Introduction: An Imperfect History
The history of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is the story of police intervention in the organization of sexual commerce, how this gained legitimacy, and how that legitimacy has been questioned and subverted. Originally founded by the French in 1555 as a means of dominating the sea routes of the South Atlantic, Rio de Janeiro was conquered by the Portuguese a decade later, serving as the seat of the Portuguese viceroyalty from 1763, the capital of the independent Empire of Brazil from 1822, and the capital of the Brazilian Republic from 1889 until the founding of Brasília in 1960.
Prostitution was largely accepted during the colonial and imperial eras, but since the birth of Brazil’s first republic in 1889 the powers that be in Rio de Janeiro have intensified earlier attempts to concentrate sexual commerce in certain areas. Although these efforts have often enjoyed social approval, they have never been coupled with laws regulating prostitution, as was the case in many Latin American cities. Public policy with regards to prostitution in Rio de Janeiro can thus be understood as an extra-legal form of regulation which concentrates immense discretionary power in the hands of the police and charges them to “control” sexual commerce. On occasion, this has resulted in the indirect management of brothels by the authorities. In spite of these efforts, however, after almost a century and a half of direct police intervention, prostitution in Rio de Janeiro continues to be widespread, sharing spaces and interests with a series of other urban actors.
Prostitution began to interest Brazilian historians as part of a renewal of historiography that took place in the 1980s and which focused on the years between 1870 and 1930, an era considered to have been of fundamental importance in the creation of modern, urban, capitalist Brazil. Historians have placed the first republican initiatives to police prostitution within the context of radical urban reforms which took place in Rio de Janeiro during this era, reforms which attempted to transform the city—then the capital of Brazil—into the
Anthropology and sociology became interested in prostitution in Rio from the late 1980s on and ethnographic studies have created a panorama of sex work in the city over the last thirty years. This has greatly improved our understanding of sex as it is sold in Rio, but unfortunately, like the historians, anthropologists and sociologists have generated relatively little information regarding the period stretching from 1930 to 1990.
Because of this unevenly focused scholarship, the history of prostitution in Rio is unbalanced. We know quite a bit about the years stretching from 1870 to 1930, as well as from the late 1980s on. We still know very little about prostitution before the 1870s or after the inaugural years of Vargas’ Estado Novo, 3 however. What information exists about the sale of sex in Rio from 1930 to 1990 has largely been produced by journalists, medical professionals, and the police, but no-one has yet collated or systematically reviewed this material.
Legal Definitions
Brazilian legislation has concentrated on repressing the exploitation of prostitutes rather than repressing prostitution itself. Laws are written in such a vague fashion, however, that any social relation involving prostitutes can be criminalized, if the authorities so desire. This power has historically been utilized by the police to manage prostitution without instituting formal regulation.
The young medical students who began to study prostitution during the nineteenth century were inspired by what they understood to be the French
The definition of who was a “prostitute” in nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro depended upon intersections between class, gender, and race in the surrounding society and the eye of the beholder. Medical and legal authorities tended to apply the term to a wide variety of women who were not necessarily charging for sex. In the early 1870s, for example, a medical student included in his list of prostitutes any woman living in an intimate relationship outside the bounds of formal matrimony, a definition that took in the greater part of Brazilian women. This same student also classified as prostitutes those women involved in the city’s incipient nocturnal life, such as “theatre goers” and “women who live in hotels.” Finally, he also appended “flower vendors, fashion designers, seamstresses and cigar sellers” to his list. Few women working in Rio’s service sector escaped being labelled as prostitutes by this gentleman. 5
This wide definition was not shared by the large majority of cariocas. 6 It demonstrates, however, that the affective arrangements then common among the city’s working class (which included serial monogamy, often outside the bounds of marriage), were seen as suspect by the city’s lettered men of means. These scholars found the elastic and vague term “clandestine prostitution” to be a useful descriptor for such relationships. As Sueann Caulfield and Juçara Leite point out, this view of sex, work, and marriage continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century. 7
The Brazilian Imperial Criminal Code of 1830 makes only one reference to prostitutes: reducing the penalty for rape to a maximum of one year if the victim was adjudged to be a “whore”. The First Republic’s penal code (1890), however, was inspired by German legal tradition and incorporated lenocínio
8
The 1890 penal code also criminalized inducing women into prostitution, in order to target pimps but affecting broader groups. The new code declared it illegal to give assistance, housing, or aid to prostitutes. These laws placed the owners of the places where prostitutes worked or lived under the gimlet eye of the law and were also used to attack prostitutes’ roommates, family members, and—indeed—potentially anyone who associated with them.
In the first years of the twentieth century, laws were widened in scope in response to international pressure over “white slavery” and the traffic in women. Changes made in 1915 allowed people who rented rooms by the hour (to a public which was not exclusively composed of prostitutes) to be charged with lenocínio. Precinct captains took advantage of the new laws to prohibit the establishment of rendez-vous along certain streets, especially in the districts targeted by the city’s urban reform plans. 10
The 1940 Penal Code, established by the Vargas dictatorship, defined lenocínio according to five different modalities.
11
While commercial sex itself was neither regulated nor criminalized, its activities were controlled according to laws which linked prostitution to prohibited forms of labour and habitation. These laws also criminalized a wide spectrum of people who could be charged with benefiting from prostitution. The resultant legal structure continues in place in today and when authorities wish to crack down on prostitutes, they charge the police to enforce the laws pertaining to lenocínio. This situation has resulted in the effective regulation of prostitution throughout the twentieth century, a “regulation” without a specific legal mandate but under the aegis of widespread social stigmatization. Meanwhile, the non-criminalization of prostitution itself offers the police a convenient reason to ignore the sale of sex when it occurs within the spaces and times in which it is socially tolerated.
