Approaching Women In Brazil

Approaching Women In Brazil Is A Whole New Ballgame. So What's The Secret?

It’s the World Cup, and all eyes are on Brazil. Alex Bellos (@alexbellos) has been writing about South America’s largest country for 15 years and is the author of the soccer bestseller Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. In this series, he shares his insights from the tournament’s host cities, revealing the unique lifestyle and habits of the Brazilian male. 

There are shy guys, there are confident guys, and then there are Brazilians.

Imagine a group of girls sitting at a table in a bar. In London, where I live, normal behavior is to walk straight past, smile self-deprecatingly, and then sit on your own. 

In Brazil, standard behavior would be to walk directly to the girls, say hi as if you've known them for years, and sit down right in the middle of the group.

It’s not rude. Brazilian men are programmed to approach women at all times, like moths drawn to light.

Yet while Brazilians are irrepressible wherever they live, nowhere is the atmosphere of sexual courtship as heightened as it is in Manaus, where the U.S. men's soccer team plays Portugal on today.

Manaus is a city of 2 million people in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. It is the only place I know where it is customary to honk your car horn when you pass a pretty woman in the street. A woman who has made an effort to look good and is not honked at may feel disappointed. I once met a man in Manaus who had lived for many years in São Paulo. “Sometimes in São Paulo when you want sex, you have to pay a prostitute!” he said. This shocking state of affairs had never happened to him in Manaus.

The city exudes sensuality partly because of the heat and the humidity, which is often at almost 100%. Clothes are always an encumbrance.

But there are also cultural reasons why the accepted behaviour in Manaus is a bit different from the rest of country.

Brazilians living in the coastal cities are by and large descended from white European immigrants and black African slaves. You see white and black and every shade in between. Manaus, on the other hand, is racially much more homogenous — its residents are mainly descendants from the indigenous population, many of whom only a few generations ago were living in Stone Age rainforest communities.

Most Manaus residents will be able to you the name of the Amazon tribe that they are descended from — and they will also tell you that indigenous Indians are more liberal about sex. But it is not true that all you need to do to pick up a girl in Manaus or elsewhere in Brazil is to go right up to them and ask them out.

Far from it.

Let’s return to the scenario in which a Brazilian walks into a bar and approaches a group of girls he doesn’t know.

Most often, the girls will tell him to go away. They will wave their hands at him. They have to — otherwise how would women ever get any privacy?

The real secret of Brazilian men is an inability to feel rejected.

There is nothing embarrassing about being brushed off. They don’t feel publicly humiliated or emotionally wounded, as we Brits would do.

Rejection is normal — and off they go to approach someone else.