I’ve found myself getting a bit more feminist lately. I have tended to be a bit dismissive of some claims of 21st-century feminism, to the point of wondering whether the word had outlived its usefulness, but have been energised lately by… well, it’s a long story. Suffice to say that having a daughter makes you want to punch more misogynists in the balls. I am all about the punching. I’m a regular Jean-Claude Van Dad.
Anyway, representation in comedy is not one of my main avenues of interest, but I was struck by this tweet earlier today, by Safaa Dib, who I know nothing about but seems to be a publisher and a candidate in a sort of left-green party called Partido Livre. She posted about the Festival de Humor, FamousFest 18. You can see why she was annoyed from the picture below. Literally not one single woman in the line-up. I know 6 of the names and 2 of those are not even comedians. Miquel Esteves Cardoso is a columnist and writer, and Filipe Melo is a producer and a graphic novelist. She doesn’t seem wildly impressed with some of the others either, judging by the comments.
If you click through to the thread, Guilherme Duarte, a comedian who uses the name Por Falar Noutra Coisa chips in and says a couple of women were invited but declined. Hm… well, fair enough up to a point… but then goes on to say (and this is less fair enough) that he didn’t want to have a quota system at the expense of quality (gasp… but wait, it gets worse…) that work was needed in the background to encourage women to try and be funny instead of making makeup tutorials. He salvages this mess of a tweet to some extent but not much. I was left with the impression that the scene is even more of a boy’s club than here.
Update 25/9/18 https://capitalmag.pt/2018/09/24/festival-menina-nao-bebe-whisky/
Luso 
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