If this kind of rationale stimulates the ficantes those who ficar to ficar with as many partners as possible, it is also true that male and female ficantes face different consequences for the same act in terms of reputation. For the male, ficar with more than one female in one night suggests he is a stud. For the female, the same behavior is not well regarded among males and may ruin her reputation. According to the picture drawn by mothers from all social groups in all three sites, dating was quite different when the mothers of teenagers were teenagers themselves.
It was strictly supervised and there was not very much they were allowed to do in terms of physical contact with their boyfriends โ which does not mean there was no such contact. Dating was, in the past, the natural path to marriage which, many females believed, would free them from their authoritarian fathers. Thus, marriage tended to happen very early in their lives. Yet freedom was not always the consequence of getting married.
As one mother reports, her husband is as authoritarian as her father was and, instead of freedom, she has moved from one prison to another.
The other day I was talking to my aunt, she said she dated 12 years with commitment. She said he [the boyfriend] never hugged her, never kissed her. More educated mothers, Macambira.
I married very young and also with my first boyfriend. I started dating him when I was 13 and I married when I was So, I married to have more freedom, because in my house it was very much like a very closed system. So I thought that, if I married early, I was going to have more freedom, and all that. It ends up, you know, with you going to another prison. Upper income mothers, Montes Claros. This is what I think.