Ethnicity, Class, and the Markets for Prostitution in the Early Twentieth Century
Brazil had finally rid itself of slavery just as the international debate regarding the abolition of regulation intensified at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, as sexual commerce began to be seen as a problem by local elites, it also became a moral issue that resonated with the struggle to abolish slavery. These resonances can still be found in the rhetoric of Brazil’s anti-trafficking movements today. More worrisome to the fin de siècle elite of Rio de Janeiro, however, was the visibility of sexual commerce in the city, especially in those regions populated by increasing numbers of African-descended workers and poor European immigrants.
Brazil’s immigration policies, which sought to “ease the transition” from slave to free labour, were based upon a peculiar local reading of Social Darwinism. According to so-called “whitening thesis”, increasing the flow of European immigrants into Brazil would “racially improve” the national population. However, the prospect of intermixture between the recently arrived “women of all nationalities” and those who “already existed [in Rio], exercising the lowest of professions”, especially those women “who are not subject to the rules of hygiene”, 12 generated considerable worry among carioca elites.
Over the years, Rio has received large numbers of immigrants: African slaves up to the mid-nineteenth century; Europeans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; and, finally, workers from other parts of Brazil throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prostitution exercised by slaves and their descendants was one of the most noteworthy characteristics of local sexual commerce throughout the nineteenth century. African and African-descended women were prominent in all parts of the city and it was common for carioca men to buy slaves as “prostitutes, lovers, concubines, or companions.” Slave prostitution in Rio de Janeiro was therefore part of a greater continuum of activities that included domestic services, concubinage, and street commerce. 13
The arrival of Portuguese prostitutes in the mid-nineteenth century created a visible contrast with the black slaves and native-born free women with whom they shared downtown. 15 Both black and white prostitutes circulated in the city streets, or called to potential clients from the windows and doorways of houses. Often, the places classified by observers as “centres of immoral behaviour and prostitution” (such as the zungus) were also in fact centres of cultural resistance for black cariocas. 16Easy women … are present in great numbers: white, black and of all categories … At night, from eight to ten, they invade the streets dressed in black taffeta or wool and wrapped in mantles. The ones of the first class also come out by day, accompanied by two slaves. They use their arts to pass for high-quality ladies and they know how to ensnare foreign men in their nets. 14
Though French prostitutes had been a fixture in Rio since the early 1800s, 17 the numbers of foreign-born sex workers increased in the late nineteenth century. This resulted in the identification of two types of sex workers which would persist into the twentieth century. On the one hand, there were the women designated as “French”. In contemporary media and literature, these “artists” were portrayed as living in expensive hotels or elegant boarding houses, or living alone. They were high-priced prostitutes who were understood as exercising a civilizing influence upon the city, the counterparts of a local male elite whose identity was informed by an abiding Francophilia. As consumer fetishism grew, the ability to buy “French” sex became an identifying characteristic of the carioca’s socially distinct masculinity. 18
At the other extreme were the “Poles”, poor white and generally Jewish immigrants who were associated with the kind of sex work decried by local elites
In spite of the symbolic importance of the European presence in Rio de Janeiro, contemporary reports indicate that Brazilian prostitutes were always in the majority. A third category of prostitute that began to gain in visibility in the early twentieth century was the mulatta. From the 1920s on, carioca magazines poked fun at local men’s ambivalent attraction to women of African descent, a situation which was to persist throughout the twentieth century. The term mulatta became associated with sensuality and African-descended beauty, contrasting with the negative associations connected to the word preta (black woman), which referenced degraded sexual practices, poverty, and ugliness. In erotic stories published in 1914, mulattas were cast as specializing in anal sex and were also understood as easily falling in love with their clients. Meanwhile, European prostitutes were characterized as being oral sex specialists and were renowned for practicing their trade in a disinterested fashion, not allowing “affairs of the heart” to mix with commerce. 20
Over time, the terms “French” and “Pole” began to be used as short-hand for two different styles of commercial sex: the first geared towards the sensibilities of the middle- and upper-classes and the second towards the working and lower classes. Mulattas, while generally situated towards the lower end of this dichotomous hierarchy could, in fact, be classified as “French-style” (or upper class) prostitutes.
21
In reality, these two idealized extremes of prostitution were composed of a wide spectrum of colours and nationalities competing for space and clients in the townhouses and streets of central Rio de Janeiro. Photos of elegant boarding houses dating from the second decade of the twentieth century, for example, show that these brothels contained many different “types”. Literary references reveal stories such as that of “Rocking Horse Alice”, a well-known madam of the 1910s who was described as a “great mulatta” and who had many important republican politicians among her clientele.
22
Likewise, in
The mulatta was often set in idealized opposition to “family girls” (moça de família), understood as white, middle-class, and chaste. This dichotomy has permeated discussions of Brazilian sexuality since the early 1900s. 26 During the interwar period, however, the “modern woman” began to interest medical and legal authorities as Rio’s nightlife flourished and already blurried lines between “honest” and “dishonest” women were perceived as even more unstable. Cafés, bars, cabarets, theatres, and other entertainment venues multiplied in Rio and behavioural patterns began to take on a new, more liberal and globalized complexion. New fashions and the “feminine invasion” of public space were understood by the city’s masculine elite in racialized and sexualized terms. As Gomes reports, when middle-class white girls began to wear theirA kiss in a bedroom is not a crime, nor is the kiss one gives to a hand or a forehead. It’s when a guy smooches on Flamengo Beach, for example, and starts sniffing up a mulatta’s neck that he ends up in the slammer. 25
Young female workers who insisted upon participating in nightlife without giving up their identification as “honest women” soon became involved in a conflict-ridden dialogue with carioca police and lawyers. These gentlemen, in turn, were forced to rethink the unequivocal borders which had been established around feminine honour. 28 One of the results of this conflict was a narrowing of the category “prostitute”, which became increasingly applicable only to those women who exchanged sex for money.
