A New Plot for an Old National Hero in Brazilian Society (and Soap Operas)
Take 1. The veteran soap opera actor José Mayer, 67, knows that it is not a problem to compliment women. He has been on the stages in Brazil for almost 50 years now. Like a tropical George Clooney, with a slim body, grey hair, tanned skin, almond-shaped brown eyes and white aligned teeth, his smile was many times described by feminine magazines as “magnetic”. “You are so beautiful”, he says with a discrete smile and a smooth voice to a costume design assistant last August, in the backstage of another huge primetime production in which he was the leading man, “A Lei do Amor” (The Law of Love), for Globo TV – the number one channel in audience. Whenever he had the chance, Mr. Mayer would say something to show his admiration to her. “I like your style.”
The reverberation of his acting performances made him once an Internet meme (as happened before with Chuck Norris, 77). Through the trending hashtag #zemayerfacts, Brazilians made jokes on social media like “Zé Mayer made a woman come by only blinking one eye, and she was blind”, “For Zé Mayer, Viagra is a sedative” and “Two things were fundamental for the demographic expansion worldwide: industrial revolution and Zé Mayer’s birth”.
Back to the backstage of “A Lei do Amor”, he improvises a line to the costume design assistant: “What a wonderful thin waist you have”. He is persistent and, more, a legend. “When I look at your butt, it makes me keep thinking about your bobbies.” He would still ask her, in private, “will you ever let me to fuck you?”.
Take 2. Seven months later, in February this year, they are together in the dressing room with another two women when he grabs the same costume design assistant by the pussy saying “this is an old desire I had”. The other ladies in the room laugh. Take 3. After a few weeks, the actor and the costume design assistant are at the set, with a full production crew of around 30 people. Mr. Mayer is under the spotlights, following the script and about to start saying his protagonist lines again -- this time he is Sebastião (or just “Tião”) Bezerra, a businessman well known for preferring a little more action, a little less conversation. Instead of looking at the cameras, he stares the costume design assistant and threatens to touch her again if she keeps not talking to him. She answers “no”, in a loud voice. “Bitch!”, the protagonist screams back.
Macho technology
For Mr Mayer, it all was just a “charming” joke. He became a star by playing the ideal Brazilian male role, the model macho both for the masculine and feminine audiences.
Many of his characters are the stereotype of a seductive man, the one who holds in his arms the most beautiful women in television; very usually the unfaithful kind of character, the type that cannot resist to beautiful ladies. “I learnt to exhale masculinity at first sight and that is a first impression you may have from me. My moves, the way I look at people, my speech, my tone of voice maybe inspire (audiences). It's the male attitude, basically.
Being an actor gave me some experience, a certain, let's say, charm. This is a technical work. Maybe the charm comes from the actor, I do not know. Maybe it comes from the man”, he explained in an interview to “Trifatto Magazine”, about being the leading man in so many different soap operas.
Mr Mayer’s behaviour and words evoke a strong feeling in the Brazilian society, where he is and his characters for the last decades were applauded for the performance showcasing an aggressive and virile masculinity – the true macho. This behaviour, for which he became an avatar, reflects and has reflections in the everyday life. For men, it may be a heavy burden to perform this permanent virile role all the time, it does not matter in which social occasion, within the family, among friends or at work. For women, it can mean harassment. For gay men, violence. But why being a man in Brazil means to be macho and to show such a sexual aggressive attitude?
The Brazilian cordial man
Different sociology scholars have been trying to explain how our tropical paradise, the land of Carnival, got stuck in such a model for men. It all started when the Catholic Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral and the ships Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria docked in Bahia bay, 517 years ago. According to the theory of one of the most prominent
sociologists in Brazil, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, in “The Roots of Brazil” (1936), the effects of the Portuguese heritage for our society were a mix of Catholic conservatism and a strong patriarchal system.
Colonisers brought hundreds of Jesuits with them to convert the native indigenous to Christianism. With the Bible, came the concept of abomination related to homosexuality, and after more than five hundred years, this idea remains strong in Brazil. The society was organised around a strong patriarchy system, in which the owner of land and slaves --brought from Africa from 1530 to 1888-- was the head of the family and the local community. The state was absent. Everybody needed the protection of a patriarch. From a scientific observation of that social structure, Mr Holanda builds up the concept of the “cordial man” to describe the national identity, based on the Weberian typology and political analyses.
This concept helps to explain why Mr. Mayer felt so comfortable (and was not alone) in making those “compliments” to the costume design assistant. “Cordiality does not mean politeness, gentleness, but a predominance of personality and passions in social relations. This concept approaches the famous expression ‘Do you know who you are talking to?’ much used in Brazil, to circumvent impersonal norms, reinforcing the personal and hierarchical character of social relations, in which such norms are valid only to some, usually those ones located in the less favoured social strata, whether in economic terms or in terms of social prestige”, explains the sociologist Daniela Leandro Rezende, from Federal University of Minas Gerais, in her article “Patriarchy and Brazilian social thought: a feminist reading of Oliveira Vianna and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda”.
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The sense of a hegemonic masculinity (the macho model) and the logic of patriarchalism are so deep intrinsic in the identity of Brazilian men that it can be a source of violence against themselves, in special at old age. A study from researches from Osvaldo Cruz
Foundation pointed both those hegemonic and logic as reasons for suicide among the elderly male population, derived from a perception of honour loss. “Although many factors are associated with self-inflicted death in this social group, the influence of a hegemonic masculinity culture in the predominance of suicides among elderly men compared with elderly women is undeniable”, the study registers.The same study describes the pattern of the socially dominant masculinity as a vulnerability factor for the suicide of elderly men. “We take into account that the pattern of prevailing masculinity in which men are socialised contributes for them to become, at the same time, main victims and perpetrators of different expressions of social violence, and especially of lethal self-harm. Once solving social and personal conflicts in an aggressive manner is a pattern of the hegemonic masculinity culture, using weapons, and deliberate exposure to risks and self-harm.”
