‘War on Fat’ : Rio Cultists: Good Looks at the Beach

On a recent Sunday, a nippy breeze from the South Atlantic brought an epidemic of goose bumps to Rio’s Ipanema beach. Despite the cool weather--this is winter in the Southern Hemisphere--there was a considerable assortment of attractive bodies on the beach, many of them underclad and shivering.

Beachwear here is not designed for warmth. This is the home of the fio dental , or dental floss, the stringiest of string bikinis, frankly intended for maximum body exposure.

Winter or summer, body exposure is important on Ipanema beach. For this is also the home of the culto ao corpo , the cult of the body, a social phenomenon that thrives today in Rio de Janeiro as never before.

Gregarious, Attuned

Rio is a cosmopolitan metropolis generously endowed with radiant sunshine and sparkling beaches. Its people are open and gregarious, naturally attuned to physical appearance and sexual attraction.

With these ingredients, the city is fertile ground for those who worship bodies, especially their own. And perhaps nowhere does the cult flourish more exuberantly than throughout Rio’s affluent Southern Zone, the beach neighborhoods of Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Sao Conrado and Barra de Tijuca.

For years, the softly swaying Girl from Ipanema of bossa nova fame has been the cult’s symbolic goddess. Today’s Girl from Ipanema is into jogging and “jazzercise,” adding a firm finish to the body of the cult.

But the idealized physique is not only female. Since the beginning of the 1980s, increasing numbers of Brazilian men have taken up weight training and other body-shaping practices in the same ritual spirit.

“I started body building when I was 16,” says Jan Portocarrero. Why? “To look good for the beach.”

A Tiger Tattoo

Portocarrero, 22, had been keeping warm--and flexing his muscles--in a Sunday morning game of paddle ball on the Ipanema shoreline. He wore a black swimsuit, revealingly brief and tight, and a tiger tattoo on the inside of his sturdy left biceps.

“On the beach, to have a right to take the sun, I think one has to have a good body,” Portocarrero said. “With the young crowd and all, the beach sort of requires it. Even the tourists come expecting to see lots of nice bodies.”

Figure Proliferation

In the Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil, a weekly page is filled with photos and articles about keeping the body in shape. The page is named Corpo, Portuguese for body.

Advertisements and commercials in the Brazilian mass media reinforce the cult of the body with a proliferation of attractive figures, prominently exhibited.

“You see advertisements for tractors with a woman in a bikini,” said Sonia Nunes, a physical therapist who thinks the cult has gone too far. “What does a tractor have to do with bikinis and rumps?”

A diet book by an Ipanema physician has become a bible for the Brazilian cult of the body. Titled “Being Fat Is Up to You,” the thin volume has sold more than 800,000 copies, a huge success by Brazilian publishing standards. “Being Fat” has been on the magazine Veja’s best-seller list for 66 weeks, most of that time in the No. 1 position for nonfiction.

Plastic Accepted

Dr. Joao Uchoa Jr., the author, has a prosperous weight-control clinic on Vinicius de Moraes Street in Ipanema. In the waiting room, figurines representing the comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy gaze out at plump women patients, who are told by a sign on the desk that they may pay with a Diners Club credit card.

Uchoa, a stocky man with thick, graying hair, boasted to a visitor that he has helped 4,000 patients lose a total of nine tons. The burgeoning interest in weight control, he said, is closely tied to the cult of the body--the competitive desire to look trim and fit, and the social stigma for those who do not.

“It is war on fat,” Uchoa said. “I don’t know a happy fat person.”

A few blocks from Uchoa’s clinic, a double line of 40 young men and women snaked to and fro across a mirrored gym, legs churning to the loud beat of rock ‘n’ roll music. In a small office overlooking the gym, Arthur Repsold Neto told how he and his partners have built a lucrative business on the cult of the body.

8,000 Members

In 1980, they opened a small exercise club called Corpore, from the Latin word for body. Today, Corpore has four locations and 8,000 paying members.

The clubs offer classes in jazzercise, aerobics, weightlifting, stretching, and other modes of getting bodies in shape. In the next few weeks, Corpore plans to bring in Candice Copeland and Chet Vienne, of the Body Express health clubs in Los Angeles, to lead a series of special aerobics classes.

What are known as “health clubs” in the United States are called “academies” in Brazil. The difference in terms reflects a difference in motives.

“In the United States, you are very concerned about health,” Repsold said. “Here it is more aesthetic. The main concern is to have a good body for going to the beach, for looking good at the beach.

“Here, a bad body is a disgrace. A good body is highly valued, maybe too highly.”

The Ideal Body

The Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area has about 2,500 exercise academies, more than double the number of a few years ago, Repsold says.

The muscular shape promoted by the academy has become the ideal body in the Brazilian cult of the body. For men, it features broad shoulders, sturdy but not heavily muscled arms, slim waist and thick legs; for women, well-muscled legs, high and firm buttocks, flat midsection and smallish bust.