Extra-official Regulation
As we discussed above, representations of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro associated sexual styles with national and racial identities in a hierarchical, if ambiguous, fashion. Available data regarding the spatial organization of commercial sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, suggests the existence of complex patterns of shifting relationships between sex-working women and their neighbours set against a backdrop of increasing police intervention.
The most common and visible modality of prostitution in the centre of Rio de Janeiro up until the 1920s was “window prostitution”, where women would hang out of townhouses, calling to passers-by. In the late 1890s, the owners of the houses where prostitutes lived and worked were often women of 30-plus years of age, typically Brazilian, Austrian, or Portuguese, who might own two or three houses in the same region. These buildings were subdivided and rented out, with prostitutes paying a much higher rent than was the norm. 29
Physical proximity between prostitutes and other downtown workers and residents was a characteristic of Rio de Janeiro in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sex workers were an integral part of a more general urban commercial scene. In the mid-1890s, however, a few years after the abolition of slavery, a precinct captain launched a “moral sanitation” campaign in downtown Rio, ordering the eviction of the prostitutes. The courts were used to slow down the captain’s measures (which were an early example of the hygienist policies that would be soon enacted) and neighbours often testified in favour
Two prostitution-related institutions were founded in the Mangue. In 1922, the São Francisco de Assis hospital opened its doors, specializing in treating venereal diseases. 32 The second institution was the 13th Police Precinct, charged with registering and maintaining the records of every prostitute in Rio. In the words of anthropologist Soraya Simões:Instructed to “clean up” the areas through which His Highness would pass, the police rounded up lower-class prostitutes on the allegation that they were “bums” and kept them under arrest until the end of the royal visit, later gathering them all together in brothels around the nine streets of the Mangue. Here, a few kilometres away from the shores of Guanabara Bay, far from the modernized centre of town, there began a series of experiments in police administration of prostitution.
Informal regulation resulted in an explosion of clandestine and semi-clandestine forms of prostitution outside of the Mangue, which allowed the majority of sex workers “to hide in plain sight.” 34 These women would meet clients in bars, streets, trolley stations, or cafés and would then go to hotels, rooming houses, or the ubiquitous rendez-vous. A growing concentration of establishments in the bohemian district of Lapa, west of downtown, was also due to police repression in the newly renovated centro (see map 19.1).These measures made the Mangue appear to be the ideal place for situating carioca prostitution, contributing to the definition of the city’s [new] moral spaces and to the hygienist view of the times, as well as to the control of syphilis and the other venereal diseases which haunted the city at the beginning of the twentieth century […]. The great mobility of the inhabitants of the area was also one of the distinct characteristics which gave it the reputation of being the “natural region” for lower-class prostitution in Rio de Janeiro. 33
Although Lapa concentrated elegant and bohemian establishments and the Mangue specialized in a supposedly more sordid form of prostitution, journalist Ricardo Pinto remarked in 1930 (as anthropologist Ana Paula Silva would observe eight decades later 36 ) that these differences referred more to the profile of the men that frequented the two districts rather than the women working in them. Pinto commented that the Mangue actually generated more money because the women could do window prostitution, as had been the case in downtown. Furthermore, in the elegant boarding houses of Lapa, the women needed to invest more of their earnings in dresses and accessories. The main barrier to working in Lapa was the establishment of the necessary contacts and this was especially difficult for lower-class women. 37
The cabaret singers and variety artists who rented rooms in Lapa during their tours of South America had a distinct advantage in this regard, given that they could count upon contacts acquired during their theatrical work. This restricted their movements, pushing them to follow rigid working hours and obliging them to be housed within a specific hotel or boarding house. However, it also guaranteed these “artists” a fixed clientele. 38
A glimpse into artistic prostitution during this period can be seen in the documents of the us Embassy dealing with the Baxter and Willard burlesque company’s 1917–1918 tour of Brazil. The company had come at the behest of Djalma Moreira, the owner of several nightspots. According to the Embassy authorities, Moreira’s clubs attracted “cheap gamblers […], business travellers, other tourists, young bohemians and the less offensive class of prostitutes”, many of whom “lived off the gaming tables when they don’t have a temporary protector to pay their bills.” After their shows, the troupe’s dancers would
Attempts to Clean up and Eliminate the Mangue
The organization of prostitution in Rio changed substantively due to one of these abolitionist campaigns. In 1943, Chief of Police Colonel Alcides Gonçalves Etchegoyen decreed the expulsion of prostitution from Glória (a neighbourhood adjacent to Lapa), giving the women thirty days to evacuate. “When this time limit had run out”, legal scholar Waldyr Abreu writes, “[Etchegoyan] asked someone, presumably a jurist, [as to what he could do] and was informed that the law had nothing to say about prostitution. So, with characteristic simplicity, [the Colonel] liquidated the problem, manu militari” by putting several thousand women onto the streets. He also closed the Mangue and Lapa’s commercial sexual venues. 41Brazil has an abolitionist tradition. During the Republic, we didn’t pass laws or measures which would regulate prostitution […]. However, in practice, we have always adopted a mitigated form of regulation. We tolerate houses of prostitution […]. There is no continuity in this policy […], however. There have been periods in which all the houses are closed. Others in which [the police] only fiercely persecute streetwalkers. Still others in which they attack the numerous sex hotels now proliferating across the city. 40
Movement of prostitution from the Mangue to Vila Mimosa, 1922–2013
By the mid-1950s, the prostitutes of the Mangue were almost all Brazilian, usually women recently arrived from the country’s hinterlands: “only the madams were foreign (and then not always): Poles who said they were French and stubborn Jewish women who’d survived the crisis” of the neighbourhood’s closure in 1943. In 1967, a census found that the majority of the 600 women in the Mangue were illiterate immigrants from rural Brazil. Meanwhile, only twelve foreign women were left, including 77-year-old Philipine Renoir, born in 1891 in Belgium, the one remaining “French” prostitute in the Mangue, a refugee from “the old days of splendour in Lapa.” 43
