This is a country that stands the basic dating principle on its head — here, the women chase the men, who are in the minority and are treated as commodities to be fought over. You will be the one ravished by looks; your ass will, at times, be pinched; and you, for a change, can be the one leaning on the bar, looking bored, because if you’re a reasonably good-looking guy, you’re likely to be approached. “I don’t hook up every night,” says Bernardo Marzana, a native of Belo Horizonte. “Sometimes I choose not to.” He isn’t boasting; he’s just telling it like it is. In this country of nearly 170 million people, there are gorgeous women almost every where you look.

“There is a historical tendency for a predominance of women in the composition of the Brazilian population,” states the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics’ 2000 census. The census found that the population has two and a half million more females than males. In my adopted city of Rio, there are 360,000 more women. In São Paulo, where at any given time it seems as if a model contest (of which there are many here) just emptied out into the street, there are 490,000 more.

But why are so many of them so stunning? I asked model-agency owners, university professors, and media commentators and always received the same answer: The year-round beach culture has created a nation of obsessively body-conscious women. (Contrary to common belief, though, the beaches are not topless.) Add to this a preoccupation with femininity, a healthy diet, and some seriously good genes. “Even the less attractive ones have something special about them,” says Reinaldo Smoleanschi, a photographer from Rio.