TW for street harassment, molestation, slut shamingTurning an Infamously Sexist City Into a Safe Pla

TW for street harassment, molestation, slut shamingTurning an Infamously Sexist City Into a Safe Place for WomenHow the next generation of Latin American women is embracing feminism and transforming street culture“Our uniform is not your sexual fantasy,” yelled 50 Rio de Janeiro public school students as they marched down Copacabana Beach on March 8th, International Women’s Day. The previous week, one of their classmates had fallen asleep while riding a public bus and awoke to find a strange man’s hand beneath her pleated school skirt. Scared he had a gun, the 16-year-old messaged her father, who began to tail the bus in his car, eventually reporting the man for arrest.“We’re not going to be quiet,” said Morena Perez, 17, at the protest. “We get a lot of harassment, from a very young age. And it’s unacceptable. If people see us mobilized against this, they’re going to start realizing that they have to respect us. A lot of these men, if you talk back and say ‘What’s that you said?,’ their mouths hang open like a fool and they don’t know how to respond.”She thought for a bit. “It’s because not only do they lack respect, but they lack courage. They think we’re an object.”When Paloma Ramalho and her classmate Mateus Torres, both 17, were planning the march, Ramalho got in touch with the organizer of another recent event that challenged chauvinism in Rio, the Carnival street parade Bloco das Mulheres Rodadas. “Women who have been around” is a Brazilian slang expression used to humiliate females for the promiscuity that their male peers brag about. This double standard hit a nerve with publicist Renata Rodrigues last December after a right-wing Facebook page posted an image of a man holding a sign saying, “I don’t deserve a woman who’s been around.” The image attracted thousands of likes before women responded with their own meme: a mocking Tumblr entitled “I’ve been around, but I didn’t get with you.”As soon as Rodrigues announced the parade celebrating female sexuality (and protesting chauvinism, sexism and homophobia), interest exploded. Three marching bands signed up to accompany the parade, and UN Women partnered with the bloco for their 2015 Carnival campaign, “Lose shame, but don’t lose respect.” At the parade, 2,000 women, men and families whirled and danced together to an all-female brass band playing a soundtrack of samba to Britney Spears.The story of the schoolgirl’s bus incident had already reached Rodrigues when Ramalho sent a message to her. Ramalho had paraded with the Mulheres Rodadas during Carnival, would it be possible for the protesting schoolgirls to symbolically meet up with the Mulheres Rodadas after their march down Copacabana Beach to join forces?Rodrigues “was thrilled at the idea,” she recalls. For International Women’s Day, the Mulheres Rodadas had already planned to celebrate what they dubbed “International Miniskirt Day” in Copacabana. And so the two groups danced and demonstrated together in a union of Rio’s hyperconnected Internet culture, street activism and long-brewing frustrations with the city’s rampant chauvinism.”Read the full piece here -- source link

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