In 1954, the police in charge of the Mangue inaugurated an intervention which attempted to put direct control of the brothels into the hands of the prostitutes by kicking out the madams and pimps. The cops then turned the
Thus in spite of Brazil’s formal adherence to abolition, police management, supplemented by medical surveillance, continued de facto in Rio de Janeiro. 44 As Inspector Pereira cynically observed, the job of the police was to close down all prostitution venues outside of the Mangue while “not only tolerating, [but] effectively managing” those within the district itself. 45
With the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1964, however, Rio began to pass through yet another wave of urban renewal. The Mangue was targeted by successive projects that included the construction of subway lines and modern high-rises. 46 The district’s demolition began in the late 1960s, but picked up speed in December 1970 with the appropriation of twenty-eight properties. 47 Part of the neighbourhood was bulldozed in 1973 to make way for the subway, but the mortal blow came in November of 1977 with the razing of the rest of the neighbourhood. 48 The film Mangue by Cecilia Resende documents the brutality of the expulsion. The police arrived before dawn and set fire to the neighbourhood’s houses. Many women, faced with the prospect of having nowhere else to go, attempted suicide. 49
The destruction of the Mangue pushed prostitution into the streets surrounding Praça da Bandeira, a few blocks west of the old red-light district. Here, in 1979, the survivors of the Mangue established a new concentration of 44 small brothels in what became known as Vila Mimosa (vm; see map 19.2). Continued urban redevelopment in the region, particularly the construction
Vila Mimosa is tolerated as a “controlled” red-light district and, in this sense, many of its relations with power replay those of the earlier Mangue. Police no longer force women to work in the district, but raids against sex workers occur with much greater frequency outside the boundaries of vm. It is a tribute to the durability of Rio’s policy of unofficial regulation of prostitution that the city’s most notorious red-light district has soldiered on despite of the best efforts of two dictatorships to eliminate it.
Praça Mauá, Copacabana, and Downtown
This story highlights several persistent themes in the extra-official regulation of prostitution by the police in Rio de Janeiro. The sale of sex was understood as a professional (if immoral and degraded) activity and not a crime. Nevertheless, it was seen as something that must be tightly disciplined, conducted out of the public view, and wholly separate from the population at large, who should not be “importuned by whores”. In the case of the Mangue in 1954, the prostitutes were organized to provide order under police oversight. In 1971 in Praça Mauá, it was the owners of the nightclubs who were empowered by the police to fulfil this role.In 1971, the newspaper Jornal do Brasil described how police worked with local club owners (who might have been accused of lenocínio under other circumstances) to maintain control of prostitution around Praça Mauá by forcing prostitutes off the streets and into the bars and clubs, where they became the responsibility of—and placed under the control of—club owners. This was seen by police as an anti-crime measure. According to one Inspector Cartola, “we’ve had no robberies of johns in our jurisdiction for quite some time now because the club owners themselves are now selecting the women that they’ll allow into their houses.” 54
Praça Mauá thus became established as yet another one of Rio’s unofficial police-moderated sex work ghettos where prostitution was tolerated as long as it didn’t interfere with the “morals and good customs” of carioca society. Until very recently, the region still contained many of the clubs established there in the 1940s and was still catering to foreigners who were itinerant seamen, mostly Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese. In 2012, however, Rio began an urban renewal project centred on transforming Praça Mauá into a “festival port”. Large sections of the neighbourhood have subsequently been confiscated and demolished.
Two other directions prostitution moved after World War ii was towards downtown and into Rio’s south zone, particularly the residential neighbourhood of Copacabana. One of the effects of the periodic anti-prostitution blitzes during the 1940s and ‘50s was the camouflaging of the sex trade. With the closing of the old rendez-vous and boarding houses in Lapa and Glória, sex work moved into hotels and private apartments. According to Inspector Armando Pereira, the number of hotels used specifically for commercial sexual encounters tripled during the 1950s. Prostitutes would make a deal with a hotel owner and bring clients back from the streets or bars, paying a full day’s rent, but only
In spite of a police campaign to close down sex hotels in 1959, they continued to proliferate. By 1967, there were over 500 in Rio. After the sexual revolution of the 1970s, sex hotels began to service ever greater numbers of unmarried couples. Today, these hotels are still used by sex workers and non-sex workers alike for temporary trysts. 56
Other forms of sex work were developed to avoid police repression during the 1950s and ‘60s. The first bathhouses and saunas began to appear in police records during this period. Pereira labelled them “an invert’s [read: homosexual] paradise”, but many catered to the heterosexual trade as well. Today, Rio’s top-end middle-class commercial heterosexual venues are all saunas. Cheap cabarets and recreational clubs with floor shows and back rooms also became common meeting spots for prostitutes and clients, as did massage parlours and theatres. All of these types of venues soldier on in downtown and south zone Rio today. 57
Another new form of prostitution was enabled by women’s increased liberty. This was the apartment brothel, which began to fill the gap left by the old rendez-vous and boarding houses in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. As Pereira describes them, these venues were two- or three-bedroom apartments rented out to young prostitutes. The women would bring clients home, using the bedrooms for work during the day and a living space at night. The police were often incapable of distinguishing between establishments of this type and apartments rented by the growing numbers of independently living single females who were increasingly part of the city’s urban scene. 58
What particularly frustrated Rio’s anti-vice specialists, however, was the fact that these new forms of prostitution were concentrated downtown and in the residential, middle-class south zone of Rio de Janeiro, precisely the regions for which the Mangue was supposed to serve as a social prophylactic. Police attempts to keep prostitution out of the burgeoning new bohemian beach-side neighbourhoods were particularly fierce.
