. The song itself is about a fantasy Copa, a bar situated in North America in the 1940s. The fact that it seems to spring to the fore of the Euroamerican conscience whenever one mentions the REAL Copacabana is an indication of how deeply rooted fantasy tends to obfuscate reality when talking about Brazil, Rio and sex.

More tellingly, however, is a second song, equally emblematic but known almost exclusively by Brazilians. When I tell my friends and neighbors that I study Copa, this song, entitled “Somos las muchachas de Copacabana”, springs to their lips. It, too, is an interesting song. Originally produced by Chico Buarque de Holanda for a musical and sung by prostitutes in that play, it goes:

If the client wants a rumba dancer
We got it
With Bahian spices.
We got a lil’ Brazilian Cuban piece
Dressed in a sombrero
Or a Paraguaian Jamaican chica
If that’s more the gringo’s style

After which the women sing the refrain…

Somos las muchachas de Copacabana

...or “we are the girls of Copacabana”. It’s notable that this refrain is sung in Spanish when the language spoken in Brazil and along the Copacabana seafront is, of course, Portuguese. What the song acknowledges is that you can have everything you want in Copa, that furthermore, that the women of Copa know what you, the gringo, want and that, finally, what you want is some sort of weird, indiscriminate mixture of “latinness” – anything exotic. Stick a black woman from the Brazilian state of Bahia in a sombrero, call her a Cuban and teach her to do the rumba and bam, the gringo client will be satisfied.

The juxtaposition of these two songs, both equally popular and paradigmatic in their home countries, highlights out a reality: gringos fantasize about tropical sexual paradises, but they have little to no knowledge about the countries they visit and therefore hard cash can be made catering to their fantasies, no matter how ridiculous these might be.

There is, however, one final thing which the juxtaposition of these songs brings to light. Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” hit the charts in 1978. Chico’s "Muchachas de Copacabana' was also written in 1978 and could even, perhaps, be an ironic nod to Manilow – stranger things have happened. However, Chico’s play is set in 1940 and Brazilian audiences saw nothing incongruous about Copa prostitutes putting on a show for gringo clients in that setting. In other words, where Lola, in the 1970s, had been a show girl thirty years ago (when they used to have a show), in Copa in 1978 the show had been ongoing since the 1940s… and it has not stopped since then.

Among people who study sexual tourism, there exists the belief that this is necessarily a recent phenomenon, something concretely linked to globalism and thus no more than a quarter century old. Our research, however, indicates that sexual tourism – or something very much like it – has been ongoing in Rio de Janeiro since the Portuguese crown opened Brazilian ports for international trade in 1807. Prostitution was very well established in the city at that time and prostitutes could range from slaves working in brothels to very sophisticated and wealthy courtesans. All prostitutes, however, seem to have conducted quite a lot of business with transient foreigners, for 19th century Rio de Janeiro was one of the Atlantic’s busiest international ports. Local folklore, coming down from those times to our days, portrays gringos and prostitutes as a commonly encountered part of the carioca urban scene and I have documents from the American Consulate in Rio commenting upon the interactions of local prostitutes and foreign tourists as early as 1917.

In other words then, Rio is a city which has had a long tradition of making money off of providing for the sexual needs of foreign visitors. Furthermore, it is a city which has been in deep and abiding contact with what we might call “the West” since the late 18th century. It is not the kind of community of innocent, uncorrupted natives, so often presented by anti-sexual tourism activists, which has recently been thrown, higgledy-piggledy, into the post-modern, post-industrial world by the advent of cruise lines and cheap air fares. Rio is a city which is part of the western world and has been so for some centuries. Furthermore, it is a city which is by and large aware of the fact that, to most of the west, it is inescapably exotic and that exotic, in this context, means sexual.

So who are the foreign men who are having a lot of sex in Rio de Janeiro and what are their fantasies, precisely?

When we talk about sexual tourism in Brazil, we are by and large talking about one main venue: the beach neighborhood of Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro. This 24 square block area concentrates some 80% of the city’s and 40% of the country’s sexual tourism consumers. The majority of foreign men who come to Brazil looking for sex come to this neighborhood and rarely stray out of it. A significant portion of itinerant foreigners who are sexually active in Brazil can be found in Copa.

