Translator: Ivana Korom Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
They asked me to stay in this spot. Is it here?
(Laughter)
Well, I can't see anyone, so if you get bored, I won't notice.
Hi, I'm Nadia
and I really can't see anyone.
but that's for the sake of video recording
and Guilherme told me to do Madonna with the headset, but it didn't work
because my head is too big.
So I won't do Madonna, unfortunately.
Well, as you were told before, I am a feminist,
but not long ago, I was not.
And I'd like to speak on feminism and show you some stats.
I also said during the coffee break I'm a statistics freak.
Many people wonder why feminism is important nowadays and say,
"Wow, these out-there women are all working, driving,
voting, having sex and doing whatever they feel like."
However, that is not so, and this is why stats are important.
Today, Brazil is one of the most unsafe places for women to live.
Every day, 10 women are murdered in Brazil.
So much so that the recent CPMI of violence against women demands
the inclusion of femicide, a gender hate crime,
as an aggravating circumstance in the Brazilian Penal Code.
So this is a reality. It is not a common kind of murder -
It's good that I can't see the clock from here, so I'll be talking forever.
It isn't robbery-homicide, or anything like it, it's gender-based,
which the press wrongly calls "crime of passion"
as if loving entailed killing, which is not true.
According to the UN, by 2020 140 million children and young women
will have been bound in forced marriage or even sold for marriage.
Examples like the recent case of an 8-year-old girl
who was found injured on a honeymoon with a 40-year-old man
are very common.
So in 5 years' time there will be 140 million "Child Brides" in the world:
young girls who will be sold for marriage against their will.
Even though women are 54% of the voters,
we have less than 10% of elective offices in Brazil,
and there is a 30% quota for candidacy reserved for women,
but even so, we're able to elect only 10% of all candidates.
Every 12 seconds, a woman is assaulted in Brazil,
according to the Federal Secretary of Policies for Women.
Last year in Rio de Janeiro, 5,000 cases of rape were registered.
The Pérola Byington Hospital in São Paulo,
which is one of the reference hospitals in attending victims of sexual violence,
attends to 15 female patients a day.
However, talking about this is slightly depressing,
and it may not actually show what it is to be a feminist,
which is something much grander and more empowering than that.
These numbers are important for us
to have an idea of what is happening,
what methods we can have and what we should do
to change such reality.
We see that this equality is rather ideologial than material.
In real life, women are still considered inferior to men,
and the stats prove that,
but they are of no use to show how a person becomes a feminist,
at least not me, and I will speak from my own experience.
What I felt when I was younger was some kind of restlessness...
an anguish.
I knew something was wrong but I didn't know what it was.
In 1989, when you were not even born
or your parents probably still had not met each other,
my parents separated
and I was a 9 year old living in Manaus, my hometown,
where society is more sexist than here, if that is even possible,
but the treatment given to my mother
was completely different from that given to my father.
My mother, the first feminist of my life,
although she doesn't consider herself one,
is an extraordinary woman, but she suffered a lot because -
well, don't blame me for not knowing sophisticated words -
but, in a nutshell, her morals were harshly judged.
So my father was the handsome loverboy
while she was the homewrecker.
I remember seeing that and thinking,
"Gosh, this is not right! They are equal!
Why are people treating them differently?"
And for the record, my dad was a real idiot,
but I couldn't understand why they were doing that to my mom.
She was just using her right
to be the owner of her life and body and to seek happiness.
That perplexing situation made me feel extremely uneasy.
Later in high school, I behaved more like boys than girls,
and I was fiercely bullied for that.
I didn't like wearing skirts, I wouldn't wear makeup,
I didn't do my nails and I played soccer.
In a way, my femininity was put to test
as if I was less of a woman because of that.
Again, I couldn't understand what was going on
and kept asking myself, "Gee, who am I?"
I would look at the covers of magazines,
featuring those gorgeous, stunning women
with perfect, party hairstyles wearing come-on mini skirts and say,
"Who is this woman?" It suddenly came to me I was not a woman
because I refused to accept that standard, so I deduced I was a man.
And I'm not talking transexuality,
but in the sense of "If being a man is cool, if doing these things is cool,
if being bossy is acceptable for men but not for women,
if diligence fits men more than women,
if women have to be docile, loving and sweet,
and I wasn't anything like it - well I'm kind of sweet -
then I had to be a man.
That made me avoid other women.