The decadence of Lapa prompted a drift of Rio’s bohemians towards the south zone beaches of Copacabana, which came to be associated with Bossa
The new apartment-style mini-brothels were perfect for this scene and were almost impossible to repress, although the police tried. Pereira recounts a story which demonstrates the methods employed in this struggle, which involved extralegal and “arbitrary” measures, combined with “a measured dose of violence” to force the prostitutes and madams to hand over their apartments to the police and leave the neighbourhood for “more liberal parishes” (presumably the Mangue). 60 Pereira shows how the carioca police operated outside the Mangue in the 1950s and ‘60s (and, indeed, since the beginning of the Republic): in order to keep prostitutes out of “regular family” areas, they went outside the law and illegally imprisoned and brutalized people they viewed as “pimps” and “madams”. This was not to end prostitution, but simply to “convince” it to move elsewhere—most probably to the Mangue or Mauá. Pereira was aware that this sort of operation was illegal, but he was also so convinced of its acceptability that he recounts it in a humorous tone.
Police attempts to keep prostitution out of Copacabana were doomed to failure, however. The neighbourhood’s main prostitution strip 61 became a concentrated region of bars, nightclubs, and cabarets in the 1970s and ‘80s. Fifty-four of 279 commercial sexual venues identified in Rio de Janeiro in 2011 62 were situated in Copacabana, with twenty-six of these within two blocks of the old strip. These establishments are also far and away the oldest venues in the neighbourhood. Some of them possibly evolved directly out of the bohemian scene of the 1950s.
By the late 1970s in Copacabana, as shown in map 19.3, prostitution had increasingly integrated foreign tourists as clients. Today, the majority of Rio’s luxurious heterosexual saunas and first-rank night-clubs are in the neighbourhood and, although foreign clients would never be the majority in most of Copacabana’s prostitution venues, they would dominate many of the wealthiest.
While Copacabana began to specialize in sexual tourism and the bohemian prostitution that had earlier been Lapa’s métier, downtown Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s and ‘70s began to develop a commercial sexual scene geared towards a Brazilian clientele made up of male workers. This process sped up considerably as the Mangue was demolished. Theatre, cabaret, and hotel prostitution, as well as massage parlours, became quite common downtown by the late 1970s. Even a few posh heterosexual saunas became established in the region.
Sex venues in downtown Rio de Janeiro, 2011
In 2011, there were 92 commercial sexual venues within a five-block radius of the intersection of Ave. Getulio Vargas and Ave. Rio Branco, visible in map 19.4. Urban renewal for the World Cup and Olympic Games has sparked a wave of real estate speculation downtown, however. As old buildings are renovated, many commercial sexual venues are being evicted. The smaller venues established office-spaces in high rises and known locally as “privés” or massage parlours seem to be maintaining a consistent presence in the centre. A typical establishment is set up in an office, subdivided into three or four “cabines” with
The privé/massagem is an adaptation to Rio’s tradition of extra-official regulation. Because they require little in the way of capital investment, they can move to a new address when they encounter police “regulation”. The fact that many privés manage to go on for years located in the same apartment, however, shows that, in spite of the repeated attempts by the carioca police to segregate prostitution, it is still common for sexual commerce to exist side-by-side with other establishments.
The Carioca Prostitute Today
From the second half of the twentieth century on, the division between “Europeans” and “Brazilians” became less demarcated in Rio de Janeiro as immigration dried up. Internal migration, especially from the north-eastern and northern regions of Brazil, began to have an impact on commercial sex in the city as Rio expanded from 1,500,000 inhabitants in 1930 to some 6,300,000
The growing role of Rio as a destination for international tourism from the 1950s on also brought a new and important male client—the foreign tourist—into the city’s sexual/affective markets. This development combined with long-extant stereotypes of the nation as exceptionally “hot, tropical and sensual” to establish the “Brazilian woman” as a much-appreciated racialized and sexualized feminine type in the global sexscape. 64 The figure of the mulatta has become so associated with this style of femininity that racial admixture, female sensuality, and Brazilianess are now almost synonymous in the international media.
The negative classification of the lower-class preta (black woman) still lives on, however, in the association of prostitution with residency in one of the city’s favela shantytowns. The urban reforms of the twentieth century failed to resolve Rio’s housing problems and, in fact, intensified them through the bull-dozing of many poor neighbourhoods. 65 Coupled with the increase in the population, this resulted in the expansion of ad hoc housing solutions on irregularly-occupied lands, often situated on slopes of the city’s mountains. In the carioca popular media, the inhabitants of these favelas are racialized as black and are often stereotyped as the creators of much of the city’s disorder. The favelas are a source of anxiety for local elites, who classify them as beyond the State’s control. The preta prostitute—black, poor, favelada and sexually degraded—can still be seen in the popular media and certain ngo and policy-maker portrayals of prostitution.
