As Brazil prepares to host the Summer Olympics this year, it also happens to be going thorough a huge crisis with regard to the rights and safety of its women.
According to Bleeding Cool, Brazillian DC Comics freelancer Allan Goldman, who was working through Chiaroscuro Studios, had his contract terminated by the company for some really gross comments he made on his Facebook page sparked by the recent, horrific gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl in mid-May by thirty men in Rio de Janeiro that was filmed and put on social media. Comments that were not only victim-blaming, but also managed to be transphobic, too!
The post has since been removed from his Facebook page, but Bleeding Cool quoted him as saying:
“What happens if the 30 rapists claimed they are women?
According to the leftist gender ideology, a person is what you feel, and your biology does not matter. The society is obliged to accept this decision, if not is fascism!
How the Court will hear case of a woman who was raped by 30 other women?
I was curious now.”
*sigh*
The girl has since opened up about what happened to her to AJ+, because as police have barely scratched the surface on an investigation on her case and have only arrested four of the thirty men who raped her, she has gotten death threats and loads of victim-blaming hurled her way:
This was the last straw for women in Brazil, who have become increasingly and rightfully angry:
Because it isn’t just about this one rape. It’s about a systemic increase in hostility toward and dehumanization of women. This hostility was most recently apparent in the impeachment of former Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, the country’s first female president.
As reported by Jezebel, Rousseff was supposedly impeached due to some shady accounting that affected the national budget, but in reality, “The popular perception, though, was that the push for her impeachment was a reaction to the dovetailing of a historic economic crisis with a massive scandal within the state-owned oil company Petrobras that has roped in top political officials (though Rousseff herself has not been implicated, her predecessor Luiz Inacio da Silva has).”
So, because of a scandal she probably had nothing to do with, the first female president of Brazil was impeached. And it just so happens that of the 513 members of Brazil’s lower House, only 53 are women, and so there weren’t very many women to speak up on her behalf. The Brazilian Senate also voted for impeachment, and when the new interim president Michel Temer chose a cabinet, it was a cabinet of all white men. This is the first time Brazil has had an all-white, all-male cabinet since the 1970s.
After decades of progress, suddenly Brazil has regressed in one fell swoop, and become a place where a teenage girl can be drugged and raped seemingly without much consequence, and where a shady government will get rid of a recently elected female president by any means necessary and make it that much harder for another one to be elected by stacking the government with even more men.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of face Brazil puts on when the world is watching them during the Olympics in August. In the meantime, we stand with you in solidarity, Women of Brazil. Keep fighting.
(image via screengrab)
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