The scrub-up extended to the square itself, which had been one of Rio’s oldest cruising parks, surrounded by bars, theaters, musical revues, and entertainment to suit all tastes. Its shrubbery had provided cover for prostitution and same-sex encounters since the days when Brazil was a monarchy. Now sex workers were being shooed from the ancient sobrados that surrounded it as the two- and three-story town houses were being converted into cultural centers, art galleries, and office spaces.
This kind of turnover was happening all over the neighborhoods that would be most visible during the sporting events—downtown, the touristy south-side, and the port area, said anthropologists Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva.
The couple have been studying Rio’s sex industry since 2004. She’s a Carioca of many generations, petite and very sharp; he’s a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with wire-rimmed glasses, a shaggy lefty-professor beard, and a disarming manner. Together they maintain a database of more than 50,000 reports about the places where people pay for sex in Rio, and draw from it a sprawling map of the industry with its 600 or so brothels. These range from a single tumble-down sobrado where sex can be had for a dollar a minute, to industrial-scaled Uruguaiana 24, a nondescript office building with four stories dedicated to the sex trade, to the exclusive Centauro, a three-story venue on a leafy Ipanema street that charges clients $60 just to step in the door. Centauro is a termas, or sauna, where clients relax in robes at the whiskey bar or take a steam bath before picking services from a menu that starts at $200.
The image-cleansing campaign of Rio’s mayor was nothing new, Thad and Ana Paula told me over dinner one evening. The city has a history of pushing prostitutes out of the way: there have been eight government-led removals, cover-ups, or attempts to quash red-light districts over the past century. The most recent was in 1996, when a zona was cleared out to make way for the city’s new administrative center. Carioca sense of humor being what it is, the imposing new structure was promptly nicknamed the Piranhão, or big piranha—slang for a sexually voracious woman.
A look at the times when the city turned against its prostitutes revealed primarily three motives, they said. The first were moments of international visibility, when officials wanted the city to look good to foreign eyes—the traditional para inglês ver. This was the case in 1920, when King Albert of Belgium came to town and police swept through, arresting lower-class prostitutes. It happened again in 1968, when police boarded up the main red-light district to conceal it from view during a visit by Queen Elizabeth II.
Another force had been urban renewal. This was behind the clearing out of the zona that had stood where the municipal administrative offices now rises, and more recently behind the closure of Help! and the Hotel Paris.
The last factor was the zeal of a powerful individual, such as a police chief or high city official who, seized with concern for the city’s moral or physical health, had clamped down on the sex trade. This had happened during a vast sanitizing campaign in the first decade of the twentieth century and again under a particularly righteous police captain after World War II.
I’d landed in Rio at an extraordinary moment when all these factors seemed to be bearing down at once. Beyond brand-names like Help!, dozens of smaller, lower-end brothels were being shut down every year. What I didn’t understand was the legal justification for all this. After all, prostitution has been listed under the Ministry of Labor’s Classification of Occupations since 2002. The ministry describes sex professionals as men or women who “seek sexual programs; attend and accompany clients; participate in educational activities in the field of sexuality.” This listing allowed them to take advantage of retirement and social security benefits, along with sick leave and other labor rights. I’d assumed this kind of official recognition guaranteed them a certain degree of protection.
This was why I’d invited the anthropologists over for dinner. Technically, prostitution is legal, but when officialdom deemed it necessary to go after prostitutes, it wasn’t hard to find ways, Thad said. Although selling sex is a legally protected activity, profiting from it or inducing someone to do it is illegal, and the laws are vaguely worded. Profit can be interpreted as anything from exploitative pimping to running a brothel to renting an apartment, he said.
“You could sell a prostitute this piece of bread, and if someone wanted to go after you for it, they could,” he said, holding up a chunk of the home-baked loaf he’d brought.
That meant sex establishments were always vulnerable to raids and remained open at the whimsy of the municipal or state administration or the local precinct chief. Plus, prostitutes were just as vulnerable to the forces of urban renewal and gentrification that were shifting thousands of lower-income residents in the city through eminent domain, increased rents, the sudden enforcement of long-neglected building codes, or demands for payment of old debts.
To understand what it would mean for the women (although there were plenty of men in the business, the majority of Rio’s prostitutes were women) I spent some time at the next potential target: Vila Mimosa, a chaotic jumble of modest storefronts that make up Rio’s biggest red-light district.
To the nearly two thousand women who rotate through this working-class zona, prostitution provides full-time work or a way to supplement incomes earned as cashiers, maids, or manicurists. To clients, Vila Mimosa offers quick, easy sex and a cold beer in a convenient location. It is just one subway stop from downtown and a five-minute walk from a station serving dozens of major bus lines. Highways connecting the heart of the city to far-flung suburbs crisscross nearby.
The Vila occupies an unattractive geographic space, sandwiched between highways, rail lines, and warehouses. But in this changing city, what had been undesirable was suddenly prime real estate. The area was right on a proposed route for the planned bullet train that would connect Rio to São Paulo—one of the projects aimed at revamping Brazil’s decrepit transportation infrastructure. Before the government opened bidding to prospective builders, I stopped by.
