The Bolillo case: a punched and ignored woman

Hottest news in Colombia at the moment: national soccer trainer hits woman and loses his job. A female senator defends him, because the woman must have provoked him. Oh my, this senator is doing three steps back where the country is doing tiny steps forward, now and then. Physical abuses and murderings of women happen every day here. So please let this senator shut up at once! But back to the hitting itself. AND AN UPDATE

My second Soho looks better

Yesterday I glanced through my second Soho, Colombia’s magazine with tits and bums and sometimes good stories too. It struck me it has less tits and bums this time and honestly that makes me feel more at ease. I read a column by an anonymous woman who describes she was going to have sex the first time in her life and she ended up with… her boyfriend’s sister. Witty column.

My first Soho, aahh, well

Soho's website

Yesterday my first Soho arrived. I had been quite nervous because as the front page always is a scarcely dressed or naked woman, I thought the neighbours – almost all of them men – would snatch it away. No, I bumped into it when I opened my homedoor after having had lunch with a friend. The deliverer had managed to throw it under the door. As I promised you a review of all the editions, here’s the first one.

Tits and bums and good(?) stories

This week I took a strange decision and I regret it a little: I subscribed to Colombia’s monthly Soho. I might be the only female subscriber because many of Soho’s pictures show scarcely dressed or naked women. But supposedly it also has good stories.

When love kills

Every four days in Colombia a woman is killed by her husband or boyfriend, Colombia’s newspaper El Tiempo wrote yesterday. The other important newspaper, El Espectador, published an article called ‘When love kills’. The reason is that within a few months at least five killings of wives and girlsfriends were reported by the Colombian press. One of the latest was the murder of a woman in the Caribbean town of Barranquilla. Her very jealous ex husband suspected she had a lover. He shot her.

More curvy models in fashion magazines

Not only the German magazine Brigitte has decided to publish pictures of ‘real sized’ women, it appears. Other magazines follow, as the Huffington Post writes today.

The picture V Magazine published on its cover

Morning after pill and promiscuity

Giving young girls access to the morning after pill will increase their promiscuity. That’s what Colombia’s senator Víctor Velásquez Reyes thinks and with him a lot more people, and it’s silly. In the meantime teenager pregnancies in Colombia keep being a big problem.

Contraception before abortion

A lot of discussion about a sentence of Colombia’s Constitutional Court, that says that Colombia’s abortion law should be explained at school. Those who are against the law obviously are against the sentence as well.

Karl Lagerfeld: not thin = fat

Chanel‘s famous fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld struggled with his weight until 2001, The Huffington Post writes in the beginning of this year. You see him in a still fatter edition with one of his thin models. And you also see the face of the thin Lagerfeld, who is holding a coin or a medal and who is pouting his mouth like an old rich and lonely lady. I think the fatter Lagerfeld looks better, but that is a matter of taste.

Tsunami of bullets and silicone tits

Tsunami of bullets and silicone tits

Thinking of a subject for this column I thought of the recent start of the tv-series The maffia’s dolls, and of a word that could describe this and other similar programmes. Extravagant! I told myself. But when I looked it up in the Real Academia Española dictionary I found the following: “What is done or said outside of the usual or common way of acting”. Yet, observing into detail the esthetics which have seized this city (Pereira, WU)- the way people talk, the way this town has begun to disguise its poverty or construct its great wealth, and even a new dialect – it strikes me that the texts of The Boss, Without Tits Paradise doesn’t exist, or The Maffia’s dolls are not extravagant. They describe in a certain way style and daily life of at least a good deal of Pereira’s and also Colombia’s society.

I made myself do the terrible job – for me – to watch some chapters of these series, only with the aim to interpret it. But is was difficult to stay in front of television without feeling revulsion. The scene with Amparo Grisales dressed as a schoolgirl, trying to seduce her ex husband, a gangster with a gold colour buckle at his belt and a printed silk shirt, who observes her (hornily) twisting up a Greek style pillar, and, next act, in an unlikely acrobacy, stretching her in the gym exercised leg towards him and stating with a purr: “You still want me”, is simply grotesque.

In these series the dialogues full of gangster slang are abundant. “What I want is a though guy who maintains me” or “I crowned (fucked, WU) this little female”, are some of the sentences that make up the great literary effort of the script writers and which are what you could hear in whatever corner of our town, expressions that don’t exactly praise the pushing forward and the love to work that our ‘Paisa’ (the inhabitants of the coffee region and Antioquia, WU) race is so proud of.

These programmes make me feel that instead of distacing new generations from drugs trafficking, prostitution and superficiality, on the contrary they are a praise of these antivalues and that anti-aesthetics which sometimes drowns me in a kind of monstruous hallucination, in which one day we will be devastated by a tsunami of bullets and silicone tits.

MARÍA VICTORIA RAMÍREZ MARTÍNEZ

Corporación Contigo Mujer

Pereira, octubre 1 de 2009

In this post my friend María Victoria Ramírez writes about the new soapseries Las Muñecas de la Mafia (The Maffia’s Dolls) in Colombia and her home town Pereira. This column was published in Pereira’s newspaper La Tarde (The Afternoon). Enjoy it.