It must be admitted that the majority of these men are not sexual tourists, if by sexual tourist we adopt the UN’s definition: “people who use the structures of the tourism industry to travel to other countries for the primary reason of engaging in commercial sex with the natives”. Most gringos in Copa are there for business, personal, or conventional tourism reasons, not specifically sex. I call these guys “accidental sexual tourists”. They come to Copa for two main reasons: commercial sex there is relatively safe, cheap and hygienic and Rio is so heavily associated with sex in the western mind that it is almost inconceivable to these men that they could come to the city and not have sex. However, it is generally quite difficult for a non-Portuguese-speaking itinerant foreigner to have sex with a carioca woman unless he is socially inserted by friends or colleagues into a given scene. Brazil is notorious for having a relational society in which personal connections trump institutional connections almost every time. The idea of a “singles bar” doesn’t really resonate here: you go to bars with friends where you meet up with other friends and, perhaps, some strangers. Generally, however, women don’t have sex with complete strangers in our culture, especially if the man are just passing through town and ESPECIALLY if they don’t speak Portuguese and don’t know a living soul in the city.

Thus stymied in the “normal” dating scene, these guys head to Copa, which everyone – foreigners and Brazilians – knows is full of gringos looking for women and women looking for gringos. Sex can easily be had there: for a price.

A very small minority of the foreign men having sex with prostitutes in Rio are what one could legitimately call sexual tourists – i.e., guys who are in Brazil specifically for sex. This minority is interesting, however, because, unlike accidental sexual tourists, its members tend to publically reflect upon why they come to Rio. Our interviews with and observations of these gentlemen have lead us to create an ideal typification of how they see Brazil and why they are here. There are basically six reasons, three of which might be labeled “cultural” and three “structural”.

Culturally, these guys evidence a series of beliefs about Brazil and its women.

1) They believe that the city is poor and that the women in it are poorer. This forces, in their words, “normal” and “good” women into prostitution. Thus, a Brazilian prostitute, according to these guys, is often a “better woman” than, say, a North American non-prostitute professional. In other words, in the sexual-affective market, these men believe that “good bargains” can be made in Brazil because “good, normal” women are sexually, commercially available due to the country’s poor economy.

2) They believe that the social relations in the city are a reflection of what they consider to be their country’s past, that “women in Rio are like what women were before” in the U.S. “Before what” is the question here and the answer, according to these guys, is usually “feminism” or “women’s’ lib”.

3) Finally, they believe that Brazilian women are endowed with a sort of hyper-sexuality, which is the result of a combination of miscegenation (or racial mixing) the tropical climate and a non-puritan mentality. Supposedly, Brazil is blessed in this sense because, this mixture means that a lot of different physical types of women are available and also because each individual Brazilian woman is a “hybrid” which combines the best physical traits of all races. “Like Beyoncé” is what I frequently hear, in this respect. Finally, Brazil’s tropical climate and its Catholic background are understood as somehow sexually liberating these women. How this supposedly occurs is not so clear, but it’s a common explanation these men present.

However, these men also salient structural factors that make Rio their choice destination for sex. These include:

1) The fact that, all things considered, a dollar spent in Brazil buys more and better sex than the same dollar spent in the U.S. This has begun to change, however, as the dollar has nose-dived in comparison to the Brazilian real over the past few years and many men who used to like Brazil, for this reason, are now claiming that they get “better deals” in Argentina, Colombia, or Asia.

2) They claim to like the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil, which means that they are not as much at risk from the police or from the mafia (who generally are seen as controlling prostitution in countries where it’s illegal). They also believe that legal prostitution means less exploitation of the women involved and thus a greater degree of freedom on their part, which results in better service for the client.

3) Finally, they tend to be impressed with the level of service available in Rio’s prostitution scene, both in individual terms (service with a smile and relatively few problems) and institutional terms (a large number of safe, hygienic and easily accessed prostitution venues with a great range of choice in terms of sexual partners and services offered).

What needs to be stressed here is that the scene on Copacabana is thus an area where fantasies about submissive, sexy tropical women meet a nightlife structure which is very aware of these fantasies and knows how to cater to them. This, then, is the answer to why American men go to Rio de Janeiro for sex and it should also, in a ‘round about fashion, answer the second question: “What is it that Brazilian women have that American women don’t?”

