Bruna Surfistinha: Brazilian hooker's memoir flying off bookstore shelves
Monday, December 12, 2005
After doing it all kinds of ways with several hundred different guys and more than a few women, a 21-year-old just-retired Brazilian prostitute has written a best-selling book about her three years on the job and plans now to settle down to a "normal" family life of husband and K*ds.
Her scandalized middle-class family hasn't quite come around to forgetting about the lurid recent past of "Bruna Surfistinha." But her avid readers - four out of five of them reportedly women seeking tips on technique - are clamoring for more.
"The Scorpion's Sweet Poison" is now the rage in Brazilian bookstores and has made its author the country's latest celebrity.
Surfistinha is the pseudonym of Raquel Pacheco, a generously curved brunette who worked for almost three years as a Sao Paulo call girl. The book's first printing of 10,000 copies sold out in just two weeks and it has risen to third place on the weekly Vega's list of non-fiction book sales.
In the 172 pages of the volume published by Panda Books, the author says that she had every possible sexual experience during her call girl years, and she recounts in detail some of her rendezvous with men, women and couples, as well as describing an orgy during which she "entertained" eight guys.
"Today, I can say that there's no fantasy that scares me because I've already done and seen everything. Some of them were pretty strange, I admit," writes Bruna, who left home before turning 18 with the aim of making money quickly.
That was how she got into prostitution, a trade she pursued in a comfortable Sao Paulo neighborhood until Oct. 26, when she decided to abandon the world's oldest profession and devote herself to her boyfriend, a divorced 30-year-old businessman who was one of her clients.
"When I got the idea that the easiest option I had to support myself when I left my parents' home would be to offer sexual services, I thought: if I'm going to be a prostitute, I don't want to be just a run-of-the-mill one," writes Bruna on the blog she created on the Internet to stay in contact with her readers and which each day receives 15,000 hits.
Bruna says that in the three years she was a prostitute, she had sex more than 1,000 times, adding that although "in theory that might not seem like a lot," in practice it's another matter. "Wild sex, orgies, many different men and women by day, almost endless nights. What can be exciting for many girls ... at 20 years old, for me is just routine," she says.
With the help of a journalist, Bruna prepared her book recounting many of her experiences, but throughout the work she maintains the anonymity of her clients. She also gives advice to women about how to act during sex so that their man does not become a client of prostitutes.
Those recommendations could be the reason why 80 percent of the people who buy the book are females between the ages of 13 and 35, according to an informal bookstore survey conducted by her editor. Because of the book's success, and the confidence with which Bruna speaks of her experiences, she has become a frequent guest on television programs, and a Brazilian men's magazine that publishes a yearly list of the world's 100 sexiest women had included her this time around.
"I got a lot from being a 'party chick.' I don't mean just money; I also made friends," she writes on her blog, where she also says that despite the occasional bad moments she experienced, overall "it was a good phase that I'll keep with affection in my memory."
With the success of her first book, Bruna now plans to write two more, study sexology, start a consulting business and lead a normal life, but she recognizes that she will have to deal with much prejudice and that it won't be easy to reconcile with her relatives, who are shocked by her adventures.
"There are ex-prostitutes, yes. But we're also women, and therefore we dream about a normal life. A life surrounded by Ch*ldren and a husband," she says on her blog.
April 27, 2006
Letter From Brazil
She Who Controls Her Body Can Upset Her Countrymen
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase "kiss and tell." First in a blog that quickly became the country's most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.
But it is not just her canny use of the Internet that has made Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, a cultural phenomenon. By going public with her exploits, she has also upended convention and set off a vigorous debate about sexual values and practices, revealing a country that is not always as uninhibited as the world often assumes.
Interviewed at the office of her publisher here, Ms. Pacheco, 21, said the blog that became her vehicle to notoriety emerged almost by accident. But once it started, she was quick to spot its commercial potential and its ability to transform her from just another program girl, as high-class prostitutes are called in Brazil, into an entrepreneur of the erotic.
"In the beginning, I just wanted to vent my feelings, and I didn't even put up my photograph or phone number," she said. "I wanted to show what goes on in the head of a program girl, and I couldn't find anything on the Net like that. I thought that if I was curious about it, others would be too."
Ms. Pacheco parlayed that inquisitiveness into a best seller, "The Scorpion's Sweet Poison," that has made her a sort of sexual guru. A mixture of autobiography and how-to manual, her book has sold more than 100,000 copies since it was published late last year, and has just been translated into Spanish.
At book signings, Ms. Pacheco said, "80 percent of the public is women, which I didn't expect at all," because most of the readers of her blog appeared to be men, including customers who "wanted to see how I had rated their performance." As she sees it, the high level of female interest in her sexual experiences reflects a gap here between perceptions about sex and the reality.
