Personal Pride
Men and their honor
A young bachelor's major strategy for bolstering his public image is to accentuate qualities of bravura, virility, and generosity. Bravura in a form of courage—the courage necessary, for example, to kill a formidable adversary, to save a mate in danger, or to resist police torture rather than inform on friends.
It is a masculine form of solidarity not far removed from that known to the military ranks. Virility comes into light especially with regard to sexual conquests. A young man's reputation also includes social virtues such as a love for children and generosity. During periodic potlatch-type binges, these young men, each time they fall into some money, manage to spend great sums in very little time. Take, for example, the case of Juarez, eighteen, just after receiving the equivalent of 400 dollars for wooden planks he stole from a construction site. Arriving at the house of Dana, full of wine, Coca-Cola and other delicacies, he ostentatiously offered presents to each new arrival. To Dona Maria, an elderly lady reputed to have curative powers, he offered money to include him in her prayers; to me, he offered money (“to pay your taxi home”), and then he started organizing a barbecue for the following day. Exactly because these young people possess no palpable marks of prestige—children, wife, car, or di- ploma—they appear to be constantly exaggerating their own personal virtues.A married man affirms his virility by fulfilling his role as husband and father. In the first place, he should be a good provider. How he does this is nobody's business. For example, the professional thieves—all of them younger than twenty-five—are known but seldom criticized for their livelihood. “I have nothing against the maconheiros' (literally, marijuana-users), claims Rosalina, mother, mother-in-law, and wife of solid job-holders.
“They carry on their activity elsewhere. It's none of my business.” Solange, a mother of four who just established a relationship with a young thief, praises her new husband's qualities:My ex-husband, father of my children, was very refined, well-educated, but he never had a job. What good is a cute husband when you’re dying of hunger? I was the one who had to work. My new man won’t let me work. He says, ‘You have everything you need—a house, food and clothes. Why would you want to work?’ When we moved into the new house, I complained because we had no table. He went out and a couple of hours later, came back with a table as well as extra cash. He’s very smart. My former husband, despite all his education, wasn’t nearly as smart.
The woman who has a job humiliates her husband, bringing to public attention the fact that he can’t support her. The problem is that most men in the vila, especially the young ones, have access only to irregular and badly paid jobs. To support a family demands aggressiveness. Obviously, it is not by making polite inquiries that one finds a job; nor is it by earning a minimum salary that a man can expect to support his wife and children. (On the average, the wives of maconheiros live slightly better than the wives of young unskilled laborers.) Aside from a handful of older men, the salaried workers’ families live on the limits of misery, with, literally, a gnawing hole in their stomachs. Living with this sort of “failure” undermines one of the fundamental bases of a man’s social identity. The fact that many husbands and fathers are confronted with the same dilemma helps to create a certain solidarity through which men band together, scorning their family obligation, to drink away the little money otherwise earmarked for the family’s welfare. Self-disgust (due to the inability to fulfill family obligations) is thus redirected toward the source of humiliation (women and children) and, in part, is counterbalanced by the prestige associated with generosity among friends.
In the second place, a married man should demonstrate sufficient bravura to protect the women of his family from aggression. Since it goes without saying that unaccompanied ladies will be accosted by the local youth, potential aggressors are never lacking. By supposing thus, married men flatter their young rivals and at the same time increase their own prestige as protectors of the homes. But, protection slips surreptitiously into control over female sexuality. Since legal marriages are extremely rare, a man’s rights over his wife are established by, and last only as long as, their cohabitation. A woman thus “married” owes her spouse strict fidelity. Transgressions occur but the risk of brutal punishment (tolerated if not encouraged by public opinion) is so great that they are held at a minimum.
Whereas a husband concentrates a good part of his energy on the control of his wife’s sexuality, a woman’s brother or father sees his as a primarily protective role. However, even this protection involves no small measure of male rivalry. In every one of the paternally headed families, the adolescent girl had to run away from home to be married since her father never approved of her beau. (The elopement relied in general on the mother’s complicity.) It would appear that the father’s opposition depends neither on the age nor the choice of mate, but rather on the principle of masculine pride: he could not peaceably cede his daughter to another man. After a girl leaves home, the rivalry between males may act in favor of women since it discourages alliances between a husband and his in-laws. Once a woman “marries,” her father and brothers are no longer responsible for her sexual behavior. Their major role becomes that of protection against potential aggressors, including her husband.