Recent ethnographic work, however, suggests that many, if not most, of Rio de Janeiro’s prostitutes do not live in the favelas and are not particularly poor, nor do they see themselves as black or are seen that way by their clients.
66
She has brown skin and dark hair (often dyed blonde and straightened) and racially classifies herself as mixed. She was born in Rio and lives in the working class suburbs. Her parents are working or lower middle class, with the mother often being a housewife. She has a high-school education, but attended low quality institutions. She probably wouldn’t be able to pass the entrance exams for Brazil’s free federal and state universities. She began sexual activity between 13 and 16 years of age and often was “married” (typically a non-formalized consensual union) before the age of 18. She is currently in her mid-20s. She is a mother and usually lives with her family. She has held other jobs, usually feminized work in the service economy. She got into prostitution as an adult, generally at the behest of a friend or by answering an ad. Prostitution is the most lucrative form of employment that she has had, paying four to ten times more than any of her prior jobs. She sees sex work as a way to achieve more than survival and plans on attending school, opening a business, building a house, or consuming luxury items otherwise beyond her means. She is not a drug addict. She does drink alcohol, but rarely anything stronger than beer or wine. She isn’t controlled by a pimp and is not forced to work, but if she works in a closed venue she is answerable to that venue’s manager with regards to how many days and hours a week she works and may be fined if she doesn’t show up. There’s a good chance that she is an evangelical Christian.
The “ideal typical prostitute” in Rio de Janeiro today is, in short, almost indistinguishable from the non-prostitute female majority. In fact, while the popular media and policy makers still believe in the “high class” and “low class” model of prostitution encoded in the “French/Pole” dichotomy of the early twentieth century, it is very difficult to say today that there are clear physical or social types dominating one or another form of carioca sex work. In the words of anthropologist Ana Paula Silva, “What determines [the] price in a commercial sexual venue in Rio today is not the style or beauty of the women so much as the social class of the male clients.” 68
The Persistent Ambivalence of Prostitution Laws in Rio
In 1915, Police Commissioner Aurelino Leal resumed what he believed had become the dominant tendency in the country with regards to prostitution. Leal claimed that the police were empowered to exercise a preventive role and given a certain degree of leeway in the measures to be employed. These included the power to decide where and when prostitution could be exercised. 72
As we have seen, this idea was translated into operations that tried to remove prostitution from this or that part of the city, beginning with the prohibition of prostitution in the downtown area, moving through the attempts to concentrate prostitutes in Lapa and the Mangue, later drives to demolish these two regions, and efforts to “moralize” prostitution in the port and keep it out of Copacabana. Indeed, the same policy can be seen today, as the police seem to consider themselves empowered to eliminate any bar or establishment where prostitution occurs, especially if said venue occupies land needed for “improvements” scheduled for the World Cup and the Olympics. 73
In recent years, however, police involvement in the administration of prostitution has come to be seen as corruption. In early 2012, a coordinated series of raids on Rio’s largest and most well-known commercial sex venues was carried out, resulting in the closure of several houses which had been functioning for some thirty years. These raids were the largest anti-prostitution activities carried out by the carioca police since the expulsion of the remnants of the Mangue in 1979. They were justified by the State Prosecutor’s Office as a blow against police corruption. 75 With a new wave of urban renewal taking over the city, it seems that Rio is once again on the cusp of a transformation in how its public authorities deal with prostitution; everything indicates that another crackdown, similar in scope and severity to those of 1943, 1959, or 1970–1971, is on the way. Meanwhile, however, it does not appear that Brazil is any more likely to resolve its legal ambivalence regarding prostitution.
Punishing the establishment of “houses of prostitution” and “procurement” is nonsensical if the sexual encounters in question are established by consenting adults. We thus propose to [decriminalize these conducts]. What is important is that we only punish sexual exploitation. It does not matter where this occurs or who are the intermediaries. 76
Predictably, the religious right and certain sectors of the feminist left in the Brazilian congress are against the proposed changes and there seems to be little chance that they will be encoded as law. As these groups’ political opposition to prostitution has grown, the Federal Health and Labour Ministry—traditionally two of sex workers’ stauncher allies in government—have backed away from supporting prostitutes.
Conclusions
The absence of prostitution regulation in Rio de Janeiro cannot be understood as the result of state inaction regarding sex work; rather, it should be construed as a policy of putting the largest amount of control over prostitution in police hands. By not defining prostitution as illegal while repressing the vaguely defined lenocínio, the Brazilian state has decided to leave everyday decisions regarding sex work and its conflicts up to individual precinct captains who apply their own personal understandings, prejudices, and interests to the situation in accordance with whatever fashions are current in the surrounding society. However, while this peculiar Brazilian system gives the police a wide scope of action when dealing with prostitutes, it also gives sex workers more space to manoeuvre and negotiate than is perhaps possible in other urban contexts.
Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro can only be understood in light of the tense negotiations that have marked the control of sexual commerce in the city during the last 120 years. Today, however, many sectors of carioca society wish to once again reform the city as a showcase for Brazil during a period of intense international retrenchment with regards to prostitution. As a result, city authorities are increasingly under pressure to remove prostitution from public view, especially in those areas of the city slated for rapid development, in order to accommodate upcoming international megaevents. Almost overnight, long-established prostitution venues have been raided, harassed, and shuttered and the city’s sex workers are having to once again reformulate survival and work strategies in an increasingly unfavourable legal and economic environment reinforced by often hysterical popular media reports that associate prostitution
Luis Carlos Soares, Rameiras, ilhoas e polacas: a prostituição no Rio de Janeiro do século xix (São Paulo, 1992); Magali Engel, Meretrizes e doutores: O saber médico e a prostituição na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1845–1890 (São Paulo, 1990); Rachel Soihet, Condição feminina e formas de violência: Mulheres pobres e ordem urbana (1890–1920), (Rio de Janeiro, 1989).
