Opinion – Renata Mendonça: Warning to groups of football friends – Mamãe Said: we are not rivals, we are the revolution

I didn’t get to hear the audio of Deputy Mamãe Falei, but the transcript alone turned my stomach. Here are some of his most perverse phrases.

“The refugee line, brother. Imagine a line of, I don’t know, 200 meters or more, just a goddess. . […] I’m sick man, I don’t even have words to express it. Four of those were mines that you, if she shits, you clean her ass with your tongue. As soon as this war is over, I will come back here.”

He justified himself quite a bit about the attitude. Two things caught my attention in the “excuses”. Mama Falei said that “I was in a moment of excitement” – it’s hard to imagine someone excited to visit a war scene, right? – and that the messages had been sent to a “group of football friends”.

Ah, the groups of football friends. And, look, this detail is important, because groups created to really talk about football are not the groups in which this type of message occurs. I have some of them on my cell phone, including. A group that is meant to talk about football accepts women who also want to talk about football. Groups like the one mentioned by Mamãe Falei are for talking and sharing p****** (sexual content exposing women).

Men were baffled by these audios (who wasn’t?), but I don’t know if they’ve realized they’re part of conversations with exactly the same misogynistic tenor. Of course, when the war context is added, the perversity becomes even more evident. But who of you men has never heard stories of friends who took advantage of drunk, drugged, depressed women or in some vulnerable situation to have sex and boast in your group?

In the sports newsrooms where I worked, I’ve heard many of these conversations between “soccer friends”. Worse, on some occasions, I listened and silenced. Or laughed. To be accepted in the men’s group, we, who were so alone in this world of sport, did everything.

But today I can say that I found my “soccer group”. We are still few, it is true, much less than we should be, but today I can say that “we are” together. Funny because we were always taught that we were rivals. That we had to compete with each other. That we had to complain that the girl got this or that, but you should have been there. And for a while our naivety made us believe all this. If we fight among ourselves, after all, the space remains all theirs.

But in the struggle, we found each other. And we realized that it was easier to silence a single voice than dozens, hundreds of voices screaming. That sharing our pains made us stronger to face them. To overcome them. To say enough about the harassment, abuse and silencing that we suffer every day.

And today we don’t just have the “soccer group”, of women who are strengthened in the fight for space in such a sexist environment. We have each other. And you don’t even need to know each other.

I went to a bar in São Paulo on Friday (4) and witnessed what we have all experienced. A man attacking a woman – who was sitting with three other friends – screaming, cursing, threatening. Of the five tables around it, four were women’s. We all react. We asked the bar manager to remove the man, who was visibly upset, but they continued to serve him beer. We didn’t know each other, but we all stayed there, until the police came to remove the said whose.

Finally we can say: we are not alone. We are not rivals, we are the revolution. Happy #8M.