Bruna Surfistinha In The New York Times – An Entrepreneur Of The Erotic
By Larry Rohter
She Who Controls Her Body Can Upset Her Countrymen
She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase ‘kiss and tell’. First in a blog that quickly became the country’s most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.
But it is not just her canny use of the Internet that has made Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, a cultural phenomenon. By going public with her exploits, she has also upended convention and set off a vigorous debate about sexual values and practices, revealing a country that is not always as uninhibited as the world often assumes.
Interviewed at the office of her publisher here, Ms. Pacheco, 21, said the blog that became her vehicle to notoriety emerged almost by accident. But once it started, she was quick to spot its commercial potential and its ability to transform her from just another program girl, as high-class prostitutes are called in Brazil, into an entrepreneur of the erotic.
‘In the beginning, I just wanted to vent my feelings, and I didn’t even put up my photograph or phone number’, she said. ‘I wanted to show what goes on in the head of a program girl, and I couldn’t find anything on the Net like that. I thought that if I was curious about it, others would be too.’
Ms. Pacheco parlayed that inquisitiveness into a best seller, The Scorpion’s Sweet Poison, that has made her a sort of sexual guru. A mixture of autobiography and how-to manual, her book has sold more than 100,000 copies since it was published late last year, and has just been translated into Spanish.
At book signings, Ms. Pacheco said, ‘80% of the public is women, which I didn’t expect at all’, because most of the readers of her blog appeared to be men, including customers who ‘wanted to see how I had rated their performance.’ As she sees it, the high level of female interest in her sexual experiences reflects a gap here between perceptions about sex and the reality.
‘I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy and a bit of fear involved,’ she said. ‘Brazilian women have this sexy image, of being at ease and uninhibited in bed. But anyone who lives here knows that’s not true.’
Carnival and the general sensuality that seems to permeate the atmosphere can give the impression that Brazil is unusually permissive and liberated, especially compared with other predominantly Roman Catholic nations. But experts say the real situation is far more complicated, which explains both Bruna’s emergence and the strong reactions she has provoked.
For more about Brazil and on this controversial subject click here.
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