Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Women’s rights reason to celebrate at Carnival
RIO DE JANEIRO — The treatment of women is emerging as a central theme of Carnival in Latin America’s largest nation, with block parties of all-female musicians, shirts, necklaces and crowns with messages like “my breasts, my rules” and several campaigns to report and crackdown on harassment.
The #MeToo movement against harassment that is roiling the United States has yet to fully catch on in Brazil, which has one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women, according to the Brazilian nonprofit Mapa da Violencia.
But while women’s groups say 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 huge party officially begins Friday and goes through Wednesday, but in some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, it’s a multiweek event. The hundreds of block parties often include heavy drinking and round-the-clock 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 co-organized a block party called “Mulheres Rodadas,” or “Women Who Get Around,” said 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,” said Thome, a former reporter currently working on a doctorate on female participation in Brazilian politics.
The “Women Who Get Around” party began as a reaction to a 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.
Since then, several other feminist-themed street party groups have been formed in cities nationwide.
They include all-female bands and themes that push back at traditional gender roles and mock derogatory names. At one recent feminist-themed block party, hundreds of women dressed up as animals they said they had been called on the streets: cows, piranhas, hens and cobras, among others.
Last year, military police in Rio received 2,154 calls about violence against women during Carnival. Noting that figure means one woman was assaulted every few minutes, security officials and several nongovernment groups have launched campaigns against harassment.