Not Here to Be Pretty

Street harassment in Brazil isn’t a footnote. It’s a daily weather condition—something women navigate the way you navigate rain, except rain doesn’t follow you down the block narrating your body. The country has some of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world, and the cultural tolerance for it runs deep, woven into music, into street culture, into the architecture of public space itself.

Which is part of what makes the work being documented in the i-D series Beyond Beauty worth paying attention to. The show follows Grace through Brazil, meeting young people trying to reshape what beauty means in a culture that has spent decades weaponizing the concept: models rethinking how they’re framed, activists rethinking how harassment is named, rappers rethinking what women are allowed to sound like in public.

The person who sticks is Lay, a rapper working the streets of São Paulo. The confrontational directness of her music—the refusal to be decorative, to soften the delivery, to make herself easier to digest—runs against a lot of what commercial Brazilian funk expects from women. She’s not trying to be likeable. She’s trying to be heard. There’s a real gap between those two things, and she occupies it daily.

I watch this kind of work from the outside and feel something I can’t quite name—admiration, yes, but also the uncomfortable awareness that these fights are happening with or without witnesses. The internet makes witnessing easier without necessarily making it meaningful. Still. You watch what you can. You let it remind you what courage actually looks like at ground level.