Rant of the week: ShowMatch

This week I am angry. To be more specific, this week I am an angry feminist. If you live in Argentina, then you must know that there is really one television show that everyone watches, and all of the other shows that are broadcasted rotate around this one show. The show is ShowMatch, I know, you can tell the sort of quality the content is just by the name. And the other shows that discuss the events of ShowMatch have equally impressive names: Este es el Show, La Cocina del Show, you get my point. ShowMatch has this sort of magical quality that highlights the best machista qualities of Argentina. Basically it is a sort of “Dancing with the Stars” but with terrible dancing, a lot of exaggerated and forced gossip and naked women. It’s a man’s paradise I suppose, for men who like gossip and constant bitching.

the Buttman

I think living in Buenos Aires for over two years has desensitized me to the exposure I have to porn in public places. And as a hard-core feminist it’s sort of a shocker (I guess now I’m just a feminist). Every kiosk and book stand has dozens of magazines with naked ladies on it, not to mention that they take up an entire wall of the display. Yesterday on the bus though, while I was staring into nothing on my way home from work, I realized that I was staring at an advertisement for Buttman, a sex shop that claims to be the largest one in all of Argentina.

Let’s Misbehave

The institutionalization of female inclusion in politics is relatively developed in Argentina, compared to other countries in the region. In fact, Argentina was the first country in Latin America to systematize female participation in Congress, in 1991. Argentina’s gender quota law requires 30 percent of all legislative candidates to be women and that women occupy at least one in three spaces on the electoral lists (or else all of the female candidates would be in the bottom-third of the lists). The effect in the legislature was surprising: immediately after the implementation of the law, female participation in the Argentine House of Representatives rose from 4 to 27 percent (Mark Jones, 1998).

Female politicians are definitely more visible in Argentina, or at least Buenos Aires, than in the US; the Coalición Cívica’s Elisa Carrió’s campaign this year with Senator María Eugenia Estenssoro was particularly unforgettable (translation: they brand us as crazy women because we want to govern without corruption. Ok, we’re crazy).