Brazilian women, in the final analysis, are really not that different from American women. Copacabana prostitutes, however, are professionally female. They make a point of studying what their heterosexual, foreign, male clients want and offering precisely that, no matter how ridiculous it may appear to an outside eye. The real question, then, that needs to be asked should not be couched in cultural or national terms – i.e. Brazil vs. the U.S. What we should be asking ourselves is why so many otherwise successful and intelligent men are willing to pay for the illusion of an idealized fantasy femininity rather than deal with female realities.

Welcome to O Mangue!

2009-11-04T22:46:00.006-02:00

Welcome to "O Mangue", our blog which presents information and opinions about life in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, concentrating on sex, race, class and those damned foreigners who make this city their home.

“O Mangue” is named after Rio’s historic red light district. The name means “the Salt Marsh” and, in its heyday during the early 20th century, the neighborhood contained a huge and diverse community of working-class Brazilians and foreign immigrants. It was made famous by police reports, yellow journalism and by the paintings of internationally renowned Lithuanian-Brazilian artist Lasar Segall. The Swamp might have been dangerous and dirty, but no one could deny that it contained a brute vitality. For the better part of a century, it was pounding heart of working-class Rio. The Mangue was Lapa's darker sister - the one we kept in the kitchen when foreign guests were about. You can see a brief film of what it was like back in the 1950s right here. Successive attempts to eliminate the Mangue began in 1943 and finally bore fruit in the 1980s, when the last houses of ill repute were bulldozed to make way for the new City Hall (thus earning that building the nickname of “A Piranhão” – the Big Whore). The Mangue's survivors then moved the show over to Rua Ceará near Praça da Bandeira, where it became Vila Mimosa, modern Rio's cut-rate commercial sex district.

We've chosen the name for our blog because we feel it represents our interests in the commonplace and bizarre people, events and places which make Rio Rrrrrrrrrrrrio and which inevitably end up tinging foriegners' views about Brazil and what can be found there.

Over the next few days, we'll be posting introductions and links to a series of our already-published articles. We hope you enjoy them. Because we are very active debaters and discussants, we also hope that these tidbits will get people interested in talking about the subjects and issues we raise in the "comments" section. It is our policy to not censor folks simply because they disagree with us, but we will shit-can anyone who is gratuitously rude or simply a spammer.

Note that some articles here will be in Portuguese and others in English. If you aren't bilingual, we're sorry. Sooner or later, we hope to have translations for all this stuff, but in the meantime, you're all just going to have to muddle through.

In the future, we plan to be writing new stuff here, hopefully on a weekly basis.

We also cordially invite others to post here, if they feel they have material of interest.

Welcome! We hope you'll find your stay here interesting and informative, if not always strictly enjoyable!

Ana Paula da Silva
Thaddeus Blanchette

Doc e Chick no século 21 (para os alunos de Tadeu, IFCS)

2009-05-11T20:35:00.000-03:00

Hoje (sábado 5.12.2009), na secção de entretenimento do principal jornal da Filadélfia (The Philadelphia Enquirer), houve uma notícia que achei interessante para os propósitos de nossa aula.

Acontece que a Fundação Nacional Ítalo-americana e a Ordem dos Filhos da Itália na América (ÚNICO) estão em pé de guerra por causa de um novo “reality show” americano, Jersey Shore (“A Costa De Jersey”) que – de acordo com os zelosos defensores da comunidade ítalo-americana – é preconceituoso e que propaga uma imagem de “violência e comportamento criminoso que cria um estereótipo marginal dos ítalos-americanos”.

