A Treatise on Brazilian Women, Part 2

Ok, so apparently I have this disease. It’s called wow-you’re-a-real-jerkitis, and its primary symptom is the inability to effectively use sarcasm. In other words, I don’t think anyone realized that my last post on this subject was practically dripping with sarcasm. I’m not really as chauvinistic, misogynistic, superficial, or judgemental as what I write suggests. Judging from the voluminous amounts of hate email I received, my reputation is already completely shattered, so might as well continue.........

In case you forgot, I was listing the 3 macro factors that a country must have in order to produce really really ridiculously good-looking women. Here’s number 2:

2. 2.a pulchritudofiliac culture - yes, I just made up that word. It means “a culture that appreciates, promotes, and idealizes feminine beauty.” For a country to produce beautiful women, it has to wantto. This may seem obvious, but it underscores the fact that, by our modern definitions of beauty, it requires a lot of work. Working out, eating right, hair treatments, skin treatments, makeup, hair removal, teeth whitening, moisturizing, tanning, and I’m sure a whole slew of things I can’t even imagine. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that most of this does not come naturally to most women. These things (besides maybe the Brazilian bikini wax) aren’t hard-wired into our genes. Where do they come from then? A culture that raises its women with a certain standard of feminine beauty, and subsequently pressures them to fulfill it. 
   

1. A perfect example is Venezuela. There’s no reason to believe that the genes of the Venezuelan people are any different (or superior) to those of neighboring nations. There’s nothing in the water, no magical homemade recipe that only they know. And yet this country has for years competed at the highest levels, becoming famous the world over for its pageant contestants. Venezuelan women have won the Miss Universe title 4 times in the past 50 years, a number far out of proportion to its tiny population, which is not much bigger than the population of metropolitan São Paulo.
   

1. So what’s their secret? Their secret is that they train these women practically from birth to be pageant contestants. It’s like a national sport, like Brazilians and soccer (interestingly and maybe coincidentally, the Venezuelan soccer team is widely considered the continent’s worst). If we can forget for a second the romantic notion of an innocent beauty, unaware of her charms, we come to the reality: the standards that our materialistic culture, the media, and advertising have established for women are so difficult to reach that they require extreme discipline and dedication. A culture that encourages women to pursue physical beauty just gives them a head start.
   

1. Here, once again, Brazil fits the bill perfectly. This is a media-obsessed society, almost to the extent of the American culture. TV is pervasive across all regions and economic levels, and advertising is world-class. The media serves as an important medium of communication, spreading information about the expectations of physical beauty far, fast, and often. There is an appreciation and idealization of women deeply embedded in the Brazilian culture, which I think comes partly from the Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary (as a perfected woman/mother figure), and partly from the machismo transmitted here through the Portuguese culture from its Iberian roots. In summary, there are a variety of elements in Braziian culture and society that serve to encourage women to seek the standard of feminine beauty that they see around them and in the media.
   

3. 3.money - going along with the above point (that modern definitions of beauty require a lot of effort) is the fact that a country requires a certain level of economic development before it can produce a lotof beautiful women. All those beauty products cost money, and until a country reaches the point that it can sustain a sizable middle class, the vast majority of the population will be stuck in back-breaking labor (not so good for that graceful posture).
   

1.     In this respect Brazil has made great strides in the past century, and especially in the past couple decades since the end of the military dictatorship. I believe that the explosion of Brazilian models on the world stage can be attributed largely to this economic progress. An economy dominated by a small number of cash crops that depended entirely on foreign demand has given way to a diverse and vibrant economy with large-scale industrialization, high technology, world-class retail and advertising, and a wide variety of agricultural and mineral resources. Although the distribution of income and land is still extremely uneven, there has arisen a strong middle class of skilled professionals, middle-managers, small landowners, and the like. The money and time needed to pursue non-survival goals used to be limited to a select few in the upper class, but now is available to the growing masses of the middle.
   

1.  So there you have it. Brazil has a large, extremely diverse population mixing and matching in all sorts of ways, a culture that glorifies feminine beauty, and a rapidly growing economy. Basically the perfect recipe for a generation of women that has taken the world by storm.

Imagine

@Jorg: happy to hear from you.

Last Saturday I went to a church retreat on the outskirts of town with the family I was staying with. It was about an hour outside the city, in a beautiful little valley with a lake, many trees, and lots of open space. 

We had a mini-service in the auditorium, and then the fun began. The theme of the retreat was “Põe a Mão na Massa,” which translates literally to “Put Your Hands in the Dough.” The idea was that every member of the church was supposed to be an active participant in the life of the church, and not just a spectator. I quickly discovered that they really meant it.

At the end of the service, the pastor announced that we would be doing a little exercise to better understand the metaphor. Everyone in the auditorium was broken up into 4 groups, and we were given our mission: to prepare lunch.

