THE BUSINESS OF SEX
It was midafternoon on Tuesday, the last full day of official Carnaval festivities, and the euphoria that builds during the five-day holiday was reaching its boiling point. A mass of revelers waited for the Banda de Ipanema, one of Rio’s most beloved blocos, or roaming bands, under a furious afternoon sun. I stood on the beach, my back to the ocean, my arms wrapped around a palm tree, and wondered how long I’d last.
The permissiveness of Carnaval, the heady sensuality of Cariocas, and the ubiquitous beer sellers with their Styrofoam coolers conspired to turn the barely clad crowd surging past into an eroticized tangle of slick, tanned limbs that shimmied to the beat of the approaching band and threatened to dislodge me from my perch. This was the live-and-let-live Rio de Janeiro of stereotypes at a fever pitch, and the tableaus unfolding suggested that the city’s reputation for openness and a fluid view of sex was at least partly deserved. In the thick of the crowd, eyes met, hands groped, and legs entwined as strangers of similar or opposite genders locked lips and bodies together with a hunger that was as intense as it was brief; seconds later they parted, carried by the throng into the arms of other anonymous revelers.
I was an island of fully clad sobriety in this surging erogenous sea, and worse, I was working, or trying to work; my reporter’s notebook was tucked into the waistband of my shorts to keep from getting lost. I could feel its metal coil digging into my belly and its hard cover softening with perspiration.
I was attempting to report about an ongoing anti-homophobia campaign and the growth of gay tourism, particularly during Carnaval. More than a quarter of the three million or so tourists who flood Rio every summer are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. I intended to interview a few, which was why I had parked myself near the Rua Farme de Amoedo, a notorious open-air cruising ground, right when the most gay-friendly Carnaval bloco made its final and most disputed sally.
Not only was I getting smeared with other people’s sunblock and sweat and drenched with sprays of the sweet sparkling cider that is a favorite with festive drag queens, but I was stuck, trapped by the humanity that surrounded me, and no one, gay or straight, could be bothered to stop for a chat. There is no sin south of the equator, songwriter Chico Buarque wrote; he could have been standing where I was that day when the words came to him.
It wasn’t until the band had squeezed loudly, gleefully past that I let go of my tree and waded against the human tide toward Farme de Amoedo proper, looking for friends who’d said they could help. As I got closer to Farme’s epicenter, there were fewer women, and for that matter, fewer men wearing anything beyond a sunga, the narrow band of spandex that Carioca men wrap around their midsection as beachwear. On occasion the sungas were accompanied by a Zorro mask, a pirate eye patch, or spray of jewel-hued feathers. But there was no mistaking it: the business on Farme that day was sex.
Eventually I found my friends, an engineer and a university professor as lithe and fit and attractive as the rest, but fully clad. We headed to the sand to sit and talk for a bit. With them was a young Frenchman on his fourth visit to Rio’s Carnaval. Three out of four of Rio’s LGBT tourists fit roughly into the same category as my new acquaintance: between twenty and thirty-five years old, in the city for about five days and ready to live it up.
These young men loved Rio and Rio loved them right back: LGBT visitors dropped upward of two hundred dollars a day, nearly triple what heterosexual tourists spent. This explained in part Rio’s outreach and advertising campaigns. Certainly, the city cultivated a relaxed, accepting image, as the secretary of tourism had said: “The city of Rio is welcoming in its essence, and Carnaval is when it shows that most clearly.” But there was also a lot of money to be made by packaging and selling this hospitality.
We spread sarongs on the sand, grabbed a round of beers, and I asked the young Frenchman what kept him coming back. He smiled. Not far from us was one of the outdoor showers Cariocas used to wash off the salt water after a dip in the ocean; our eyes followed a swarthy young man as he sauntered over for an open-air rinsing-off ritual that was as much a bath as a calculated display of body parts toned to perfection.
“There is so much seduction everywhere,” said the Frenchman, sitting cross-legged by my side, his fingers fluttering generally in the direction of the showers, the sidewalk beyond, and the bars whose tables spilled out onto the street. “You are in overdrive, all the time.”
