I’ve been thinking about this topic for years, and about the process that took me where I am today.

Here’s my story.

I grew up in a family of nerds. My mom, my dad, my brother and I, our favourite thing to do as a family was to go have lunch on Sundays at the mall, and then go to this huge bookstore. We would each get lost in our favourite sections discovering and reading new books for one or two hours.

Both my brother and I were very smart kids, and my parents always encouraged us both to learn new things. There wasn’t really a distinction between how they treated us. We had a comfortable upper-middle class life in Brazil, and they would move heaven and earth if it meant a learning opportunity.

So at one point they got me a chemistry set (because I liked to experiment with anything I’ve found in the kitchen), a cd-encyclopedia showing how engines worked (since I took my mom’s music box apart to see the mechanism), and science magazine subscriptions, (because watching the Carl Sagan’s series twice wasn’t enough). When I was seven my dad even enrolled me in English classes, as he wanted me to love languages as much as he does. Thanks, dad, it worked! =)

Despite all that, we were not growing in an isolated bubble, and in the 90’s there was a clear distinction between what a boy should like and what a girl should like. I remember our birthdays, I’d get dolls and dresses, and my brother would get this amazing robot that turns into a car and you can remove these parts and make a wing, or those super cool building blocks… You get it. I was so jealous and I’d often try to manipulate him into giving me his toys, as every older sister should do.

I also remember my brother being praised as the smart boy. Not that my parents didn’t praise me. We were fortunate to grow in this great environment in which my parents would never pressure us to get perfect grades. They always said that the important thing was to study, and we both loved to learn new things, so we would get good grades anyway, and everyone was happy.

Nevertheless, the world would praise my brother as the smart one, and at a very young age I started to believe that he was smarter than me. I remember one of the days, later in the adult life, when I felt this phenomena very clearly. I was in my 20s and I ran into a nice old lady that used to be our neighbour as kids. I was with my boyfriend at the time, and she wanted to know all about him, how everyone was doing, and then she asked: what about your brother, is he still super smart?

Take notice, it’s not that she said that he was smarter than me, that’s not how this works. It’s just that I wouldn’t normally get this type of praise from strangers growing up, so I concluded the most logical thing — my brother gets the praise because he’s smarter.

And this is a story I told myself since I was a kid. If I didn’t finish one of my books and he had read all the Jules Verne’s collection, it’s because he’s smarter. This is the sort of thing that would eat my self esteem as a kid, not having read the Jules Verne’s collection before my brother, so you can see the kind of weird person I am. =)

Anyway, this idea ended up turning into “boys are smarter than girls”, and eventually into “men are smarter than women”. Not that anyone told that to my face but, remember, I’m a smart girl and could put the pieces together myself.

I remember this other occasion, when my parents were having a party. I think it was my dad’s birthday, and back then he worked at the bank, in the IT department, during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Yes, my dad was a computer guy before computers were a thing, and so were all of his friends from work.

If you’ve been to these couple-hosted parties (at least straight couples), you know how it goes, the guys end up all mingling together in the living room, while the women congregate in the kitchen. And I, a 12-year old girl, was clearly out of place amongst all these adults.

I remember being fascinated by all the conversations the men were having, they would talk about new computers, the president running for re-election (it was 98), if inflation would come back, the best types of investment, you get the picture.

And I just had this epiphany — this is where the smart conversations happen, these are the smartest people in the whole party! I wanted to just be there and listen, but of course my dad told me to go find my mom.

My mom, a university-professor-turned-into-stay-at-home-mom, was in the kitchen with her girlfriends. They were having other types of conversations. They were talking about their kids, the best schools, recipes, their parents who were becoming elderly, and other topics that my 12-year-old self found incredibly boring and unimportant.

It’s not that my mom and her friends were not smart. Some of the women worked the same job as my dad’s friends. It also wasn’t that the topics they were discussing weren’t complex or relevant for society as inflation, it was just that it didn’t seem important enough to me. It’s probably because I was told this story about what topics should or shouldn’t be at the top of the agenda.

I then grew up always hungry for knowledge. At the end of high school I decided that I wanted to study at the same university where my mom taught. It was one of the best schools in the state, and getting in wasn’t an easy feat, but I was determined.

After two years of studying every day for the admission exam and refusing to enroll in any other college, I made it. I was in the temple of smart people, and for me this was heaven. My program was a major in Social Communications, and my creative side wanted to be a designer. But soon enough my intellectual side got hooked up to the Journalism crowd. And oh, how they were my crowd.

I started hanging out with three of the guys, who in my point of view were the intellectuals. They knew everything about politics, journalism, law, music and culture. I also knew my fair bit, so we would spent hours at the bar (you know the drill) talking about all the controversial topics of the day.