I got there just after 5 p.m., when offices downtown disgorged hordes of workers and Vila Mimosa’s business picked up. Bass-heavy funk rattled metal tables set out on the sidewalk and shirtless men fired up makeshift grills next to coolers of beer. Women in thong bikinis or Day-Glo lingerie that popped against their dark skin lounged about in plastic chairs, swinging their heels, or leaned against doorways, smoking, waiting. They were young and old, fresh-faced and worn, brunettes and bottle blondes. I saw bellies scarred by C-sections, crisscrossed with stretch marks, rippling with rolls of fat squeezed by too-tight elastic bands. I also saw lithe, flawless, taut young bodies and faces as mainstream pretty as any picture in a magazine. They represented a cross section of Rio’s working-class women, much as you’d find in an express bus headed for the northern suburbs at the end of a long day.
Although the bullet train was still in the planning stage, the women were worried. Cris, a curvaceous black woman who was getting ready for rush hour by applying bright pink lipstick to match her vivid spandex top, agreed to talk over a beer.
She was frank. There’s nothing appealing about Vila Mimosa. The bottom floor of most houses had been converted to basic bars—chipped Formica counters, plastic stools—or nightclubs blaring distorted music out of insufficient speakers so dancers could gyrate under a lone disco ball. The sex took place on the second floor, where small, windowless cubicles branched off a narrow central corridor. For as little as eighteen dollars, a customer got twenty minutes on a plastic-covered foam pad atop a cement bunk. These curtained-off spaces offered little privacy. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh resounded in the hallway. The briny smell of fresh semen and sweat came in waves over the searing chemical scent of disinfectant. Cleanup was a bucket of water and roll of toilet paper.
But the money she made there was at least double, on a good day triple, what she could make elsewhere, she said; it had helped raise her children, buy a sm
all house, and furnish it. She was now forty-eight years old and saving for retirement. Demolishing the Vila would push her out at a time when starting over elsewhere or in a new job would be unbearable.
“My clients come here, they know me,” she said. “And it’s safe. I know all these girls. When we leave at night, there’s transportation here, and there’s always someone keeping an eye on you.”
I’d hear many variations on that story. Some, like Cleide de Almeida, remembered what removal was like. She grew up in the red-light district’s old downtown location, one of ten children of a woman who cooked for the prostitutes there. Now she headed the Vila Mimosa residents and business association.
“The women were forced into the street,” she said. “They worked out of cars, wherever they could, until we were able to buy up property here. It was a terrible time. We tried to move, but word got out and residents there waited for us and fought us off when we got there with our trucks.”
While the women in Vila Mimosa waited to learn their fate, the crusade on visible prostitution continued. In March 2012 the federal government asked more than two thousand websites that promoted Brazil as a sex tourism destination to take down explicit content. In June, as thousands of foreign dignitaries and environmental activists boarded flights for Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a hundred officers swarmed Centaurus in Ipanema and eleven other well-known brothels in Copacabana. All were on the short list of venues that cater mostly to foreigners. The official warrants for the raid listed corruption—police often take a cut of these large establishment’s profits—but also money laundering, drug trafficking, and sexual exploitation, among others. Three people were arrested, including Centaurus’s manager, and the women working there disbanded.
The manager was released a week later. By August, the international media attention had died down, the environmentalists had gone home, and Centaurus was up and running again. In early September, a judge dismissed charges against the two other men who had been arrested, arguing that none of the prostitutes had complained of being exploited and that “adult women cannot be treated as if they were invisible, without agency and ability to make rational choices.”
The judge went on to conclude that the raid had been motivated by a “repressive political climate generated by sanitizing measures intended to prepare the city of Rio de Janeiro for the sporting mega-events of 2014 and 2016.”
I believed he was right. So when Thad told me in early 2014 that he was going to do a recount of establishments to see how many remained open, I joined in. With only a few months to go before the World Cup, I wanted to get a better sense of how much had changed.
We hopped on our bikes in midmorning, armed with Thad’s map and a plan to tackle downtown. Our goal was to visit thirty-two establishments that day. That sounded like a lot, but I soon realized it was only a fraction of the sex businesses in the area. There was barely a block that didn’t have a brothel or termas of some sort. We hit them, one by one, tallying the number of patrons, the number of women, the number of shuttered façades.
Most were threadbare old sobrados with boarded-shut windows, dark and airless even in the middle of a sunny summer day. It was January, when most Brazilians take their month of vacation. Many of the joints had only two or three visible customers; a handful had more. Women in bikinis or underwear would perk up when we walked in, but their smiles drooped once they realized we just wanted some bottled water and a quick chat with the manager.
There were attempts at décor: Christmas lights wrapped around the bar, bits of tired tinsel hanging from the ceiling, or balloons that danced to the back-and-forth sweep of a tabletop fan. One had a jukebox, but it only worked when a client bothered to feed it money. Song over, the silence closed in again. These details were meant to liven up the atmosphere, but instead they created a sad, expectant air, like at a birthday party where the guests had failed to show.
