THEAnd girls are complicated today. They yes – much more than us twentieth -century girls, Boomer or Gen X, born between 1946 and 1980 – are called to do everything. To be everything. For love and necessarily. For love, why We imagined them perfect growing them in freedom. It is necessarily, because the complexity has tangled by embarking laces and knots without a sketched plot.
And here they are, with their thoughts as inflorescences, With doubts about what beauty is, with the honesty and fragility of those who avoid compromises with themselveswith the determination to put everything in question: the words, between wrong pronouns and conditions to the conditional, and people, until you have tried that they are not – that we are not – stuntios.
In Castelfranco Veneto two fourteen year olds note a man, over 45 years old, who harasses their peers on bike by barrier: they call the carabinieri, they describe it, make it stop. It will be discovered that it is a pedophile, with precedents, a photo album of girls at home, a knife in the jacket with a 7 centimeters blade.
Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Vangeri Gilbert).
In the Modenese two girls kiss the Lambrusco festivalin the square. They are surrounded by a group of young people who insult them, one is hit in the face by a punch. It will go on stage, when the party ends, with the mayor next to calling citizens to respect. Of the rights, of others and others, of the choices that are not yours.
A friend writes to me – who draws clothes full of hope and colors for each generation, for us and our daughters – who, yes, the girls are complicated But maybe they are “the girls complicated the right answer to this strange world”. A phrase like a glove. Velvet glove to go out in the evening or to grab a sword.
“I am high but it is the same/ I am not up to those who speak little and slowly with a firm head/ my wardrobe does not understand why you change in such a short time but it continues to do it/ difficult to live the moment without taking an uncertain step/ but from tomorrow if I walk it is because I took the first step” (Emma Nolde, 25 years old, songwriter, extracted from Tocaterara).
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All articles by Barbara Stefanelli