Even after repeated returns, he was still a little shy of diving into the muscle-bound throng and hadn’t mastered the Carioca confidence required to approach a stranger and extract a kiss. But he had also never paid for his liaisons, although such exchanges weren’t uncommon among foreigners in town for a quick dip into Rio’s good times, he said. This too I had gathered from the mismatched couples, gay or straight, canoodling on the beach. He found his partners online, at bars, on the beach and was never short of desirable company.
Rio certainly had its appeal—it had been elected the “Sexiest Place on the Earth” by the LGBT travel site TripOut, and with good reason—but it wasn’t without a dangerous undercurrent.
Just days before, a taxi driver outside the international airport had attacked a gay couple from northern Brazil with homophobic slurs, then punches. The assault wasn’t as serious as other cases of violence against the LGBT population that I’d written about since arriving; the men recovered and the driver was arrested. But it was also a sobering reminder of the social tensions coursing through Carioca culture.
I understood Rio’s appeal to someone like my French interviewee. The shameless sexy on display had long been one of the city’s more enticing aspects to visitors. This was a place where the heat and humidity encouraged a certain indolence, a sway and drag of step, and discouraged a whole lot of clothing. Men sauntered about shirtless and women reveled in their curves no matter their years and fitness level. This meant you could be engaging in some innocent or decidedly dull endeavor—bagging your purchases at a pharmacy or riding the elevator to the office—and suddenly get an eyeful of some deep cleavage or a clearly outlined rear end. This seemed to keep the collective libido stoked.
To me, this comfort with flaunting the flesh was refreshing after long seasons in countries where any display of the body was either forbidden or a pleasure permitted only to the thin, the young, and the perfectly fit. The Cariocas’ apparent freedom, their exuberant public displays of affection, and their libidinous street parties often led foreigners to see Rio as a great free-for-all, a sexually fluid place that harbored few inhibitions.
Even while living abroad, I knew the reality wasn’t that simple. True, sex seemed to be everywhere: in by-the-hour motels that did a banging business during lunch and after work; in the prime-time soaps churned out by the Rio studios of Globo, with their juicy close-ups of in-depth kissing; and in the explicit photos advertising the services of prostitutes—male, female, or transgender—that turned downtown phone booths into cornucopias of sex to satisfy any appetite. And yet, there were cases like that of the visitors beaten before they even left the airport, and the more serious attacks that killed more than three hundred LGBT people a year in Brazil.
“It’s a city of extremes, Rio,” the Frenchman granted, saying he had heard the occasional homophobic comment. He’d never been assaulted, but the worry hovered in the background. “Sometimes I worry a little bit, I’m not sure how far I can go. Maybe I look at the wrong guy in the eyes a little too long, maybe they’re not gay.”
Sorry I’d forced the conversation into such a gloomy turn, I let my friends go back to the fun and elbowed my way to the subway. Street parades had been going on for weeks. They start well before Carnaval’s official opening day, and linger for days past their traditional ending at noon on Ash Wednesday. I was beginning to cave under the relentlessness of this inescapable party. Youngsters belted out Carnaval marchinhas inside the metro station, the acoustics making their bass drum reverberate like peels of thunder; sequined dancers on their way to the official Sambódromo parade stuffed themselves and their great plumed shoulder harnesses into the train and made the carriage pulse as they samba-stepped along to some impromptu singing; by the time I got off at Flamengo Station, the pervasive tah-cah-TAH tah-cah-TAH tah-cah-TAH that had once left me so nostalgic for Rio rung like a jackhammer inside my skull. I shut myself in my room, turned the air conditioner way up, and churned out the article I’d been reporting.
That evening, disinclined to face the frenzy again, I curled up on my couch to mull over the multi-hued hedonism outside. At first glance, Brazil gave the impression of being a progressive place: it had the world’s largest gay pride parade, although in São Paulo, not Rio; the prostitutes who traipsed up and down Copacabana’s sidewalks had their profession codified by the Ministry of Labor; the president, Dilma Rousseff, was a no-nonsense former guerrilla who took her oath of office accompanied not by a husband, as she was long divorced, but by her daughter.
Yet places of prostitution were being shuttered as the city gentrified, and reports of violence against women and the LGBT population were on the rise. Increased awareness of rights was a big part of this, certainly, but it didn’t explain the numbers entirely. I turned these thoughts over in my mind that night and in years that followed as I tried to come to terms with another of Brazil’s idiosyncrasies, brought to its zenith in Rio: the vibrant openness around issues of sex, sexuality, and gender relations that seemed to flourish alongside, and in spite of, deep pockets of machismo, homophobia, and a potential for violence. Now these areas were also undergoing a rapid succession of legal, social, and structural changes. What did this transformation mean for those whose lives were entangled in it?