"I think there's a lot of hypocrisy and a bit of fear involved," she said. "Brazilian women have this sexy image, of being at ease and uninhibited in bed. But anyone who lives here knows that's not true."
Carnival and the general sensuality that seems to permeate the atmosphere can give the impression that Brazil is unusually permissive and liberated, especially compared with other predominantly Roman Catholic nations. But experts say the real situation is far more complicated, which explains both Bruna's emergence and the strong reactions she has provoked.
"Brazil is a country of contradictions, as much in relation to sexuality as anything else," said Richard Parker, a Columbia University anthropologist who is the author of "Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil," and has taught and worked here. "There is a certain spirit of transgression in daily life, but there is also a lot of moralism."
As a result, some Brazilians have applauded Bruna's frankness and say it is healthy to get certain taboos out in the open, like what both she and academic researchers say is a national penchant for anal sex. But others decry her celebrity as one more noxious manifestation of free-market economics and globalization.
"This is the fruit of a type of society in which people will do anything to get money, including selling their bodies to be able to buy cellular phones," said Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, a newspaper columnist and professor of theology at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. "We've always had prostitution, but it was a hidden, prohibited thing. Now it's a professional option like anything else, and that's the truly shocking thing."
But Gabriela Silva Leite, a sociologist and former prostitute who now directs a prostitutes' advocacy group, argues that such concerns are exaggerated. "It's not a book like this that is going to stimulate prostitution, but the lack of education and opportunities for women," she said. "I don't think Bruna glamorizes things at all. On the contrary, you can regard the book as a kind of warning, because she talks of the unpleasant atmosphere and all the difficulties she faced."
Part of the controversy stems simply from Ms. Pacheco's forthright and unapologetic tone about her work. Traditionally, Brazilians feel sympathy for the poor woman selling her body to feed her Ch*ldren; she is seen as a victim of the country's glaring social and economic inequalities.
But Ms. Pacheco does not fit that mold. She comes from a middle-class family and turned to prostitution, she said, both as rebellion against her strict parents and because she wanted to be economically independent.
That a woman is now talking and behaving as Brazilian men often have may also offend some. Roberto da Matta, a leading anthropologist and social commentator, noted that even though role reversals were an important part of Carnival, other areas of Brazilian life, including sexual relationships, could be quite rigid and hierarchical.
Under the system of machismo that prevails in Brazil and other Latin American countries, "only a man has a right to command his own sex life, and that control is seen as a basic attribute of masculinity," he explained. "So when a young, attractive, intelligent woman appears and says she is a prostitute, you have a complete inversion of roles, leaving men fragile in a terrain where she is the boss, not them."
For all her willingness to break taboos, though, Ms. Pacheco's current life plan is conventional. She has a steady boyfriend and hopes to marry him, and is studying for the national college entrance exam, with a mind to majoring in psychology.
"Being Bruna was a role that left its mark on me, but I can't abandon her," Ms. Pacheco said. "There are people who still call me Bruna, and I don't mind, but I wouldn't want to be her for the rest of my life."
Nor is Ms. Pacheco immune to the influence of pudor, a concept important throughout Latin America that combines elements of modesty, decency, propriety and shame. In her book, rather than write out the words commonly used on the street to describe sexual acts and organs, she prints only their first letters, with dots indicating what everyone already knows.
"I think it's quite vulgar to say the whole word," she explained. "But I didn't want to be too formal, either."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times
About the author
Raquel Pacheco, 21, was born on October 28th, 1984 in Sorocaba, in the São Paulo countryside. She started prostituting herself at 17 and quit this profession at 21.
Bruna Surfistinha is the foremost celebrity on Brazilian internet today. Her former blog (
www.brunasurfistinha.com) had a daily rate of about 15 thousand accesses from users who delight on the racy stories she tells about the encounters she has had with men, women and couples in her flat. All of her encounters (totaling up to six a day!) are described and Bruna has even created a rating system for the client’s performance. Bruna also describes in details the parties she has been to in swing clubs.
Unafraid of showing her face, this call-girl has been interviewed on radio and television, and for national magazines. However, many of the stories had never been told and are now revealed in THE SWEET VENOM OF THE SCORPION. You will learn all the revealing details of how a girl from an upper middle class family traded weekends with her family in Guarujá to become a prostitute at 17. The book also features Bruna the surfer’s top-secret diary, with stories so daring she was not brave enough to publish in her blog. The 36- black- page diary is shrink-wrapped. Finally, Bruna also gives women a few lessons on how to seduce a man – and never to lose him for a call-girl.
Photos. For a garota she's about average.
http://www.famozinhas.xpg.com.br/bruna_surfistinha.html
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Who I would love to see read & analyze this book Is JAZZ! 
