Choices that change the world

__This article is published in the 12th issue of __Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 21, 2023**

Nana is 44 years old, lives in Georgia and works as a state employee. One day last week, she finishes her shift and takes her husband to the hospital for a visit. There is chaos on the streets of the capital Tbilisi: people have gathered to protest against the “Russian law”, a hoax of which she knows the contours very well. It is a bill that aims to punish the “international agents” present in the area when instead it limits those who favor independent information or those involved in welfare receiving aid from abroad. Nana Malashkia grew up in Abkhazia, she experienced the pain of injustices on her own skin and she knows very well that if you don’t intervene, if you don’t do something, then you can’t complain when everything falls apart. So she, moved more by a practical spirit than by a heroic impulse, takes up a flag of the European Union and starts waving it in the street even when the police charge the demonstrators. Her image of her proud of her goes around the world and becomes a symbol of freedom.

The same fate awaits five girls in sweatpants and T-shirts dancing to the tune of Calm down by Rema and Selena Gomez in the Ekbatan neighborhood of Tehran, Iran. They are all bare-headed and are all wanted: for this gesture of freedom they risk being arrested and being imprisoned for several years.

Nana’s photo and the video of the five unnamed girls would be enough to remind us not only what women’s strength is, but what we learn from their courage. On the other side of the world, in the most glossy ceremony on Earth, the Oscar winners, Michelle Yeoh, ex Miss Malaysia and ex Bond Girl, raises the statuette won as best actress for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. «I dedicate it to all the boys and girls who look like me», she explains excitedly and then adds, regarding her sixty years: «Ladies, never let anyone tell you that you are past your prime. Never give up.”

On the cover of this issue of Vanity Fair there is another woman, Aurora Ramazzotti. She is 26 years old and we photographed her before the birth of her first child. This image is not meant to be an apology for motherhood: it is rather the story of another woman who took her destiny into her own hands and did it her way. No stereotypes, no social pressures, no clichés: the choice to become a mother is one of many possible for a woman, just as valid as that of not being one. And like all choices, it must be protected and then lived with strength, with determination even when it raises a thousand doubts and a thousand questions.

Take this number of Vanity Fair as another ode to all these women and their great choices. They are choices of freedom, freedom for all choices. Choices that are changing the world.

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