They had so many strong convictions and were so confident in their opinions that it was hypnotizing. I learned so much from them and I still treasure those days. And I thought: I finally made it, right? I wasn’t just a mere spectator, I was one of the boys, one of the smart guys in my dad’s living room drinking whisky and discussing all the important topics!

And then I entered this weird phase.

You see, to be one of the guys implied in not being “one of the girls”, or at least not “one of those girls”. And who were they?

They were the girly girls. The ones who always showed up in class with makeup, nice hair, had long shiny nails and pink everything. I barely knew them, but I already had a bunch of assumptions. They were clearly not smart, or else they would be hanging with the intellectual gang (us, of course). They were delicate flowers, and clearly couldn’t handle any of the heavy topics at the bar. They wouldn’t even set foot in the bar, it was clearly too dirty and disgusting for them (honestly, it wasn’t the cleanest of places).

Here’s the thing. Another unspoken story that went around those times was that women only had two options: you either have brains, or you’re pretty. You can’t have both.

I clearly didn’t want to be seen in the “pretty” box, because that would obviously mean that I had no brains. And if I had to chose, I’d rather be unattractive and smart, then beautiful and dumb. So I stayed away from them. And of course, I looked down on them, because who likes dumb people?

This notion sounds comically nonsensical to me today. I have no idea how I got to that conclusion… 🙄

Of course, I didn’t have this all clear in my head at the time, it was just a feeling that I disliked them and felt superior to them. But today I know exactly what the cause was. Nevermind that they had to pass the exact same strict exam than me for one of the most competitive universities in South America, but hey, have you seen how much makeup that girl wears everyday?

It’s a thought that I can’t even wrap my head around these days. You could say that with all the time they must have spent at the gym and worrying about appearances, they clearly didn’t have time to study and learn. But hey, if they had time to go to the gym and still pass the same exams as I did, they were probably smarter than me.

There was even this girl, super pretty, who was getting a degree in Social Com with us and getting a Law degree at another college. At. the. same. time. And she was top of class. Guess what, she didn’t waste the whole afternoon at the bar like us smart people.

And there was yet another thing. You see, being “one of the intellectual guys” also meant not being “fussy” as the girls. Like the girls who never touch their food, but also the girls who spoke up against sexual harassment. To me, being able to participate in every conversation with the guys naturally meant to have the opportunity to hear the “locker room talk”, including that time “when I was pissed drunk and grabbed Julia from behind, and she made such a fuss about it”.

I didn’t want to be “that girl”, so I never said anything about it. None of the times. At the time it seemed a small price to pay for a free-pass to all kinds of talks with the guys, but these conversations still haunt me today. Because like many others, at some point I was also Julia.

By then I had already fell in love with journalism. I finally graduated and began my life as a full-time newsroom reporter. Six months after graduation, at 24, I got a job in one of the most prestigious weekly magazines in the country, the kind that my dad and the people in the smart room read to form their political opinions.

I moved to São Paulo to live on my own and start a new life. The newsroom was just a bigger version of that “intellectual boys club” that I’ve seen before. The leadership was a perfect image of the guys in my dad’s living room, and every Friday they’d go out for beers, a boys-only confraternization they nick named “The Confraria”. Needless to say that people in The Confraria got promoted faster and paid more.

A few years in and I got this strange call from my mom. She was furious with her mom. Turns out my grandma was giving all my male cousins R$1,000 as a graduation gift, as a way to help them start their professional lives. She had skipped me (the only granddaughter) and when my mom asked why, she answer that she “was saving for Larissa’s wedding day”. My mom managed to convince her that graduating was an accomplishment for me as well, regardless of my gender.

By that time I was already getting suspicious of the whole “boys are smarter” story, and eventually I started to hear a different tune. A tune that says that women are perfectly capable of the same intellectual work as men, and should be given the same credibility. A tune that says that how a woman looks or dresses has nothing to do with IQ, honesty or her value as a person.

Yes, that was a story feminists told me.

Eventually I embraced pink, tried different shades of lipstick and dove in to the world of curly hair care. Not because I thought that I was supposed to do that as a woman, remember, the value and the looks are disconnected here. But because I saw myself in a different light.

I was able to witness the ideas of so many beautiful and brilliant woman having the most creative, well-curated discussions that it was liberating. Not having to give up my seat at the ladies’ table meant that I was free to be any kind of woman I wanted.

It’s still a work in progress, but more and more I’m letting go of the need to be accepted by the guys in the living room. Because I’ve now been invited to the best room in the house.

This room is not exactly the kitchen, but maybe the library, where all kinds of people meet in the evening to debate everything between the sky and the earth. In there, you don’t even need to stick to the right topics, all you need is an idea worth sharing.

How do I know I belong there? I got my ticket when I first took that music box apart.