Women push back at Brazil’s Carnival
As massive party kicks off, groups are bringing attention to issue of harassment
RIO DE JANEIRO— Ana Lobo, who is six months pregnant, was at a pre-Carnival street party last weekend when a man started yelling and calling her names.
“Whore!,” she remembered him saying, apparently because she was wearing a revealing top.
“Some men have this feeling that they can do whatever to your body,” said Lobo, a 29-year-old artist who later that night attended one of the many feminist-themed parties. “It’s time for women to take advantage of this moment” to push back.
Many women in Latin America’s largest nation are doing exactly that during this year’s Carnival celebrations, with block parties of all-female musicians, shirts, necklaces and crowns with messages such as “my breasts, my rules” and several campaigns to report and crack down on harassment. The #MeToo movement against harassment that is roiling North America has yet to catch on in Brazil, which has one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women, according to the Brazilian non-profit Mapa da Violencia.
But while women’s groups say that Brazil has a long way to go to address inequality and ingrained machismo, they see glimmers of a potentially bigger movement in the public dialogue about harassment during Carnival and what authorities and several organizations are doing to crack down on it.
The massive party officially begins Friday and goes through Wednesday, but in some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, it’s a multi-week event. The hundreds of block parties often include heavy drinking and round-theclock samba dancing and they come during the Southern Hemisphere’s sweaty summer month of February, when the heat drives many to wear few clothes.
Debora Thome, who in 2015 coorganized a block party called “Mulheres Rodadas,” or “Women Who Get Around,” says Carnival is a good time to focus on fighting harassment because it forces the question of respect amid scantily dressed partygoers. “A woman can be naked in the street and nobody should be allowed to touch her,” Thome said.
Mulheres Rodadas began as a reaction to photo that went viral on Facebook of a man holding a sign in Portuguese saying he “didn’t deserve a woman who gets around.”
Thome and co-founder Renata Rodrigues announced plans for a block party protest as a joke, and within 24 hours, more than 1,000 women said they would attend. They knew they had struck a nerve.
“Carnival is just a small piece of a much larger problem,” Rodrigues said.