“It is the academy that makes that body,” says Repsold, 31, whose own body fits the fashionable mold.

Not all good bodies are made in academies, of course. Many are literally sculpted in Rio’s famous plastic surgery clinics. Suction lipectomy, a surgical method for removing excess fat tissue by vacuum pump, has become an industry in Rio.

“Liposuction,” developed in France in the late 1970s, came to Brazil in 1980. Today, about 2,000 liposuction operations a month are performed in Rio, accounting for 40% of all plastic surgery here, according to the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgeons.

‘Ahead of the Americans’

The society has 500 members in Rio, about one-fourth of the total membership in Brazil; Manhattan, by contrast, has only 130 plastic surgeons. Dr. Farid Hakme, president of the society’s Rio chapter, says all 500 plastic surgeons here perform liposuctions.

“In body sculpturing, we are way ahead of the Americans,” he told an American reporter.

He said a good liposuction operation costs $800 to $2,000 in Rio, depending on the surgeon and the quantity of fat removed.

Brazilian plastic surgeons also specialize in breast reduction, an operation that has become increasingly popular as Brazilian women have followed the small-bust trend dictated by the cult of the body.

“The Brazilian woman has an obsession with the cult of the body,” Hakme said.

While facial plastic surgery is more popular in the United States, Brazilians buy more body work, Hakme said. Breast alterations, liposuction and other cosmetic body surgery account for the bulk of operations by Rio’s plastic surgeons. And although women are the usual patients, Hakme estimates that 20% of Rio’s liposuction operations are performed on men.

Conventional Surgery

Most Brazilians cannot afford plastic surgery, even at what American patients would regard as bargain rates. But among the middle and upper classes, especially the women of the Southern Zone, it is as conventional as buying a car or a diamond, Hakme said.

For many Rio women, the stages of life are marked by different plastic surgeries. Hakme outlined what he described as a typical timetable for the fashionable woman:

-- Age 15 to 20: breast reduction surgery.

-- Age 20 to 25: “She has liposuction, even before marriage.”

-- Age 25 to 35: breast-lifting and liposuction, to correct the sags and bulges that can come with child-bearing.

-- Age 35 to 43: “She waits a while and goes back to the academy, back to the cult of the body” for exercise.

-- Age 43 to 50: facial surgery, and “she always takes the opportunity to have some ‘freshening’ done on the body.”

Although plastic surgery can be a routine matter for Rio women, Hakme says many try to keep their operations a secret by having them during winter vacation, typically in July. As a result, July is by far the busiest month for Rio’s plastic surgeons.

Survival Instrument

According to Roberto da Matta, a Brazilian anthropologist who will begin teaching at Notre Dame University this fall, Brazil’s body cult has its roots in slavery, which was not abolished here until 1888. In the relationship between slave and master, Da Matta said, the slave’s body was the key element, the main instrument of survival for both.

From that corporeal preoccupation comes the Brazilian’s “enormous capacity for knowing the body, for discovering the details of the bodies of others, for permitting himself to observe so much in the bodies of others, and, with that, the whole importance that we systematically give to the appearance of bodies,” Da Matta wrote in an essay on “The Brazilian Body.”

Brazil’s traditional pre-Lenten carnival, with its elaborate costumes, frenetic dancing and open nudity, also focuses on the exhibition and enjoyment of the body.

Given the role of the body in Brazil’s cultural history, Da Matta said, nothing comes more naturally to Brazilians than the cult of the body.

‘Way of Life’

“It’s part of Brazilian culture,” he told an interviewer. “It’s like water for a fish. It’s part of our way of life.”

Da Matta, who has lived in the United States, says Brazilians are generally more openly expressive with their bodies than Americans. “In the United States, there is a repression of the body in everyday life,” he said.

While he recognizes that the cult of the body is alive and well in other parts of the world, including California, he emphasizes that in general, Brazilian cultists are more intensely concerned with looks for the sake of looks. Like Repsold, he cited exercise as an example: “In the United States, they are doing that for the sake of health. In Brazil, they are doing it for beauty. They are doing it because it is fashionable.”

Ilana Strozenberg, also an anthropologist, said that a Brazilian’s personal appearance has always been his “calling card” in business and social contacts.

‘Transforming the Body’

“The matter of the cult of the body today is an extension of that importance attributed to appearances,” Strozenberg said. “What is new now is the fact that it is the body itself that is in question, and no longer clothes. Now, it is a matter of transforming the body itself. . . . It is much more complicated to keep the body in style.”

Among socially ambitious young adults, it is important to have “the body” of the cult, she said, adding that “there is very heavy social pressure to conform to that model.”

Strozenberg predicts that Brazil’s cult of the body will eventually fade, like other popular fashions.

“There will be a certain disillusionment with that frenzy,” she said. “I don’t mean that people will stop taking care of their bodies, but it will no longer be the center of their lives.”