Juçara Luzia Leite, “A República do Mangue: Controle Policial e Prostituição no Rio de Janeiro (1954–1974)”, (Unpublished m.a., Fluminense Federal University, 1993).
Getulio Dornelles Vargas was the president of Brazil from 1930 to 1945. He inaugurated a period of dictatorship known as “Estado Novo”, or “New State” from 1937 to 1945. Ironically, however, the inauguration of the Estado Novo coincided with a deterioration of Brazil’s relations with the Axis powers and the country entered wwii on the side of the Allies in 1942.
Herculano Augusto Lassance Cunha, Dissertação sobre a prostituição, em particular na cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1845); Miguel Antônio Heredia Sá, Algumas reflexões sobre a cópula, onanismo e prostituição (Rio de Janeiro, 1945). See also Luis Carlos Soares Rameiras, ilhoas … and Sérgio Carrara Tributo a Vênus: A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil, da passagem do século aos anos 40 (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
Soares, Rameiras, ilhoas e polacas, pp. 31–32.
Carioca is the adjective form that refers to people and things from Rio de Janeiro.
Sueann Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue: Raça, nação e controle da prostituição no Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1942”, Tempo, 9 (2000), pp. 43–63; Juçara Luzia Leite, A República do Mangue.
The act of “maintaining a brothel” but also being a go-between for prostitutes and clients.
Cristiana Schettini, “Que Tenhas Teu Corpo”: Uma história social da prostituicao no Rio de Janeiro das primeiras décadas republicanas (Rio de Janeiro, 2006), pp. 171–173.
Ibid., pp. 195–200.
Miguel de Campos Júnior, “Do lenocínio e do tráfico de mulheres”, in Anais do Primeiro Congresso Nacional do Ministério Público, 256 vols, (Rio de Janeiro, 1943), iv.
Barão do Lavradio, apud Cristiana Schettini, Que Tenha seu Corpo, p. 139.
Luiz Carlos Soares, O Povo de Cam na capital do Brasil: A escravidão urbana do Rio de Janeiro do século xix (Rio de Janeiro, 2007); Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Juliana Barreto Farias, No labirinto das nações: Africanos e identidades no Rio de Janeiro, século xix (Rio de Janeiro, 2005).
Theodor von Leithold, O Rio de Janeiro visto por dois prussianos em 1819 (São Paulo, 1966 [1819]).
Friederike Strack, Mulher da Vida—Frauen des Lebens: Brasiliens Prostituierte im Widerstand gegen Stigmatisierung und Repression (Berlin, 1996), p. 66.
Tenements occupied by the city’s black population. Carlos Eugenio Líbano Soares, Zungu: Rumor de muitas vozes (Rio de Janeiro, 1998), p. 30.
Karl von Schelichthorst, O Rio de Janeiro como é (Rio de Janeiro, 1943 [1825]), pp. 100–101.
Jeffrey Needell, Belle Époque Tropical: Sociedade e cultura de elite no Rio de Janeiro na virada do século (1890–1930), (São Paulo, 1993).
All quotes from Cristiana Schettini, Que Tenhas seu Corpo, p. 138; Beatriz Kushnir, Baile de Máscaras—mulheres judias e prostituição: As polacas e suas associações de ajuda mútua (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
Dom Felicio, “Na Zona”, Contos Rápidos n. 11 (Rio de Janeiro, 1914); Alessandra El Far, Páginas de Sensação: Literatura popular e pornográfica no Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo, 2004); Schettini, Que Tenha seu Corpo, pp. 231–242.
Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”.
Orestes Barbosa, Bambambã (Rio de Janeiro 1993 [1922]).
Marques Rabelo, Marafa (Rio de Janeiro, 2003 [1935]).
Regarding the uses of the imagery of the mulatta, see Martha Abreu, “‘Sobre mulatas orgulhosas e crioulos atrevidos’: Conflitos raciais, gênero e nação nas cancões populares (Sudeste do Brasil, 1890–1920)”, Tempo, 8 (2004), pp. 143–173.
Fortunato Padilha, “As Entrevistas Momentosas”, O Paiz, 23 October 1925 (Rio de Janeiro, 1925), apud Tiago de Melo Gomes, “Mulatas, massais e meretrizes: Imagens da sexualidade feminina no Rio de Janeiro dos anos 1920”, Cadernos Pagu, 23 (2004) pp. 121–147.
Thaddeus G. Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Mulheres vulneráveis e meninas más: Uma análise antropológica de narrativas hegemônicas sobre o tráfico de pessoas no Brasil”, in Ferreria et al. (eds), A Experiência migrante: Entre deslocamentos e reconstruções (Rio de Janeiro, 2010), pp. 325–360, 352.
Mariza Corrêa, “Sobre a invenção da mulata”, Cadernos Pagu, 6/7 (1996), pp. 35–50; Tiago de Melo Gomes, “Mulatas, massais e meretrizes”.
Sueann Caulfield, Em Defesa da honra: Moralidade, modernidade e nação no Rio de Janeiro (1918–1940), (Campinas, 2000).
Schettini, Que tenhas seu corpo, pp. 184–193.
Ibid., pp. 29–43.
Paulo Donadio, “Tem rei no mar”, Revista de História, 7 July 2008.