The business of sex has been a notorious part of this port city since its earliest years. In 1820, French traveler Jacques Arago reported prostitutes to be “as numerous as at Paris,” present “in every quarter and in every street.” A journalist who wrote vivid memoirs of fin-de-siècle Rio, Vivaldo Coaracy, found the city replete with painted ladies who called from windows, bars, and brothels, part of echelons of depravity “that started with cachaça in São Jorge Street and ended up with the obligatory champagne of the chic pensions in Catete.”
Convivência—the live-and-let-live art of coexistence—has always been a guiding principle in Rio. The city is dense, with deeply etched hierarchies of class, race, origin, and occupation. It is only through skilled maneuvering and obeisance to a shared code of conduct that distinctions can be maintained in such close quarters. Foreigners are often oblivious to the terms that regulate these interactions, and mistake Rio for a liberal paradise where blacks and whites, rich and poor, migrants and locals, prostitutes and ladies who lunch can mingle easily and without prejudice. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There have always been rigid, if unspoken, rules about sharing space. Vivaldo Coaracy, the journalist who wrote about Rio at the end of the nineteenth century, gave an insightful description of this balancing act in his account of the Confeitaria Colombo, a café that still serves full afternoon tea under gilded mirrors more than one hundred years later. Earlier in the day, well-to-do ladies would cluster around the little tables, gossiping and eating cake. Around 4 p.m., they cleared out en masse, leaving only the languid gentlemen of the literary set, still nursing their sherry. By 5 p.m., the place filled up again, this time with madams and prostitutes, some of them minor celebrities who would then hold court among the crystal and the marble.
I’d seen the same complicated ballet on the sidewalks of Copacabana: traditional restaurants with bow-tied waiters spread their tables onto the black-and-white mosaic walkway where prostitutes also cruised for clients, families took the evening air, street vendors hawked miniature Cristo statues to tourists, doormen kept watch, and beggars beseeched them all for change—each highly conscious of his place and his relationship to others, careful not to overstep his bounds and create unwelcome interactions.
As Rio de Janeiro began to polish its image, however, the balance created by this carefully orchestrated convivência was upset. The city’s bordellos could be described as blight or as beloved institutions, depending on who’s being asked, but while Brazilians largely shrugged their shoulders at what they saw as an entrenched aspect of urban life, blatant prostitution wouldn’t do when the city was under the international spotlight. With the World Cup and the Olympics looming, the brothels, saunas, and clubs where the trade was plied began to suffer the biggest crackdown in decades.
The first to go had been the infamous Help!, a colossal discothèque whose neon lights had throbbed in the heart of Copacabana for twenty-five years, offering johns—most of them gringos, as it was a tourist favorite—their choice from among the two thousand prostitutes who rotated through during the week. It was closed down in January 2010 to make way for a music museum designed by the same firm that gave New York’s Lincoln Center a facelift.
Another of the city’s storied bordellos, the 1902 neoclassical Hotel Paris, was shuttered in 2011. It had anchored the lower-tier sex trade in Tiradentes square for decades. With its closure, Rio’s respected prostitution rights organization, Davida, lost its home and dozens of prostitutes lost their place of work. The French brothers who bought it planned to turn it into a boutique hotel, Le Paris, with a rooftop pool and a daily rate of six hundred dollars.
The scrub-up extended to the square itself, which had been one of Rio’s oldest cruising parks, surrounded by bars, theaters, musical revues, and entertainment to suit all tastes. Its shrubbery had provided cover for prostitution and same-sex encounters since the days when Brazil was a monarchy. Now sex workers were being shooed from the ancient sobrados that surrounded it as the two- and three-story town houses were being converted into cultural centers, art galleries, and office spaces.
This kind of turnover was happening all over the neighborhoods that would be most visible during the sporting events—downtown, the touristy south-side, and the port area, said anthropologists Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva.