First of all, as we turned to exit the room, there were about a dozen bowls with raw pasta dough lined up in the back near the exits. Before we could leave the room, all 400 of us had to stop and knead the dough for at least a few seconds (no hands had been washed). 

Group 1 (my group) was given the task of finding the raw materials for our lunch. We had about 30 items to find like bags of pasta dough, cans of tomato sauce, bags of salt, and spices, but here’s the kicker: they were literally hidden all over the retreat site. There were cans of tomato sauce submerged in the mud, bags of salt high in the trees, and bags of dough floating in the lake. None of these items were contained or sealed in any sort of container.

Group 2 formed a line of people from the lake all the way back to the auditorium, and each item was passed from person to person along the line until it reached the food-prep area. Here, Group 3 did the actual cooking while Group 4 prepared dessert.

When the dust had settled, we all ate the pasta that had resulted from this arduous process. Now the thing that struck me about this process is the following: can you imagine if this happened in the U.S.? People would go absolutely bonkers. There would be lawsuits out the door, people would be having convulsions on the floor, and the church would be accused of all sorts of malfeasance. 

I happen to believe that the food was perfectly safe, being that it was cooked at high temperatures. The conditions under which this food was prepared were so far outside the sanitation requirements of U.S. laws, yet to my knowledge no one got sick from the meal and there were no complaints. I think that sometimes we build such a protective wall around ourselves, such a massive cushion against the hard edges of the world, that we assume the world is a harsher place than it really is.

Besides that, I’ve just been getting settled into my new place. I am sharing an apartment with three Brazilian guys; Pedro, Rodrigo, and Edson. It is in a good location, with a gym, bakery, and grocery store close by. The biarticulated bus, which is the fast one that goes directly to downtown, passes just a couple blocks away. 

Classes are fairly interesting, although it can be difficult to understand what they are saying sometimes. You don’t notice it as much when it’s your native language, but academic-speak is really like it’s own language, with its own words and structure only applicable in that setting.

One thing I have noticed is that Brazilians have a love affair with little pieces of paper. If there is a line, you get a little piece of paper with your number on it. If you eat at a restaurant, they give you a little piece of paper where they write everything that you buy. If you buy something at a store, the little piece of paper has the salesperson’s name on it. Every time I ask for directions, or even an address, they insist on writing it on, you guessed it, a little piece of paper. Every day I come home and empty my pockets and I have like 50 of them. So that’s where the Amazon is going.

Check out the pics. They have captions.

A Treatise on Brazilian Women, Part 1

Three of the five best-paid models in the world in 2007 were Brazilian. From swimsuits to sunglasses to lingerie to perfume to watches to virtually everything else that can be purchased, Brazilian models have become the ultimate spokespersons for the good life. Their fame has gone global, reaching the front pages of Vogue, Elle, Cosmo, and many others, and finding its way into the households of millions of Americans in the pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

If you think that these women are anomalies, think again. Take a drive down the southern Brazilian coast, stop by such cities as Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Florianópolis, and Porto Alegre and you will find a virtual paradise of feminine beauty. 

The question is......why? What is it about this place and these people that catapults them into international stardom with such frequency? In this multi-part series, I will attempt to answer this question using population statistics, intercultural studies, structural face analyses, and gene-tracking mapping applications.

So that was my “book-style” introduction. What’d you think? Pretty badass, huh? So I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time, and I’ve come up with a number of theories about it. Since I have you as a captive audience, just thought I’d test em out. Thing is, I’m not so hot on all those fact-related things I mentioned above. Don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all, it’s just I’m pretty popular here, and so I don’t have as much time to be doing research and stuff. Instead, I will be employing that far more entertaining (for me) and insightful instrument of the human intellect: totally arbitrary speculation.

But first, the disclaimers...

DISCLAIMER 1: before I even get that first email or comment accusing me of misogynistic stereotyping, I want to make clear that I will be reducing the fairer sex to the most basic components I can conceive of. The reason for this is, simply, that it makes it far easier to talk about such subjective things as beauty, attractiveness, and compatibility by reducing them to their simplest parts. I will take the role of cold, dispassionate observer, without regard to the subtleties and nuances that make the daughters of Eve so difficult to understand and yet so wonderful. If you harbor overly romantic notions of feminine identity, I suggest you stop reading now. As they say, love is the illusion that all women are different (that was a test: if you found this statement offensive, you will enjoy the following website far more and should proceed there immediately).

DISCLAIMER 2: like everything I write, these posts will be ridiculously long, overly wordy, obtuse, bombastic, capricious, and of course will use unnecessarily obscure words such as obtuse, bombastic, and capricious. If any of this causes you any discomfort or frustration, feel free to take out your anger in the comments section. After all, that is what it is for (what, you don’t think I actually read them, do you?). One of the things I love most about this blog is that, unlike with emails, it is no longer my fault if I write crap and you read it - it’s yours. Also, this blog exists for my emotional health, not your entertainment. Keep that in mind as you read.

