Last October, the U.S. academic Camille Paglia’s provocative diatribe about feminism in Time went viral. In her piece, she dismissed sexual assault on campuses as “wildly overblown claims.” Paglia, a self-described “notorious Amazon feminist,” believes that both the second wave of feminism during the 1960s and third wave of today actually stymie the march toward gender equality because they operate through a disempowering lens of victimization and downplay the myriad agential ways women push back against patriarchy. It was not surprising, then, to see an article on an interview with Paglia last month headlined with the sensational quote “Women should be maternal and stop blaming men.” It was surprising, however, that the headline was in Portuguese and published in the leading Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo.

During Paglia’s visit to São Paulo last month for the TED-like project Fronteiras do Pensamento, she took advantage of an interview with Folha de S. Paulo to enumerate the failures of liberal feminism, which she credits in large part to Gloria Steinem “and her psychological problems.” Women, Paglia told the female reporter, must choose between having a career and being mothers, and should not expect businesses to try to accommodate motherhood, because “companies don’t exist to be agents of social change.” She also argued that “only an idiot thinks of going out in the streets dressed provocatively without risking being attacked.”