The couple have been studying Rio’s sex industry since 2004. She’s a Carioca of many generations, petite and very sharp; he’s a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with wire-rimmed glasses, a shaggy lefty-professor beard, and a disarming manner. Together they maintain a database of more than 50,000 reports about the places where people pay for sex in Rio, and draw from it a sprawling map of the industry with its 600 or so brothels. These range from a single tumble-down sobrado where sex can be had for a dollar a minute, to industrial-scaled Uruguaiana 24, a nondescript office building with four stories dedicated to the sex trade, to the exclusive Centauro, a three-story venue on a leafy Ipanema street that charges clients $60 just to step in the door. Centauro is a termas, or sauna, where clients relax in robes at the whiskey bar or take a steam bath before picking services from a menu that starts at $200.
The image-cleansing campaign of Rio’s mayor was nothing new, Thad and Ana Paula told me over dinner one evening. The city has a history of pushing prostitutes out of the way: there have been eight government-led removals, cover-ups, or attempts to quash red-light districts over the past century. The most recent was in 1996, when a zona was cleared out to make way for the city’s new administrative center. Carioca sense of humor being what it is, the imposing new structure was promptly nicknamed the Piranhão, or big piranha—slang for a sexually voracious woman.
A look at the times when the city turned against its prostitutes revealed primarily three motives, they said. The first were moments of international visibility, when officials wanted the city to look good to foreign eyes—the traditional para inglês ver. This was the case in 1920, when King Albert of Belgium came to town and police swept through, arresting lower-class prostitutes. It happened again in 1968, when police boarded up the main red-light district to conceal it from view during a visit by Queen Elizabeth II.
Another force had been urban renewal. This was behind the clearing out of the zona that had stood where the municipal administrative offices now rises, and more recently behind the closure of Help! and the Hotel Paris.
The last factor was the zeal of a powerful individual, such as a police chief or high city official who, seized with concern for the city’s moral or physical health, had clamped down on the sex trade. This had happened during a vast sanitizing campaign in the first decade of the twentieth century and again under a particularly righteous police captain after World War II.
I’d landed in Rio at an extraordinary moment when all these factors seemed to be bearing down at once. Beyond brand-names like Help!, dozens of smaller, lower-end brothels were being shut down every year. What I didn’t understand was the legal justification for all this. After all, prostitution has been listed under the Ministry of Labor’s Classification of Occupations since 2002. The ministry describes sex professionals as men or women who “seek sexual programs; attend and accompany clients; participate in educational activities in the field of sexuality.” This listing allowed them to take advantage of retirement and social security benefits, along with sick leave and other labor rights. I’d assumed this kind of official recognition guaranteed them a certain degree of protection.
This was why I’d invited the anthropologists over for dinner. Technically, prostitution is legal, but when officialdom deemed it necessary to go after prostitutes, it wasn’t hard to find ways, Thad said. Although selling sex is a legally protected activity, profiting from it or inducing someone to do it is illegal, and the laws are vaguely worded. Profit can be interpreted as anything from exploitative pimping to running a brothel to renting an apartment, he said.
“You could sell a prostitute this piece of bread, and if someone wanted to go after you for it, they could,” he said, holding up a chunk of the home-baked loaf he’d brought.
That meant sex establishments were always vulnerable to raids and remained open at the whimsy of the municipal or state administration or the local precinct chief. Plus, prostitutes were just as vulnerable to the forces of urban renewal and gentrification that were shifting thousands of lower-income residents in the city through eminent domain, increased rents, the sudden enforcement of long-neglected building codes, or demands for payment of old debts.
To understand what it would mean for the women (although there were plenty of men in the business, the majority of Rio’s prostitutes were women) I spent some time at the next potential target: Vila Mimosa, a chaotic jumble of modest storefronts that make up Rio’s biggest red-light district.
To the nearly two thousand women who rotate through this working-class zona, prostitution provides full-time work or a way to supplement incomes earned as cashiers, maids, or manicurists. To clients, Vila Mimosa offers quick, easy sex and a cold beer in a convenient location. It is just one subway stop from downtown and a five-minute walk from a station serving dozens of major bus lines. Highways connecting the heart of the city to far-flung suburbs crisscross nearby.
The Vila occupies an unattractive geographic space, sandwiched between highways, rail lines, and warehouses. But in this changing city, what had been undesirable was suddenly prime real estate. The area was right on a proposed route for the planned bullet train that would connect Rio to São Paulo—one of the projects aimed at revamping Brazil’s decrepit transportation infrastructure. Before the government opened bidding to prospective builders, I stopped by.
