Be unfaithful, be yourself

This article on summer 2023 is published in issue 40 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 3 October 2023

In a 1918 children’s fashion magazine article Earnshaw’s Infants’ departmentit was written that «the generally accepted rule is pink for males and blue for females. The reason is that pink, being a more decisive and stronger colour, is more suitable for a boy, while blue, more delicate, is more beautiful for a girl.”

Yet, in the following years, the value of the colors pink and blue was overturned, and today it seems normal that pink is “for females” and blue is “for males”. From the gender reveal to birth bows, from clothing to room furnishings, one almost feels obliged to use colors as binding narrative tools.

There is a part of pedagogy that deals precisely with reflect on those gender conditionings that are transmitted through educational models, and which translate into words, practices, customs that do not limit themselves to giving indications on social life but limit self-expression. He talks about it for example Alessia Dulbecco in It’s always been done this way! (just released by Edizioni Tlon), describing a long series of conditioning that does not only concern the female gender. As a pedagogist, engaged for years in meetings and training with parents and in schools, she has in fact illustrated how these social conventions affect all the various phases of development, making a person’s growth a path full of obstacles, in which they must continually demonstrate that they know how to stay in your place and respect what is expected of your gender.

It seems like an outdated matter, yet a couple of days ago our nine-year-old son, returning from school, told us that his male classmates had made fun of him because, after seeing a pendant of My Little Pony attached to a friend’s backpack, he told her he had seen the cartoon. A “female” cartoon, they had mocked in response, that “males shouldn’t watch.” Rome, year 2023.

Gender pedagogy he explains to us that all this is not natural but is a cultural construction that is learned from an early age. This applies to colors – which until a century ago were attributed to the opposite gender – as much as to an infinite series of other behaviors, traits, desires.

This confirms the idea that, unfortunately, even those who are very small today find themselves having to defend themselves from accusations of being too feminine (if male) or too masculine (if female).. Anyone who deviates from the dictates of the role that society has assigned to him, therefore, commits a real betrayal.

And then, perhaps, even those who do not have great difficulties in staying within their own gender, and those who have desires that are rather close to the “expected” ones, should still practice putting themselves in other people’s shoes and betraying conventions so that others can do the same. same. To highlight the arbitrariness of stereotypes, so as to allow those who really suffer the impact of them to slip away and express freely, without incurring the judgments of others, what they really are.

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