At a place called Vanessa’s Bar, the prices were posted on the wall, starting at $15 for 15 minutes of straight-up oral or vaginal sex with protection. Of that, $1 was for the condom and $6 to the house. The prostitute took home $8. A beer was $3. This represented the going rate in these spots, which served the downtown crowd—not the businessmen, but the office boys, the drivers, the delivery guys. The higher-end termas aimed at the men with suits charged entrance fees of $22 or $45 and did not allow women to enter, unless they were prostitutes. Thad would visit them without me.
We took a lunch break at the Beco das Sardinhas, a pedestrian passage taken over by greasy spoons all specializing in fried sardines. Over an oily pile of deep-fried goodness, we discussed the morning’s work.
Yes, the hypocrisy of shutting down a brothel around a big international event made me cringe, as did the inherent injustice of shoving aside prostitutes or anyone else to make way for a tapas bar or a cultural center where they’d never feel welcome. At the same time, the working conditions in these places were abysmal; many of these sobrados weren’t just eyesores, they were also unsafe. At one place, the aging floorboards were worn so thin I could see the room below through the cracks.
None of this was new to Thad. Since Davida, the prostitutes’ rights organization, had been kicked out of the old Hotel Paris, its founder, a former prostitute called Gabriela Leite, had died of cancer. She’d been a charismatic woman who’d worked for recognition of the field she’d chosen and professed to love. Without her, the organization was leaderless and without a home. This left Thad and Ana Paula as the most prominent prostitutes rights activists in Rio. While we visited the brothels, Thad took notes, but he also passed on a card with a phone number where they could report abuses and problems. This number was his cell phone.
“Listen,” he said, gesturing with half a sardine. “I’m not like Gabriela. I think that in the majority of cases, prostitution is not cool. There are women who like it, but often it’s just . . . what other options do they have? People say prostitution isn’t dignified. Is it dignified to wash someone else’s bathroom for a minimum wage that won’t allow you to feed your kids, or to depend on a man? What dignity is there in these other options? That’s the problem.”
After lunch, we made a few more visits. As the afternoon wore on, there were more clients. One of the last brothels we visited, around the 5 p.m. rush hour, had a steady stream of customers—I counted ten men climbing its steep stairs in five minutes. This one wouldn’t let me in, either. Sometimes wives come, the bouncer at the door explained. They cause a scene.
That was fine. What I’d seen that day would linger with me for a long time: the women, their exposed bodies and the effort in their smiles; the stuffy rooms with their red walls, pink balloons, and plastic flowers. We’d also answered my question about what was happening to Rio’s brothels: of the 32 places we’d visited that day, 11 had closed down since the last time Thad checked. Several had received warnings from the city about the physical conditions of the building.
In the months before the World Cup, I looked up the projects and improvements for which places of prostitution had ostensibly been removed or threatened with removal over the last few years. None of them were in place.
Vila Mimosa was still operating, as the government had tried and failed three times to attract bids for the bullet train. The Museum of Image and Sound, which was to take the place of Help!, was still a construction site, and the boutique Le Paris hotel remained a paper dream, stymied by the owners of a mattress store who operated on the ground level and refused to budge.
Thad was right. This crackdown was largely another case of para inglês ver, bolstered by gentrification and moralistic zeal, and motivated more by a concern with appearances than with making Rio better for its residents. The welfare of the women involved was last on the list of priorities.
The shuttering of brothels was part of the physical transformation of the city, and easy to measure: Thad and Ana Paula were taking care of that. But
there were other social, cultural, and legal shifts that were reshaping the murky arena of sex and sexuality in ways that were less tangible but would have lasting repercussions.
One arena that was undergoing significant change was the position of women at home and at work, and with it, the relationship between genders. Some of these changes could be explained easily through numbers: women now made up about 60 percent of college graduates; the wage gap between women and men shrank every year; nearly 40 percent of women in the last census had said they were the head of household, with another 30 percent saying they shared the responsibility with their partner.
Underlying this was a very rapid demographic shift. I had to look no further than my own family to see a great arc from mothers who had a soccer-team roster of children to the current generation, in which the adults outnumbered the doted-upon babies. My grandmothers, who’d grown up with eight and eleven siblings, had borne six and seven children each. My parents in turn had three kids. My sister, brother, and I had three, two, and zero children, respectively. This averaged out to 1.6 children each—just under the national average of 1.9 per mother recorded in the 2010 census.I
Plot those numbers and you have an astonishing slide, particularly for a Roman Catholic country where abortion remains illegal and where there was never any official incentive toward birth control. Somewhere along the line, women across social and educational strata had seized control of their bodies. This precipitous drop took developed nations a century or more, but happened in half that time in Brazil.
The federal government was one unexpected agent in this transformation. When President Lula launched the conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família in 2003, the money went to women in 93 percent of cases. This began to work a rearrangement of power within families. The money boosted women’s status within the family; anecdotal evidence showed it helped them break out of bad marriages and take charge of household purchases. The biggest difference, according to studies, was in their ability to make birth control decisions. This was momentous, as by 2014 the program reached one-fourth of the population.
Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink Page 19