Honor among women
There is no particular notion of honor linked to single women. Whereas a man's public image is indexed by several activities (sex, bravery, family, occupation), a woman's revolves around a single area—that of female domestic tasks.
She must be a devoted mother and a good housekeeper. The criticisms I usually hear of women go something like this: “My brother was right to leave that girl—she was so negligent, her baby died before it was a month old.” And the defense runs along the same lines: “My mother-inlaw says I don't deserve my husband because I don't take care of him as I should. But his clothes are always clean, his meals always hot, and the baby is well cared-for. What else does she want?”A woman who lives with her parents may be praised because of her love of children, the help she gives to her mother, and the like, but she will never be fully recognized until she has her own home—a feat accomplished either by getting married or by having a baby. An unwed mother or divorcee may rely on her motherly virtues to bolster her public image, swearing that she'll never remarry because it wouldn't be good for the children. (Since it is a biological father's role to support his children, a woman's second spouse would be considered a fool to support her children by a previous marriage; consequently he usually pressures his wife to farm her children out to a grandmother, godmother or willing neighbor.) However, in fact, women seldom stay single for long; the overwhelming majority of divorced women remarry, perhaps even several times.
One may easily imagine that this behavior has more to do with material survival than questions of honor or prestige. The sexual division of labor, according to which men go out to work and women stay to care for the home, theoretically permits a rational organization of activities necessary for social and biological reproduction. But, strangely enough, single working women, even those with many children, often seem to have a higher standard of living than many of their married neighbors. Because these women control the family income, they needn't worry about wheedling money from the husband, or chiding him to keep a regular job. Why then remarry? By remarriage, a woman has the hope not only of receiving some affection, but also of raising her status.
One always suspects that a single woman has no man because she wasn't able to get one. Furthermore, a husbandless woman is a thorn in the side of the community—a challenge to male virility and an object of constant female jealousy. A husband to neutralize the woman's sexuality nicely settles the affair. Furthermore, if the man has recognized virtues, these will enhance his wife's status still more.People do not generally criticize women for their sexual past; their virtue concerns others only when it begins to threaten the domestic peace of a neighbor. The few times I heard that a woman had been called a whore or wanton slut by some neighbor, it was gossip carried through someone from outside the vila: the Catholic sister or a student volunteer. Otherwise, the commentaries I heard were much more moderate. For example, Eli, the only professional prostitute who lived in the area, a comely and prosperous mother of four, was well spoken of by her neighbors. She, as did other single women, took great care not to provoke the jealousy of her neighbors: “I never have anything to do with the men here. I don't even go to the dances. They [the other women] can say nothing against me.” In another example, we see how sexual flaws are minimized in relation to other female qualities:
My ex-husband’s lawyer came after me with a bunch of accusations. And I said, yes, it’s true—I’ve done this, and that. So what? Ask the neighbors: who pays for my children’s food? I’ve sold lettuces on the street corner, I’ve begged from door to door at the bourgeois houses there on the hill, to put a roof on my house, I carried tiles from downtown to here in the vila— on my back! And I did it all for my kids. So! No one can say anything against me.
Nonetheless, jealous wives demand a minimum modesty from the women in the vila. The only girl I knew who regularly transgressed the norm of female modesty was known as “loony Regina” (Regina a louca). She strolled the streets in short shorts “half naked”; she openly expressed her sexual desires to certain of the men; and was once surprised in flagrant delit with a married man from the neighborhood. I was present one day when she began to taunt Seu Joao, a highly respected leader in the zone: “People say your wife is going to leave you because you can’t get it up.” Her sister-in-law, standing nearby, immediately covered up, declaring: “You know she’s half off her rocker.” “Not just half,” responded Seu Joao. And then, reestablishing the norm: “Anyhow, you know she’s lying. My wife never speaks of our private life to anyone.” The young women her age all avoided Regina, calling her “nauseous,” but her greatest punishment, the worst imaginable, was to remain single—because no man in the vila wanted to be associated with her.