WHAT IS BEAUTY?

I know you’ve all been wondering, so let me explain it to you. By the way, this section refers mostly to purely physical feminine attractiveness. I will be addressing more subjective, temperament-driven attractiveness in a later section, right after the sections on the Meaning of Life, How to Be Happy Forever, and Whether God Can Create a Rock That Is Too Heavy for Him to Lift.

Before I talk about Brazilian women, I need to lay out a framework for what conditions I believe need to exist, on a macro scale, for a given country to produce large numbers of beautiful women. Of course, you will always find at least some of them in every country and city. That’s just the genetic lottery: someone’s gotta win it. But for a country to gain a reputation for its women, now that is a whole different ballgame, and requires a delicate balance of enivornmental factors.

So what does a country need to produce copious amounts of ridiculously, ridiculously gud-looking women?

1. 1.genetic diversity - science tells us that inbreeding, even among a relatively large population, is bad for that population. Recessive genes are expressed with greater frequency, yielding diseases and genetic defects that normally lie dormant. Any beneficial adaptations or mutations that would make an individual better-suited to its environment - say a thicker coat or resistance to sickle-cell anemia - are far more likely to spread to a population that breeds on a larger scale: a closed group will not benefit from the genetic improvements of its neighbors. For an example, look at the Royal Family of England. Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaah. ‘Nuf said. Then you get some fresh blood in there (Princess Diana), and you get the vastly less bad-looking lads of William and Henry.
   

2. 
   

3. We know that virtually all of the normally-accepted indications of feminine attractiveness (luminous
   

4. skin, healthy hair, large eyes, etc.) relate directly to indications of fertility. Inbreedling decreases fertility. The flip-side of this, of course, is that genetic diversity increases adaptiveness, fertility, overall health, and therefore physical beauty.
   

1. You will be hard-pressed to find a better example of genetic diversity than Brazil. Even the United States, which has a more diverse population by the numbers, can’t match its southern neighbor. The U.S. suffers from the “salad bowl effect”: people of different ethnicities mix but don’t melt. They may work together and play together, but when it comes time to copulate, they choose someone of the same ethnicity due to cultural pressures. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re about to point to the recent study that Americans are more likely to marry someone of their same socio-economic standing than of their same ehtnicity, culture, or religion. How dare you suggest that Americans judge their mates on their income level, you cynical bastard! Anyway, that would be a valid argument, except for the detail that socio-economic lines in the U.S. largely follow ethnic lines. Nice try, buddy.
   

1. If you look at the other contenders for genetic diversity on a large scale, they all fail miserably. China, India, Russia, Canada - all of these populations are extremely homogeneous. There is really no country in the world that approaches Brazil in the extent to which it is a genetic mishmash of wildly diverse ethnicites. In this country people of every imaginable race comingle. There are significant populations of blacks from all parts of Africa, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, British, Americans, Jews, Swedes, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and of course people from all of the other countries of Latin America, drawn to the region’s largest economy and cultural force. 
   

2. 
   

3. Unlike most of the world, including the U.S., these groups mix to a great extent. While in the U.S. we are able to neatly segment our population into categories, relegating mixed people to that insignificant “Other” checkbox (I’m not bitter), in Brazil the vast majority of people are mixed, and not in that yeah-I’m-really-diverse-cuz-my-ancestors-were-from-all-over-England-Ireland-and-Scotland-esque way, but in a seriously I’m-so-mixed-that-when-I-got-in-a-fight-with-my-brother-CNN-reported-a-race-war kind of way. Oh no, no, wait. In a I’m-so-mixed-that-when-my-mother-grounded-me-I-had-her-indicted-by-the-Anti-Apartheid-Commission-of-the-International-Criminal-Court kind of way. No, wait. In a yo-mama-is-so-diverse-they-had-to-create-a-new-checkbox-called-”omnicultural”-just-for-her kind of way (enough, we get it: ed.)
   

4. 
   

5. So what is the big deal with genetic diversity? I’m glad you asked. It gives its beneficiaries the aforementioned advantages of increased fertility, lowered susceptability to birth defects and rare diseases, better overall health, and increased fertility. But you’re right, this isn’t nearly enough. We live in the era beyond the industrial revolution, and our notions of feminine beauty have evolved far beyond the animal impulses from which they came. But here genetic diversity also comes into play. As we have become more globalized and interconnected, we have come to prize exotic features and combinations of features to an ever greater extent. Green eyes with black hair. Wide-set eyes with delicate mouth and nose. I can’t think of any more but just take my word for it. The point is, while your country’s women can get by with the factors I will mention next, if you want a reputation, you must have the genes to create truly unusual combinations.
   

1. That’s Gisele 1, World 0.
   

2. 
   

3. This post is already ludicrously long, so I’ll wrap it up here. In Part 2 I will be discussing the other 3 factors necessary for a country to produce beautiful women, so stay tuned.