It made ​​me think they were so dull that I had nothing to do with them,
I was a whole different kind of woman,
because I wasn't a woman, I was something else.
But that wasn't good!
I may sound arrogant here,
but it didn't feel good at all, because I was caught in the crossfire
not knowing which side I was fighting on.
That can easily undermine self-esteem and make you feel out of place.
And as a teenager - I guess most of you are,
because I really can't see anyone -
or for the majority of teens, but whether that is the case or not
there is this 'where am I, who am I, where am I going, how am I going
and who am I going with' thing
and I was sure that I wouldn't go with women
because they were stupid and even competed with me for the guys' attention.
So the bond the girls and I were supposed to have never did really exist.
I spent my whole life like this,
but of course I wasn't a social misfit.
I had girl friends, my older sister, my mother,
who is my greatest role model and I just lived on.
I had a nice sex life as an adult - not as a teen!
You guys please don't do it without prior medical advice.
Excuse me. Huh? What?
Oh, he's telling me we're halfway through the presentation.
We still got nine minutes, then!
I was having a nice sex life
until I started this blog that was mentioned before.
It was a place for me to describe my sexual experiences.
And honestly I thought there was nothing wrong with sharing them
either because people would not in the least be interested in reading it
or make one or two throwaway comments in languages
I would probably not be able to read without Google Translate.
I thought no one was ever going to read or care about it
and that I would end up closing it just like I had done before with others
ever since I started posting, which was when I was still in Law school.
So it's not just a journalist thing,
I had started roughly 350 blogs and given up all of them.
I thought this would be the likely fate of my new blog:
no one would read it, I would get home too tired to post and all.
And the blog went viral.
At that very moment, I was faced with a reality
that I didn't believe to exist.
In 2011, when it happened,
I relived what my mother had lived in 1989.
My sex life had been put to test and from that moment on
I realised I wasn't free,
I wasn't free at all.
People cursed and threatened me in so many ways.
They said bizarre things like,
"I want you to die with many sarcomas in your body".
It's not supposed to be funny, guys, it was pretty tough.
At that moment, rather than getting sad - well, I was, indeed -
but instead of dying in misery, I was awakened.
Then that restlessness, and anguish I felt
but couldn't understand before turned into inspiration.
Right there, I found millions of women like me who were not entirely free
and who needed a voice, they needed to be here, they needed to be there,
they needed to tell us about themselves.
So my life changed completely thereupon.
People may say, "Oh, it changed because you wrote a book."
No, guys, an author gets only 10% of the cover,
which is roughly the same price as this can of water I could not open.
So if I needed an opener I wouldn't be able to afford one
by selling a book.
What changed my life then was not the book, but this.
To be here, to be speaking. To write and to get if off my chest.
To look women in the eye and find out they are exactly like me:
that they have the same concerns and feel that something is, in fact, wrong,
that they can make a change and that it's possible to team up
against the idea of a magazine cover girl that will do anything to hook the guy
who's not that hot and is drunk!
You know, get over that guy!
In fact, we must unite and be together, we have to support each other
and promote initiatives for women to chair elected offices.
We must appreciate companies that have gender equality policies.
We have to fund voluntary initiatives that help and assist women.
I'm not paid a penny for speaking about feminism
and that's all right because I - I mean, it actually sucks, but -
the change it's made in my life is abstolutely spectacular and priceless
even though the bills arrive every month.
There are initiatives being created for women, edicts and other things
to help us, women, understand that we're in this together.
It might take a while for future generations to see those stats change.
I don't think I'll see those numbers...
How many minutes left, guys? I don't mind.
I don't think I'll see those numbers decrease or change,
but I will see more women talking,
more women turning this concern into fight, into movements.
So I invite those unfamiliar with feminism,
to get to know a little of what this movement is about.
There are several blogs out there,
many books and this author who has a book I really like,
but unfortunately has not been translated to Portuguese.
Her name is Bell Hooks, she's a black American feminist
and she also has some really boring books, but this one is exceptional,
it's called "Feminism is For Everybody".
In the introduction, she talks about
how people misjudge feminism and feminists
saying we are "hysterical, crazy, loud women
in need of a man, and so on."
Those people are just reproducing biased ideas from a third party,
sometimes the press, anti-feminism blogs or whatever,
that does not come directly from a feminist.
Hooks then asks, "Who are these feminists?
What is this feminism you think you know"?
And the same invitation she makes, I extend to you here and now:
come closer to feminism.
Thank you.
(Applause)