Goal against yourself
One relevant form of social aggression derived from this culture is violence against gays. It takes only one recessed ball or a goal shot for the goal keeper in a football stadium to hear the adversary supporters screaming: “OOO, FAGGOT!”. Football arenas, where the
sport is treated as a passion, are one of the main stages for machos expressing their aggressiveness. “This type of violence is not punctual, unexpected, or casual. Violence is plotted against a logic, a backdrop, in which the presence of the patriarchate is still strong and in which male domination is the tonic”, explain Marco Almeida and Alessandro Soares in the article “O futebol no banco dos réus: caso da homofobia” (Football on the dock: homophobia case).
Even between amateurs the game can be the background for hostility, therefore a group of gay friends decided to start their own training team in São Paulo. “We had a bad experience playing with a hetero team once. They got tense and aggressive because in their mind it would be a shame to loose against gays. The game got heavy with a silly rivalry. So we decided, at least for now, that we will only play among ourselves”, says the lawyer Felipe Marquezin, 31, the founder of the Unicorns Football Club.
Indeed, it can get quite heavy for gays in Brazil. Less than one year ago, in July 2016, “The New York Times” discussed an epidemic of anti-gay violence in Brazil, where a gay or a transgender person is killed almost every day. Different LGBTQ groups claim that Brazil is on the top of the ranking of world’s deadliest place for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender. The Gay Group of Bahia – the oldest association for the defence of the human rights for homosexuals functioning in Brazil – tracks the deaths through news articles: 1,600 people died in hate-motivated attacks in the last five years.
It’s not a match
As seen previously in “A Lei do Amor”, women are also often victims of violence from our macho culture. According to the United Nations, a woman is assaulted by men every 15 seconds in the city São Paulo. For many years, the national public transportation system has been the stage for this manly performance.
The Rio subway, ten years ago, started offering women passengers their own waggons, where men are forbidden to enter. This initiative was not enough to keep men under control, so last year a new law was created by the government. If a man insists in staying on the feminine waggon now, he has to pay a fine that varies from R$ 173 to R$
1,084 (from 52 to 326 euros). In São Paulo, where there are no exclusive waggons, a feminist group handed out needles to female passengers as a defence weapon against harassment.
Feminism, by the way, is raising in Brazil as an important voice and counter-movement answering to this old aggressiveness, that hurt both men and women.
Take 4. The costume design assistant Susllem Meneguzzi Tonani, 28, smiles with embarrassment at the first compliments from Mr. Mayer, in August, but at a certain point, she has to be clear. “I am not interested in you. You are not allowed to touch me. If you ever put your hand on me I will directly go to the Human Resources department.”
Take 5. Ms Tonani is trying to be rational about it all but her words are not enough to stop him. “You are older than my father. You have a daughter my age. Would you like that she was treated like this by anyone?”, she tries to be reasonable. Take 6. He goes further and touches her. The leading man puts his hands on her body in front of two women, who just laugh at the situation. Ms Tonani saw herself alone, unprotected, cornered, ridiculed, made inferior. What was she doing there anyway? She had to get back to work. Nothing worse could happen, until being called “bitch” in front of everybody.
Take 7. She goes to the Human Resources and is sent home while an internal investigation starts. It feels like being punished. “This has to stop”, she hears from Camila Pitanga, 39, an actress that had the same problem with Mr. Mayer in 2003, when they were both playing protagonists in the same soap opera, “Mulheres Apaixonadas” (Women in Love), also for Globo TV. “In some occasions, he was not being professional while we were kissing in front of the cameras and he crossed the limits”, she complained at HR then, but 14 years ago, things were different. Nothing happened. Ms Pitanga remained quiet.
Take 8. Ms. Tonani decides to publish her story on 31 March in a blog hosted by feminist activists in the newspaper “Folha de S.Paulo”. Mr Mayer certainly was not expecting this story to become public and he is forced to improvise some lines to his public: “I respect women a lot, as well as my colleagues and my work environment. I beg you to not mix up fiction and reality. The words and attitudes being claimed to be mine are proper of the chauvinists and misogynists: they belong to one of my characters, Tião Bezerra! For all these 49 years working as an actor
I have always reached respect and trust from my stage colleagues.” It’s 2017. It is hard for the audience to be passionate about his lines now. “Will José Mayer ever change?”, wrote in her social media account Letícia Sabatella, 46, another actress, interpreter of a former romantic couple with him.
A new trending topic
There is no memories of #zemayerfacts in social media anymore. All of a sudden, a new hashtag starts trending, #stopharassment. The main TV actresses are posting pictures of themselves with a t-shirt in which is written “Mexeu com uma, mexeu com todas! #chegadeassedio” (Mess with one, mess with all! #stopharassment).
Take 9. “I made a mistake”, he has finally to admit in April. In an open letter to the public, he addresses to the other men who might think and act like him. “I was wrong in what I did, what I said and in what I thought…Unfortunately, I’m from a generation that learned wrongly that chauvinist, invasive and abusive attitudes may be disguised by jokes. They can’t. They are not jokes. I learned in the last days what I have not learned in 60 years. The world has changed and this is good. I want to change with the world… I hope the public recognition of my mistake may alert many different people from my generation, the ones that have the same thoughts and actions, to think about it and change themselves too. I’m living the painful need of change. Painful, but necessary…”
Mr Mayer’s letter is personal, but also carries centuries of Brazilian history and it seems to point to a new beginning, both for men and women. Circumstances forced him to play a different character now, the macho that does not have to be aggressive. It’s time to applause him and pray that he may keep inspiring audiences.