Even though I am retiring from dating at the top of my game, I still
find articles on the topic fascinating. So does Richard over at Just a
Gwai Lo, who found a New York Times article titled The Girls from Impanema are Not Impressed.
In the article, three young women who’ve come to New York from Brazil
talk about their dating experiences with American men, and precious
little of them are good. The key excerpt:
Forget getting a job, learning English, finding an apartment. The
true challenge for the young, single and foreign-born who arrive in New
York is cracking the code of the dating scene.
For Brazilian
women, who come from a place where public displays of affection are a
way of life and men rarely lack for amorous gusto, the task is
particularly confounding. Ask Brazilian women what they think about
American men, and most respond precisely the same way: with gales of
laughter. Then they tell disturbingly similar tales of men who fear
making advances lest they be accused of date rape and who coldly
calculate how many days they need to wait between meeting a woman and
asking her to dinner.
There’s a bit of a culture clash here. Brazil — like my
native country, the Philippines — is a
Latin culture. I’ve never been to Brazil, but I’ve gone clubbing in the
Philippines, and if you’re a guy, you have to dance and you have to
approach the ladies directly. On the other hand, the U.S. and Canada
are WASP cultures, and as the
joke goes…
Q: What do WASPs say after sex?
A: “Thank you much. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
An aside: my former housemate Paul is currently in Prague and observes in a recent entry on his site:
I first noticed on the tram, girls sitting on guys laps,
and I thought maybe they didnt want to take up two seats. But then I
saw it on otherwise completely empty park benches. And people nuzzling
each other while waiting for the subway, kissing in the street; boys
with arms around girls shoulders. None of the
we-musnt-show-affection-in-public of north america. So cool.
Another source of the problem: universities and colleges. The university dating scene
circa the early 1990s — remember, this wasn’t much long after the late
1980s explosion of “political correctness” and Marc Lepine’s evil rampage in Montreal — was a social minefield. At Crazy Go Nuts University,
“Every man is a potential rapist” was a popular phrase used at womyn’s
(note the spellyng) empowerment gatherings and most
socio-politico-complexo-migraino discourse had been pretty much reduced
to people saying “We’re white, we’re straight, we’re sorry!” Still, we were dating paradise next to Antioch College, who passed a student code of conduct that required explicit consent for each sexual act. It’s every policy studies professor’s wet dream — they effectively turned sex into a series of negotiation meetings!
Along with the good things that university feminism teaches is at least one very bad thing:
that “gender is solely a social construct”, or more simply: a man is just a woman
with a penis and an attitude problem.
I am donning my flame-proof accordion as I write this. Let me be
clear that I am not advocating date rape or any form on non-consensual
sex nor am I advocating viewing women solely as sex objects. I am also
not advocating everything in the Brazilian Man Repertoire, asthe women in the interview did say that:
American men have other good qualities – their faithfulness, for
example. Brazilian women often say that Brazilian men are safados –
shameless – and love to chase the fairer sex. Americans actually mean
what they say (at least more often than Brazilians do). And they are
sweet.
What I am advocating is understanding that men and women are different,
and as my gay and lesbians friends would say, “we’re born that way.”
Anyone who doesn’t believe me should watch toddlers, who haven’t had
enough time for much social conditioning, play.
Simply put: more Astrid Gilberto! Less Cathy!
In the meantime, until such a social revolution comes, guys may want to
start taking up the accordion and carrying it when they go out. It
requires confidence (and upper body strength) to tote one about,
teaches you the fine art of The Swagger, gives you an excuse to be more
forward and lends you the power of the Electra Complex (“Oh! My dad/grandfather used to play the accordion!”)
Want to read that article? It’s available, but hidden behind the New York Times registration wall. Failing that, the blog
agádoisesseóquatro has it transcribed in this entry.
9 replies on “"The Girls from Ipanema are Not Impressed"”
Please remember folks: though we are a couple and we are massively in love and such, we do not necessarily share all opinions, particularly when it comes to gender issues.
🙂
It’s a shame that you felt you had to write two paragraphs of apology as a preface to an observation as innocuous as, “men and women are different.”
That’s love — you build on the commonalities and respect and appreciate each other’s differences!
This sort of discussion is a “hot button” topic for many people and the internet is a place where context sometimes gets lost in the writing. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a diplomatic approach; I’ve been caught in too many campus “ideological shooting wars”.
electra complex via accordion? I love you joey, but I was never in love with you, so that in and of itself totally disproves your electra complex via accordion theory.
heh.
The above commenter again.
