Prose: Ancient History
By: Andrea Blanco
There will come a moment when children at schools, as part of the all-integrated curriculum, will learn about a time when colours supposedly embedded genders and little boys were thought to confuse their identity through pastel colour shades.
When babies’ ears were pierced out of tradition to prevent strangers from commenting they were the opposite sex, as that was thought to be a big issue.
When supermarkets aisles divided currently inspiration and creativity aimed toys into predefined life chores and therefore roles. When the adjectives used to advertise such products seemed hard to overlap, contradictory and somehow demeaning if applied to the other sex.
When women were held responsable for their own rape, as their attire choices, its colour and length were thought to provoke. A time when, despite those connotations, Burqa-wearing women and romper-wearing babies happened to be raped as well.
A time when women were sexualized and objectified since childhood and costumes for them were advertised as sexy, despite no boy costumes ever portraying that. A time when even girls and women’s clothes held tiny useless pockets creating a need for a purse and clear visibility of curved hips.
A time when boys were held innocent throughout adulthood, subject to being teased and excused of any behaviour for their masculine nature’s hormones and undeniable urges. For their needs had to be met in almost any circumstances without anybody still noticing it.
A time when sterilizations were performed on poor women without their knowledge and when male contraceptive trials were discontinued for ten percent of side effects already endured by women, because they were thought to be too much to handle, too alarmingly unlucrative.
Children will be told about a time when most female presence in museums was in naked portraits of themselves. When women in art were given little credit and their work was better valued if the world thought it was a masterpiece of their husbands. A time when women could only publish under male pseudonyms or initials preventing an audience from ever seeing their faces, outraging at the lack of credentials of their anatomy.
When streets with female names -yet male last named- had scarce visibility as if they hadn’t created history sidealong. When they couldn’t write it for literacy wouldn’t encompass the private sphere of diaper changing, where the right to education hadn’t yet arrived.
A time further ahead, when even transgender people had more opportunities in science than women. When they were asked how they balanced a family and a profession, and more about their husbands, than about their field of expertise or when they were denied fellowships for the liability of a pregnancy.
Children will find out how different collectives shed light on a form of abuse and made its sharing viral by naming with hashtags. How understanding the world in terms of opposites led people to judge an alleged polarization, to fear the damage and imagined revenge inflicted by its counterpart.
They will know of a moment when a discussion about feminism made people uncomfortable and defense responses were way more frequent than understanding. They couldn’t help taking it personal, they couldn’t know they were uneased at the realization of their own machismo, their complicity, the silence at the perverse normalized behaviour we as a society grew blind to.
How feminism through the decades needed to justify its name, its focus, for recognition demands the stress on the oppressed group. It was only when equality was obtained, guaranteed and sustained around the year 2150, that a new name could be used and a new word was created out of everyday experience and not wishful thinking.
There will come a moment when all of this will be ancient XVI until XXII centuries history. History about times when the human and huwoman kind, thought the inquisition, slavery, nazism, child labor, sexual exploitation, surrogacy, death penalty and sexism were common, harmless, everyday practices, occupational hazards of coexisting in this planet.
Times when people made fun of pioneers demanding change and justice, simple and constant evolution. When wide-opened eyes, having recognized the matrix we all passively float in, could not sit by and bemoan the violation of the most basic human rights. The skin-colour-coded, gendered and nationality-dependent values and privileges a society’s minority was resting on.
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