I got there just after 5 p.m., when offices downtown disgorged hordes of workers and Vila Mimosa’s business picked up. Bass-heavy funk rattled metal tables set out on the sidewalk and shirtless men fired up makeshift grills next to coolers of beer. Women in thong bikinis or Day-Glo lingerie that popped against their dark skin lounged about in plastic chairs, swinging their heels, or leaned against doorways, smoking, waiting. They were young and old, fresh-faced and worn, brunettes and bottle blondes. I saw bellies scarred by C-sections, crisscrossed with stretch marks, rippling with rolls of fat squeezed by too-tight elastic bands. I also saw lithe, flawless, taut young bodies and faces as mainstream pretty as any picture in a magazine. They represented a cross section of Rio’s working-class women, much as you’d find in an express bus headed for the northern suburbs at the end of a long day.
Although the bullet train was still in the planning stage, the women were worried. Cris, a curvaceous black woman who was getting ready for rush hour by applying bright pink lipstick to match her vivid spandex top, agreed to talk over a beer.
She was frank. There’s nothing appealing about Vila Mimosa. The bottom floor of most houses had been converted to basic bars—chipped Formica counters, plastic stools—or nightclubs blaring distorted music out of insufficient speakers so dancers could gyrate under a lone disco ball. The sex took place on the second floor, where small, windowless cubicles branched off a narrow central corridor. For as little as eighteen dollars, a customer got twenty minutes on a plastic-covered foam pad atop a cement bunk. These curtained-off spaces offered little privacy. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh resounded in the hallway. The briny smell of fresh semen and sweat came in waves over the searing chemical scent of disinfectant. Cleanup was a bucket of water and roll of toilet paper.
But the money she made there was at least double, on a good day triple, what she could make elsewhere, she said; it had helped raise her children, buy a small house, and furnish it. She was now forty-eight years old and saving for retirement. Demolishing the Vila would push her out at a time when starting over elsewhere or in a new job would be unbearable.
“My clients come here, they know me,” she said. “And it’s safe. I know all these girls. When we leave at night, there’s transportation here, and there’s always someone keeping an eye on you.”
I’d hear many variations on that story. Some, like Cleide de Almeida, remembered what removal was like. She grew up in the red-light district’s old downtown location, one of ten children of a woman who cooked for the prostitutes there. Now she headed the Vila Mimosa residents and business association.
“The women were forced into the street,” she said. “They worked out of cars, wherever they could, until we were able to buy up property here. It was a terrible time. We tried to move, but word got out and residents there waited for us and fought us off when we got there with our trucks.”
While the women in Vila Mimosa waited to learn their fate, the crusade on visible prostitution continued. In March 2012 the federal government asked more than two thousand websites that promoted Brazil as a sex tourism destination to take down explicit content. In June, as thousands of foreign dignitaries and environmental activists boarded flights for Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a hundred officers swarmed Centaurus in Ipanema and eleven other well-known brothels in Copacabana. All were on the short list of venues that cater mostly to foreigners. The official warrants for the raid listed corruption—police often take a cut of these large establishment’s profits—but also money laundering, drug trafficking, and sexual exploitation, among others. Three people were arrested, including Centaurus’s manager, and the women working there disbanded.
The manager was released a week later. By August, the international media attention had died down, the environmentalists had gone home, and Centaurus was up and running again. In early September, a judge dismissed charges against the two other men who had been arrested, arguing that none of the prostitutes had complained of being exploited and that “adult women cannot be treated as if they were invisible, without agency and ability to make rational choices.”
The judge went on to conclude that the raid had been motivated by a “repressive political climate generated by sanitizing measures intended to prepare the city of Rio de Janeiro for the sporting mega-events of 2014 and 2016.”
I believed he was right. So when Thad told me in early 2014 that he was going to do a recount of establishments to see how many remained open, I joined in. With only a few months to go before the World Cup, I wanted to get a better sense of how much had changed.
We hopped on our bikes in midmorning, armed with Thad’s map and a plan to tackle downtown. Our goal was to visit thirty-two establishments that day. That sounded like a lot, but I soon realized it was only a fraction of the sex businesses in the area. There was barely a block that didn’t have a brothel or termas of some sort. We hit them, one by one, tallying the number of patrons, the number of women, the number of shuttered façades.
