Sometimes I wake up and watch Ana Maria Braga. It helps to exercise distraction during breakfast, it's very good, but sometimes irritating. Last week, for example, the morning's theme was about "the two national passions": women's bottoms and Corinthians.
The question "how much does a boom-bum cost?" that appeared on the screen caught my attention. Even though women's butts are not the part of the human body that most attracts me, and I'm not a Corinthians fan, I insisted on seeing what would happen.
Currently, Brazilian TV has been sexist and heterocentric in its successful formula for attracting viewers. No one doubts that anymore. It's clear to everyone. That's why I wasn't surprised by TV Globo's investment in this topic first thing in the morning. After all, there is financial return. In fact, I didn't change the channel myself.
With a special dedication to panties with padding to "give a lift" to the butt and exercise classes at gyms for women to "grow a butt", the time for television approaches to the subject has passed. My coffee had already finished and the butts didn't leave my screen, in large sizes and different textures.
I found it absurdly objective when one of the physical educators interviewed stated something like: "Glutes are a requirement of the national fitness market." Yes, it's true, many women and many men consume ass. It has a use value and an exchange value! And, of course, like everything in capitalism, it is surrounded by a fetish as a commodity that doesn't let us see things as they really are, or how they came to be the way they are. Hail Marx!
But since my goal was to distract myself, I tried not to be too critical. I turned my attention to the images on the screen: pants clinging to very young girls, but with no brains. And here, I am not referring to the figurative sense of the term. I am not criticizing the intelligence of these women. I draw attention to the fact that all the time in the images, external and live in the studio, women are shown without heads. They had their backs turned, and at times behind a kind of wall that started above their butts and continued to above their heads to show only what was interesting.
The feature of removing the heads of "seductive images" has not only been used on television. Several dating sites, including those aimed at the gay universe, use this strategy of, let's say, personal marketing. Internet users are the biggest supporters and executors of this strategy. What is admired are the parts, not necessarily the whole, which is why the bodies are placed in isolated pieces, sliced, split, objectively selected.
The head, that is, the face, is almost never disclosed. Where the brain is has become less and less attractive. Identity at this moment is not of the slightest importance, what counts is impersonality.
I remembered Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who wrote about the ass:
"The ass, how funny.
She's always smiling, she's never tragic.
It doesn't matter what happens
across the front of the body. The ass is enough."
I think Drummond was right. If we think like him and contextualize the ass independently of what we see on the other side of it, we can declare: the ass has no sex! Therefore, it brings with it a sign of equality, even though the TV program only referred to women's butts, which are much more exposed and exploited in the media than men's.
In the center of the buttocks, called by Drummond "two twin moons", there is something that makes us very different: the anus. Evidently a very important sexual organ, both for men and women, because its good uses are undeniable for different sexualities.
But, on television it's like that, you imagine and focus on the ass, but you only show and talk about the ass considered feminine, protect and pretend not to see men's asses to get theirs out of the way. It's a process of making things more veiled, even though it's commonplace. Even to talk about the ass, TV is very intelligent, even if it doesn't trigger reflections and criticisms, even though it reproduces values that are in no way praiseworthy.
It's his way of making us believe that we are all in love with women's butts like no one is in any other part of the world, that we are a mass that supports, whether for or against, Corinthians. It's the sexist way of uniting us as a nation for women's butts and football, and the rest can be f#$x&%!
So, the old women, the fat ones, those who don't have silicone, who don't work out, who are classified as ugly, those who aren't Corinthians fans, who don't like football, who don't have a thing for butts, or who like men's butts that are very hairy, Those who don't look behind them when a woman passes by, those women who aren't assholes, those who don't have it all together, those who want more education and less football, aren't they Brazilian men and women? Are they sick in the head or sick in the feet? Are they a threat to national identity?
I, personally, couldn't stand it or wait to see how far the approach to these "two great national passions" would go in the program in question, I don't know what happened, neither the asses nor Corinthians. I had to "drop my hallucinogenic eye drops", as the other says, and take the bus to work. My breakfast didn't last long and I had the distinct feeling that not everything is always good enough to distract us, that we have to be careful not to start the day irritated by the stipulated price of a "good ass" on the national market.
*Tiago Duque is a sociologist and has experience as an educator in different areas, from teacher training to street social education. Milita no Identidade – Fight for Sexual Diversity Group. He likes to think and act with those who want to do something new, in search of another possible world.
