Just imagine a female gymnast making a good landing after a double summersault off the vault and as TV commentators talk about the quality of her performance, the anchor butts in to say that the athlete should be given the gold for her “beautiful eyes”. On Sunday evening, during the live broadcast of gymnastics’ team event, when Polish athlete Katarzyna Jurkowska-Kowalska was waiting for her points to appear on the big screen, the anchor began talking about her “lovely blue eyes” and why “everybody would be envious of her”. Then he made recommendation: “She deserves the gold medal for her beauty.”
The other two commentators on the panel – both gymnastic experts – just laughed off the comment. In many countries if a TV journalist makes this kind of sexist remarks on live television being watched by millions would definitely be reprimanded if not taken off air, but in Brazil talking about beauty – both male and female – is almost an art form and it hardly invites any censure.
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Brazilians are extremely beauty-conscious people. It’s evident in the country’s everyday life. But even as the world is looking at the best athletes, many Brazilians are fixated on their beauty index. On Sunday, at about 3 pm the Brazilian gymnastics team started performing and the social media exploded with commentary on the looks of the local girls. While one tweet said that “Basically ALL as Brazilian gymnasts are Beyonce”, another one compared their beauty with girls from other countries. Brazil has a real chance of winning a medal in gymnastics, but many people couldn’t care less as they were busy talking about the bodies of gymnasts.
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Though there are many Brazilians who find all chatter sexist and politically incorrect, the country’s music and art scene has been dominated by this obsession with beauty. Many a writers have described Rio de Janeiro as a body of a beautiful woman. The gate at the Sambodrome, the annual Carnival site where the archery competition is taking place now, is rumoured to have been designed by the legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer to look like the backside of a woman.
All this talk about beauty is also blamed by many for stereotyping of Brazilian women around the world. That image got a bit reinforced on Friday night, when Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, 36, made an appearance at the games opening ceremony. As she walked across the Maracana to strains of Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema), it was difficult not to recall the opening lines of the song which go like this:
Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes
Goes A-a- a-h
Perhaps, it was also important to remember that the song was composed by two middle-aged men, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, when they saw a teenager with bronze skin and green eyes crossing the street in Ipanema in front of their favourite watering hole in the city.
