Opinion – Renata Mendonça: From Marília to you: get over it, women didn’t come into the world to be beautiful

I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s done for me. There is a little time that we hear, read and see these things happen and it seems that not even death spares us. No matter how talented you are in your field, if you’re a woman, it’s your appearance that will always speak volumes.

A text by writer and actor Gregório Duvivier in this sheet, in 2014, marked me a lot in this regard. He said, “The first comment about a woman is always this: ugly. Beautiful. Fat. Hot. Would eat. Wouldn’t.” And no matter what this woman is doing, whether presiding over Petrobras (which was the topic Duvivier spoke about in the aforementioned text), or occupying the position of the most heard singer in the country, there will always, ALWAYS, be that observation: “you visual was not the most attractive”, “she was chubby and struggled with the scales” or anything that talks about the appearance of the protagonist in question.

All this way, I know (we know) by heart. If I’m not mistaken, now they’re going to say that it wasn’t the intention, that they wanted to talk about the importance of breaking the paradigms of a woman “outside the standards” having arrived where Marília Mendonça has arrived. Without realizing that the standards are precisely imposed by those who, even in the painful moment of the departure of a Brazilian music icon, make a point of remembering the weight, not of the singer’s representation, but of her body on the scale. “Skinny” or “chubby”, we survive on looks.

But damn our posture. No matter what we do in life, even in death the judgment will pass through our bodies. Sometimes the impression is that men are fully convinced that our reason for existing in the world is to be pleasing in their eyes. Our number one function is to be beautiful. Then, who knows, if we do something relevant, they’ll weave a few lines about us – not without, of course, dedicating the proper paragraph to our appearance. They don’t do that when they write obituaries for male characters.

And now, whose fault is it? They will say that society doesn’t judge men by their beauty, so there’s no need to talk about them when they write about them. They forget that “society” is not a hidden subject. It’s us. And as long as they reproduce this same logic, women will never be able to free themselves from the shackles of, more than being amazing at what they do, having to be beautiful, thin, hot.

Worry, no, that we are not going to be embarrassed, you are the ones who will. From Marília to you, get over it. Stop and listen to what the women have to say. Descend from the arrogance pedestal of someone who is always sure that he is right and that the error is in others to seek to see what the spotlight, always directed at you, has covered. When a woman sings, talk about her voice.

When a woman writes, talk about her writings. When a woman presents a TV show, comments on a football game, becomes president of a company or a country, talk about what she does, not about how she looks.

In a while, you’ll get used to it. Female protagonism will not stop bothering us. You who were used to writing about each other will have to write about us more and more. And time will teach. Listening to Marília Mendonça can help.

To her, the eternal gratitude of a woman who listened, learned and was inspired by her lyrics, by her authentic way of living, and by the strength she always showed to pave the way for her and the others who would come in such a macho environment as is the country’s. From woman to woman: thank you.