Como todos os shows de realidade (pense em Big Brother Brasil), Jersey Shore concentra nas aventuras e desventuras de um grupo de jovens que, regado a cerveja, festas e sexo, vive sendo filmado pela a MTV, 24 horas por dia. O diferencial desse show é que ele acontece na praia de Nova Jersey (uma espécie de Piscinão de Ramos americano) e é protagonizado quase exclusivamente por jovens americanos de descendência italiana. De acordo com André DiMino (o presidente do UNICO e uma espécie de Chick Morelli do século XXI), os garotos representam “uma vergonha para si mesmo, suas famílias e sua herança italiana”. A organização é principalmente preocupada com a utilização do apelido “Guido” pelos jovens para se auto-rotular. “Guido” é um termo semi-pejorativo para ítalo-americano, cujo contraparente mais próxima na língua de Camões seria, talvez, “carcamano”. De acordo com Sr. DiMino, o uso desse termo representa uma ofensa para os ítalo-americanos e deve ser censurado.

Os jovens protagonistas do show, é claro, pensam de outra maneira.

“Nasci e fui criado como Guido,” afirma Pauly D, um membro do elenco. “é um estilo de vida. Significa ser italiano, dar prioridade aos amigos, à família... usar gel nos cabelos e freqüentar salões de bronzeamento artificial. Enfim, tudo que é italiano.”

“Todo mundo tem seu estilo e atitude próprio,” afirma outro jovem, Mike Sorentino. “Sou feliz em ser o que sou e tenho orgulho da minha família, do meu bairro, da minha herança... Duvido que esses velhos [do ÚNICO] não devem ter bebido e caído na farra quando eram jovens também.”

A situação me lembra aquela retratada pela William Foote-Whyte em Sociedade da Esquina. Mesmo hoje, setenta anos após da primeira publicação do livro, o grupo étnico formado pelos ítalo-americanos vive uma divisão básica entre college boys e corner boys. De um lado, temos os “ítalo-americanos profissionais”, desejosos de uma inserção maior na sociedade circundante, mas também conscientes do fato de que sua base de poder nos EUA é a massa ainda etnicizada de “carcamanos” pitorescos, entendidos como “outros internos” pelos brancos, anglo-saxões e protestantes que ainda dominam a vida política e econômica nesse país. Pelo outro lado, temos os “guidos”: jovens operários oriundos dos bairros urbanos ítalo-americanos, que são conscientes de sua etnização, mas confortáveis com esse processo, não rejeitam os estereótipos, se afirmando neles.

Neste sentido, então, a batalha entre UNICO e os “guidos” resume um dos grandes dilemas da vida urbana, retratado por nós na aula: a contradição entre a segregação promovida pelo espaço urbano e a grande mobilidade entre os universos de significação que também é característica marcante da cidade. Os “guidos” se distinguem dos “WASPS” (brancos, anglo-saxões e protestantes), “negros” e “latinos” ao seu redor, possivelmente porque é uma maneira de se sobreviver de forma anti-anomica nas grandes cidades americanas. Todavia, e como os líderes do UNICO sabem, a ascensão social neste espaço também é condicionado pela capacidade de ser reconhecido como cidadão comum e não como estereotipo étnico.

É sobre essa condição dupla da cidade que nossa primeira opção para o trabalho final deve versar.

Utilizando A Sociedade da Esquina e as outras obras lidas durante curso (mais particularmente os artigos de Simmel, Wirth, Davis e Abreu) como subsídios intelectuais, analise três filmes que retratam a questão de segregação e mistura nos espaços urbanos. Os filmes que podem ser assistidos incluem (entre outros, discutidos na aula):

Embalos de sábado noite
Noites violentas em Brooklyn
Desafio no Bronx
Faça a coisa certa
Amor sublime amor
Quase dois irmãos
Grand Torino
Crash

A segunda opção de trabalho é a seguinte: retirar três exemplos de histórias na mídia de “sexo problemático” (i.e. exploração sexual de menores, prostituição, tráfico de mulheres, turismo sexual etc.) e, utilizando-as leituras da aula, suas experiências de campo e as nossas discussões sobre dados quantitativos e qualitativos, criticá-las. Finge que tais histórias não são relatórios jornalísticos e são estudos sócio-antropológicos. Quais são alguns dos erros metodológicos e analíticos feitos por seus autores? Como poderíamos corrigir esses erros (i.e. com quais formas de pesquisa ou através de qual tipo de análise)?

Os trabalhos devem ser escritos em Time New Roman 12, espaço 1,5, e não devem ter mais que 10 páginas. Para serem entregues na ocasião de nossa próxima reunião no dia 17.