When you disembark on the subway in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, you have the option of exiting via Joana Angélica or Maria Quitéria. For the carioca, they are just street names. For Bahians, however, Joana Angélica and Maria Quitéria are women who symbolize the wars for Bahia’s Independence. It was not a separatist movement; it was a movement to free itself from the armed yoke of Lisbon and accompany Rio de Janeiro in the Independence of Brazil.
By my accounts, identity began to impose itself in Brazil in 2015. The armed conflicts for the Independence of Bahia began in February 1823 (before the cry on the banks of the Ipiranga) and ended on July 2, 1823. Since then, Independence has been widely celebrated in Salvador and the Recôncavo, and the heroines have been known since school. Bahians live with the memory of Joana Angélica and Maria Quitéria for two hundred years before the empowered woman with pink hair and an ox ring in her nose appeared, wanting to catechize us into victimhood. Cariocas, at some point in their urbanization, dedicated the streets of Ipanema to the heroes of Bahia’s Independence. These two women were not left out.
What did they do for Independence? In February 1822, when the Bahian soldiery was rehearsing anarchic reactions to the Portuguese military occupation, the abbess Joana Angélica had hidden yet another the Bahian rebels at the Convento da Lapa. They attacked and hid there, much to the annoyance of the Portuguese. The latter went to the convent, had an altercation with the abbess and pierced her with a bayonet. She died on 20 February 1822, causing an immense commotion and setting the people on fire. According to the version taught to children at home by families and in schools by teachers, Joana Angélica would have told the Portuguese that they would only enter there by stepping over her dead body. Her act of bravery had cost her her life.
As for Maria Quitéria, her exceptional bravery made her a symbol of Bahian independence. She was married and her husband didn’t want to go to war. So she took his uniform, dressed up as a soldier, and went. Her outstanding participation was recognized by the military authorities, who gave her a Scottish kilt to improvise a women’s uniform. It is with the kilt that she is represented in paintings and monuments. First woman to sit in the square in Brazil, she won a medal from the Order of the Cruzeiro.
The Luluzinhas revolt
Two hundred years after Maria Quitéria chose for an essentially masculine activity and succeeding at it, the empowered manas burst into digital tears over a joke. More: the joke was about a work whose directors bragged about choosing people according to “gender”, had a lot of women (which is actually quite unusual in engineering), and… it fell.
As no one has yet managed to control the internet, a video began to circulate in which a lot of empowered sisters from the corporate world were talking about how important it is to hire women. One Vilma Dias Armenini, an HR analyst, said: “I always try to hire women”. At other times, it would be shameful to admit such prejudice. In the end, the misandrists want to steal men’s jobs and still take the men’s “allimony”. How is the man going to pay for the children’s iPhone if HR must make every effort not to use it?
The video used this material from the staggering construction company Acciona, cut scenes of the collapse of the work and included ironic captions. An engineer appears saying “There is a barrier in engineering with regard to women”, and the sign “Why is it?” goes up. Cut to collapse. Photo of the triumphant sisters wins the lyrics: “The great warriors!”.
Eduardo Bolsonaro shared a reduced version of the satirical video on the networks and said the obvious: “’I always try to hire women’, but for what reason? Are men a worse engineer? When meritocracy gives way to an ideology without scientific proof, the result is usually not the best. Always choose the best professional, regardless of your color, gender, ethnicity, etc.” Here is a message in perfect compliance with equal opportunities, against discrimination based on sex and color.
But now it is ugly to be against discrimination based on sex and color. Being in favor of equal opportunities makes you far-right. Prestes’ successor tweeted: “Attention women! Eduardo Bolsonaro thinks you are incompetent. As far as it depends, you won’t have a job and will always be guilty even before any investigation. He doesn’t respect women, but he likes their vote. Give the answer to this misogynist and misogynist father of his in October!” That is not true. The deputy did not advocate that only men be hired. If Roberto Freire thinks that a woman needs misandrical discrimination to be hired, he is the sexist. The column by Monica Bergamo, a well-known PT channel, takes the company’s pains: “The original material praised the participation of women in the enterprise, highlighting the hiring of engineers for the construction site and other professionals directly involved in the work. In the version made now, to relate the breakup on the track to female participation and question the competence of professionals solely because of their gender, images and speeches of interviewees were taken out of context and ridiculed.”
HR Social Science
Background reasoning deserves to be called HR Social Science. It is understood that men and women are tabula rasa, and any difference between the sexes is explained by state coercion. They look at any job in the corporate world and ask, “Why aren’t they 50% male and 50% female? ” Answer: structural machismo. How to fix? In the big hand, discriminating against men. And if it’s 50% women, that’s great, because there are historical injustices to be repaired.
Interestingly, they only ask these questions about professions of status in which men tend to be the majority, such as engineering. Nobody problematizes the structural machismo of the street sweepers or wants to put a quota for women among them. Nursing, although it enjoys a certain status, does not count either: no one wants to deconstruct masculinity by placing a quota for men.
It is, in the short term, a dogmatic movement that aims to reserve vacancies for middle class women.
If we believe in the Luluzinhas of the corporate world (a world that corrupted universities, giving them money via the Ford Foundation), there is no need to investigate anything about the impacts of evolution in the differences between the human brain of both sexes. That, yes, is scientific denialism. It implies ignoring the entire field of evolutionary psychology.
The world of HR
Another problematic implication is the passivity of women. In principle, I’m here, like an object, until a graceful HR mana decides to empower me, taking the job of a “male asshole” and giving it to me. I sit there waiting for the management to take care of me and earthly justice.
If it is true that the world works like that, how can I explain Quitéria’s decision to take her husband’s uniform, pretend to be a man and go The fight? Where are individual freedom and self-initiative? The ideal world would have a giant HR managing humanity?
I believe that a great project designed by female engineers can be done well, as long as the female engineers have gone through a meritocratic selection process. If the company does a sealing selection process and hires a fat black trans lesbian engineer in a wheelchair to make a little bridge, I’ll go by boat.
The case of Maria Quitéria shows that women can, on their own merit, excel in essentially masculine activities. In the case of Maria Quitéria in particular, bravery is essential for her prominence, and passivity is completely incompatible with this.
There are other successful women whose activity does not require bravery. Marie Curie, for example, had to overcome prejudices to establish herself as a scientist. The virtues of a scientist are quite different from those of the military. So she doesn’t have to be brave to be good; it was enough to make great scientific discoveries.
The West made it so that women did not need special bravery to dedicate themselves to a peaceful profession. Women no longer have to face prejudice when entering university, and that’s fine. That’s equal opportunities.
Now, can you imagine if Bahia’s Independence depended on Acciona’s HR? Cataria Maria Quitéria by the hand along with a lot of housewives. The merit would go to the cucuias, and the women’s battalion would be a ready joke.
If Acciona’s HR took care of science, it wouldn’t work out very well for Marie Curie either. Allocated in a female “team” full of housewives recruited against their will to fulfill a schedule, she would get lost in the crowd of nullities and would be prevented from working with a collaborator, who happened to be her husband.
God forbid HRs. If I see a little Luluzinha wanting to recruit me, I’ll declare my vote for Eduardo Bolsonaro right away.