I know it’s a hot topic. I’ve been in the same crossfire myself. Our attitude toward anyone who makes us feel we have to apologize before expressing ourselves should be, “fuck ’em”. Really. Think about it. This posture on discourse is as preposterous and tight-assed as the attitude toward sex ridiculed in the Brazilians’ joke. The two are analogous. And there is nothing progressive* about it.
It reminds me of an old joke of Alexi Sayles’. He observed that he could tell when he was performing for a soi-disant progressive crowd when he heard a little pause between a joke and the laugh while the crowd decided whether or not they were allowed to laugh.
* I don’t want to use the term “politically-correct” because it’s so thread-worn. And it tends to be used most in rants by AM-talk-radio kind of people, alongside “tree-hugger”, “bleeding heart”, “cultural elite”, etc., etc., — and I don’t want to have anything to do with them, either.
I want to write a book on this. Many American/Euro girls seem reserved and a bit cold compared to Latin girls and Brasilileiras. For instance, it takes time getting used to shaking a womans hand instead of kissing her on each cheek when you meet her. That hand shaking bit is really wierd; it feels so cold and distant and that just seems indicative of the scene to follow. Thats just a small example, but it is indicative, it’s like a distance you have to bridge that has already been bridged with a Brasilian woman from the start, and all the harder to describe things follow, like touching, people being very physically expressive, kissing casually ect. I can just picture me approaching a girl in a bar in the US and after 20 minutes of talking and flirting asking for a kiss, and getting the response “EXCUSE me!! Do I KNOW you!!??” instead of a coy “Why should I?….oh you have to do better, every man says that.” If you acted in the US the way Brasilian men act, you would be slapped/arrested for sure.
If these Brazo girls are unimpressed with most American men, imagine how unimpressive New York women are compared to warm passionate Brasilian women, (not to lump everybody together because I don’t think latins have a lock on sexuality, but this article does deal with stereotypes). Just as there are Safado’s, there are Safada’s, and Brasileiro(as) do have the reputation of a) infedility and b) being easy to get into bed, and c) being wilder in bed (american girls are shocked when I tell them alot of my Brasileira girlfriends love getting a little slap on the face while your doing the deed). Many American/Euro/Austrailian girls just don’t seem to want to turn loose (it’s probably a good thing, morals and all that). I’m not trying to agitate people, those just seem to be the facts on the ground. I think feminism (not equality, respect for strong women, ect. but radical, every man is a potential rapist style feminism) has American women conflicted. I could be wrong, I’m still learning alot of this, but it seems that the feminist movement has left its mark on the culture, and women feel they must state that “I AM NOT A OBJECT FOR A MAN”, but on the other hand they want to be sexually attractive and desired.
I don’t know, just my thoughts
“I could be wrong, I’m still learning alot of this, but it seems that the feminist movement has left its mark on the culture, and women feel they must state that “I AM NOT A OBJECT FOR A MAN”, but on the other hand they want to be sexually attractive and desired.”
Perhaps we american women are less ‘warm’ and ‘passionate’, but then again that kind of ‘I am not an object’ mentality has gotten us much further in terms of equality, especially in the work place. You can be both sexually attractive and desired, and yet still have enough respect for yourself not to allow a man to treat you like a walking vagina and nothing more.
We are neither cold nor reserved, we just don’t put up with bullshit. You’ve just got to work a little harder, that’s all.
Hello!
I am a Brazilian .. I really became interested in how people think about us and really impressed me with disrespect size!
excuse me if not written everything right but it’s because I’m on google translator!
look, do not know how you can think that we Brazilian are easy to get to bed, I think you should study more to know, the country does not influence in any way the relationship women’s sexuality, just go to bed anyone! is not true?
because I tell you because I was very concerned about what the US think about us!
Because here in Brazil the situation is contrary, for us the US that are easy to get to bed because a lot of porn sites are American, and many videos we see women with an extremely sexy roupar, but as I know that not all are so I decided to look for what you thought of us, and really disappointed me, because I thought * pulls us Brazilians think the uS is the basis of what we see on the internet *
but everyone knows that this has nothing to do, I would never go to bed with a man I just met, feel uncomfortable and leave there quickly …
but what happens is that here in Brazil to a lot of prostitution, since many people can not afford to feed their children and even himself for a high rate of unemployment, and the only way out for many is prostitution .. but know that many do so because they do not have any option to work, not only because all we think about sex, you really think that if we had money we were going to have sex with any strange knowing that he can rape us and kill us?
I think they should be more concerned shaping the Brazilians!