Most were threadbare old sobrados with boarded-shut windows, dark and airless even in the middle of a sunny summer day. It was January, when most Brazilians take their month of vacation. Many of the joints had only two or three visible customers; a handful had more. Women in bikinis or underwear would perk up when we walked in, but their smiles drooped once they realized we just wanted some bottled water and a quick chat with the manager.
There were attempts at décor: Christmas lights wrapped around the bar, bits of tired tinsel hanging from the ceiling, or balloons that danced to the back-and-forth sweep of a tabletop fan. One had a jukebox, but it only worked when a client bothered to feed it money. Song over, the silence closed in again. These details were meant to liven up the atmosphere, but instead they created a sad, expectant air, like at a birthday party where the guests had failed to show.
At a place called Vanessa’s Bar, the prices were posted on the wall, starting at $15 for 15 minutes of straight-up oral or vaginal sex with protection. Of that, $1 was for the condom and $6 to the house. The prostitute took home $8. A beer was $3. This represented the going rate in these spots, which served the downtown crowd—not the businessmen, but the office boys, the drivers, the delivery guys. The higher-end termas aimed at the men with suits charged entrance fees of $22 or $45 and did not allow women to enter, unless they were prostitutes. Thad would visit them without me.
We took a lunch break at the Beco das Sardinhas, a pedestrian passage taken over by greasy spoons all specializing in fried sardines. Over an oily pile of deep-fried goodness, we discussed the morning’s work.
Yes, the hypocrisy of shutting down a brothel around a big international event made me cringe, as did the inherent injustice of shoving aside prostitutes or anyone else to make way for a tapas bar or a cultural center where they’d never feel welcome. At the same time, the working conditions in these places were abysmal; many of these sobrados weren’t just eyesores, they were also unsafe. At one place, the aging floorboards were worn so thin I could see the room below through the cracks.
None of this was new to Thad. Since Davida, the prostitutes’ rights organization, had been kicked out of the old Hotel Paris, its founder, a former prostitute called Gabriela Leite, had died of cancer. She’d been a charismatic woman who’d worked for recognition of the field she’d chosen and professed to love. Without her, the organization was leaderless and without a home. This left Thad and Ana Paula as the most prominent prostitutes rights activists in Rio. While we visited the brothels, Thad took notes, but he also passed on a card with a phone number where they could report abuses and problems. This number was his cell phone.
“Listen,” he said, gesturing with half a sardine. “I’m not like Gabriela. I think that in the majority of cases, prostitution is not cool. There are women who like it, but often it’s just . . . what other options do they have? People say prostitution isn’t dignified. Is it dignified to wash someone else’s bathroom for a minimum wage that won’t allow you to feed your kids, or to depend on a man? What dignity is there in these other options? That’s the problem.”
After lunch, we made a few more visits. As the afternoon wore on, there were more clients. One of the last brothels we visited, around the 5 p.m. rush hour, had a steady stream of customers—I counted ten men climbing its steep stairs in five minutes. This one wouldn’t let me in, either. Sometimes wives come, the bouncer at the door explained. They cause a scene.
That was fine. What I’d seen that day would linger with me for a long time: the women, their exposed bodies and the effort in their smiles; the stuffy rooms with their red walls, pink balloons, and plastic flowers. We’d also answered my question about what was happening to Rio’s brothels: of the 32 places we’d visited that day, 11 had closed down since the last time Thad checked. Several had received warnings from the city about the physical conditions of the building.
In the months before the World Cup, I looked up the projects and improvements for which places of prostitution had ostensibly been removed or threatened with removal over the last few years. None of them were in place.
Vila Mimosa was still operating, as the government had tried and failed three times to attract bids for the bullet train. The Museum of Image and Sound, which was to take the place of Help!, was still a construction site, and the boutique Le Paris hotel remained a paper dream, stymied by the owners of a mattress store who operated on the ground level and refused to budge.
Thad was right. This crackdown was largely another case of para inglês ver, bolstered by gentrification and moralistic zeal, and motivated more by a concern with appearances than with making Rio better for its residents. The welfare of the women involved was last on the list of priorities.
