It is unlikely for the name ‘Bolsonaro’ to be unfamiliar to most, at least everyone has heard a mumble about how terribly Brazil has handled the Covid-19 crisis or the dystopian state of the Amazon rainforest. These infamous failures are brought to you by Bolsonaro: a former military officer who was elected in 2018 as a member of the conservative party of the nation, which is ironically called the Social Liberal Party.

My life can be sorted into fangirl phases. One Direction posters were plastered across my pre-adolescent bedroom walls. 5 Seconds of Summer lyrics were scrawled across the inside of my wardrobe when I was 13. Now the likes of Michelle Obama and AOC grace my nightstand, although granted, Harry Styles is still my phone lockscreen.

“Should we separate art from the artist?” has become an increasingly popular question as cancel culture continues to grow more prevalent in modern day society. Most of us would like to say that we cannot separate the two and should never support a ‘bad’ person. However, I strongly disagree.

Whenever someone asks me what my career prospects as a classicist are, I say that our current prime minister is a classicist, and I am usually met with a grimace or huff. Indeed, Boris Johnson is a less than desirable poster boy for classics. He exemplifies every bad stereotype about the field: he is priviliged for being ‘pale, male, and stale’ and a public school alumnus, and entitled and apparently out of touch with current social values. I am reluctant to use him as an example of a good career path for a classicist for these reasons, but also because he is, frankly, a bad classicist.

The Bechdel test will hopefully be familiar to the reader base of Unconquered Peaks, but just to make sure that everyone is with me: The Bechdel test is a measure of the inclusion of women in media, which asks whether there are two women who speak to each other about something that isn’t a man. The test was the subject of an 1985 comic strip by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which features two women deciding to choose a film at the cinema based on the rules of the test. They are unable to find a film that passes, so they go home. Bechdel credits the rules to her friend Liz Wallace (and prefers the name Bechdel-Wallace Test), and suspects that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that ‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.’ Over fifty years later, Bechdel and Wallace sought to highlight this disparity between the depth of portrayal of women and men, and still today, this gap has not been closed.