Carrara, Tributo à Venus.
Soraya Simões, “Identidade e política: A prostituição e o reconhecimento de um métier no Brasil”, Revista de Antropologia Social dos Alunos do PPGAS - UFSC ar, 2 (2010), pp. 24–46.
Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”.
6C–751A, 1923, gifi (Police Papers). Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
Ana Paula Silva, “‘Cosmopolitanismo tropical’: Uma análise preliminar do turismo sexual internacional em São Paulo”, unpublished paper presented at the seminar “Trânsitos Contemporâneos: Turismo, migrações, gênero, sexo, afetos e dinheiro”, unicamp, Campinas, 2010.
Ricardo Pinto, Tráfico das brancas: Observacoes em torno aos cáftens franceses que vivem no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1930), p. 25.
Cristiana Schettini, “Circuitos de trabalho no mercado de diversoes sul americano no começo do século xx”, Cadernos ael , 17 (2010).
Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “As American Girls: Migração, sexo e status imperial em 1918”, Horizontes Antropológicos, 15 (2009), pp. 75–99.
Pereira, Sexo e Prostituição, p. 90.
Waldyr Abreu, O submundo do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem: Aspectos jurídicos, sociais e psicológicos (Rio de Janeiro, 1984), pp. 130–131. The boundaries between Lapa and Glória were imprecise. “Glória”, in this case, almost certainly takes in some of the houses of Lapa. In Leite, A República do Mangue.
Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 139–140.
Ibid., pp. 55, 152, 162–163.
Leite, A república do mangue, p. 57.
Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 152, 160.
Leite, A república do mangue, pp. 86–87; Strack, Mulher da Vida; Pereira, Sexo e prostituição; Soraya Simões, “Identidade e política”.
Flávio Lenz, Beijo da rua (Rio de Janeiro, 1990), p. 10.
Strack, Mulher da vida, p. 90.
Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”; Simões, “Identidade e política”; Abreu, O submundo do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem.
Soraya Simões, Vila Mimosa: Etnografia da cidade cenográfica da prostituição Carioca (Niterói, 2010).
Although foreigners frequented Rio’s houses of ill-repute in earlier decades.
Paulo Bastos Cezar and Ana Rosa Viveiros de Castro, A Praça Mauá (Rio de Janeiro, 1989), pp. 64–76.
Ibid., p. 76.
T. Baltar, P.C. Araujo and A. Jacob, “Praça Mauá abriga em 11 boates mercado de sexo para os homens do mar”, Jornal do Brasil, 7–8 (1971), p. 40.
Pereira, Sexo e Prostituição, pp. 94–95.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 104; Blanchette and Silva, “Sexo a um real por minuto”.
Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 102–103.
Abreu, O submundo do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem, p. 130; Marcello Cerqueira Beco das garrafas: Uma lembrança (Rio de Janeiro, 1994).
Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, p. 102, fn. 1.
Ibid.
Thaddeus G. Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”, in Susan Dewey and Patty Kelly (eds), Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State in Global Perspective (New York, 2011). Blanchette and Silva count each address where prostitution takes place. Vila Mimosa’s 78 micro-establishments are thus one “venue”.
Blanchette and Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”.
By “global sexscape”, we follow Denise Brennan’s lead in applying Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of global flows to the sexual and affective sphere. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, 2004); Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture Economy”, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London, 1990).
Maurício Abreu, A evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 2006).
Blanchette and Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”, pp. 130–145; see also by the same authors “Amor a um real por minuto: A prostituição como atividade econômica no Brasil urbano”, in Sonia Correa and Richard Parker (eds), Sexualidade e política na América Latina: Histórias, interseções e paradoxos (Rio de Janeiro, 2011).
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York, 1997 [1903–1917]), p. 90. This ideal typification is based on interviews conducted by Blanchette and Silva in a wide variety of commercial sex venues, as well as eight years of participant-observation.
Silva, “‘Cosmopolitanismo tropical’”.
Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Nossa Senhora da Help: sexo, turismo e deslocamento transnacional em Copacabana”, Cadernos Pagu, 25 (2005), pp. 249–280; Adriana Piscitelli, “On ‘Gringos’ and ‘Natives’: Gender and Sexuality in the Context of International Sex Tourism in Fortaleza, Brazil”, Vibrant, 1 (2001).
According to Elizabeth Bernstein, a commercial sexual experience where what is sold is a manufactured authenticity that tries to simulate reciprocal desire and pleasure. Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago, 2007), pp. 125–130.
Blanchette and Silva, “Nossa senhora da help”, pp. 277–278.
Aurelino Leal, Polícia e poder de polícia (Rio de Janeiro, 1918).
Julie Ruvolo, “Rio’s Biggest Prostitution Crackdown in a Generation”, The Atlantic: Cities, 7 September 2012; available at: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/09/rios-biggest-prostitution-crackdown-generation/3199/; last accessed 8 July 2017.
Blanchette and Silva, “Sexo a um real”.
Waleska Borges, “Três pessoas são presas na Zona Sul acusadas de incentivar a prostituição”, O Globo; available at: https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/tres-pessoas-sao-presas-na-zona-sul-acusadas-de-incentivar-prostituicao-5213176; last accessed 7 July 2017; Ruvolo, “Rio’s Biggest Prostitution Crackdown”.
Senado Federal, Relatório final da comissão de juristas para a elaboração de anteprojeto de código penal, criada pelo requerimento n° 756, de 2011 (Brasília, 2012).
The same Judicial Committee suggests that “sexual exploitation” be redefined as “forcing someone to work as a prostitute or impeding them from leaving work as a prostitute.”