The shuttering of brothels was part of the physical transformation of the city, and easy to measure: Thad and Ana Paula were taking care of that. But there were other social, cultural, and legal shifts that were reshaping the murky arena of sex and sexuality in ways that were less tangible but would have lasting repercussions.
One arena that was undergoing significant change was the position of women at home and at work, and with it, the relationship between genders. Some of these changes could be explained easily through numbers: women now made up about 60 percent of college graduates; the wage gap between women and men shrank every year; nearly 40 percent of women in the last census had said they were the head of household, with another 30 percent saying they shared the responsibility with their partner.
Underlying this was a very rapid demographic shift. I had to look no further than my own family to see a great arc from mothers who had a soccer-team roster of children to the current generation, in which the adults outnumbered the doted-upon babies. My grandmothers, who’d grown up with eight and eleven siblings, had borne six and seven children each. My parents in turn had three kids. My sister, brother, and I had three, two, and zero children, respectively. This averaged out to 1.6 children each—just under the national average of 1.9 per mother recorded in the 2010 census.I
Plot those numbers and you have an astonishing slide, particularly for a Roman Catholic country where abortion remains illegal and where there was never any official incentive toward birth control. Somewhere along the line, women across social and educational strata had seized control of their bodies. This precipitous drop took developed nations a century or more, but happened in half that time in Brazil.
The federal government was one unexpected agent in this transformation. When President Lula launched the conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família in 2003, the money went to women in 93 percent of cases. This began to work a rearrangement of power within families. The money boosted women’s status within the family; anecdotal evidence showed it helped them break out of bad marriages and take charge of household purchases. The biggest difference, according to studies, was in their ability to make birth control decisions. This was momentous, as by 2014 the program reached one-fourth of the population.
In other countries, a host of adaptations had followed the switch to smaller families. Most had a direct impact on male-female relations: postponed weddings, delayed motherhood, a greater number of couples living together without marrying, and higher divorce rates. As with the drop in the number of children, this was also happening in Brazil, but it was taking place very quickly indeed.
The consequences of this upheaval were still rippling outward, further complicating Brazil’s already complex gender picture. Even during Carnaval, those days of permissiveness when men wore skirts and many of the usual rules were subverted, machismo still thrived. The groping and kissing in the streets was very often consensual, but not always. During my first Carnaval I’d almost deployed an elbow-to-the-nose move on a drunken lug who tried to force an interaction, and I’d heard from countless women who were groped or kissed against their will, or who faced a barrage of insults when they turned down a man’s advances.
Beyond the anecdotes, there was hard evidence that traditional, male-dominant gender roles and violence against women remained a real and often unacknowledged problem.
Take one extreme measure: rape statistics. The number of cases had jumped in 2009, when a new law broadened the definition to include sex acts beyond copulation, but had continued to increase nationally and locally, going up around 50 percent in the state of Rio over the three years that followed.
The increase was due in part to more reporting. Campaigns and hotlines encouraged victims to notify police; a new law protected victims of domestic violence, and specialized, women-only police stations took their complaints. But regardless of the numbers, many of the attitudes remained unchanged, and women still shouldered the blame for attacks they suffered. A 2014 survey showed 65 percent of Brazilians agreed with the statement that if a woman is abused and remains in a relationship, it’s because she “likes being beaten”; 58.5 percent concurred there would be fewer rapes if women “knew how to behave”; and 26 percent agreed that “women who wear revealing clothing deserve to be attacked.”
These beliefs were so pervasive they extended even to PUC, Rio’s elite private university, which gave its female foreign exchange students a pink pamphlet informing them that “the policy ‘no means no’ does not apply to all circumstances here (in Brazil). If a girl places herself in a situation where the guy understands that she agreed with having sex . . . he will do all he can to make her cope. And this will hardly be sexual assault, much less rape.” This is an astounding position for a major university to take; it also reveals something deeper.
The position of women in Brazil might be shifting, but this would not be a simple, linear progression so much as a period of turbulence with great gains in some areas and ugly pushback in others.
I. The 2010 census was also first to record a fertility rate that was lower than 2.1 children per woman, the number necessary for the population to replace itself. This trend was expected to continue, with the federal bureau of statistics projecting the fertility rate would drop to 1.6 by 2020 and 1.5 by 2030.