The Z generation and gallantry: the princess dilemma

SortAnd the BBC was also recently asked for: but but Why at Gen Z, or thirty -year -old, twenty -year -olds and fifteen -year -olds, likes the princesses? Because they drink hours of TV series like Bridgengeron, The Gilded Age, Sandonin which, of course, you also have sex, but above all you break away and bow, get the ladies in the carriage and flirt?

Because the hashtag #princessreatment has it exceeded 130 thousand posts? And finally: why, instead of a game and fun, can it be a trap? Be treated by princesses, after all, already involves a series of limitations in itself. Lady Diana teaches.

If then in the cauldron we also throw the new theorists of the “home home” that depopulate on US social networks, such as peremptory Courtney Palmer, who self -proclaims “Princesso Housewife”, Casalinga Princessand whose videos on Tiktok had 7.6 million views, the feeling is that something crunch.

Palmer says, who bases in Utah, a land of Cristiana Polygamy for those who do not know, who, when he goes to the restaurant with his husband, does not speak with the hostess that welcomes, does not open doors, does not say what he wants to order. And it doesn’t pay. Rightly pù observators commented that, more than a princess, it looks like a prisoner.

Apparently, at least in Europe, is a lonely one. According to a French survey Open the car to a woman, give it flowers and pay the account at the restaurant, they are considered ridiculous and overcome gestures. Of course, then it is the same audience that consumes Bridgengeron Palate.

But the point is this: what is hidden behind the #princessreatment? And why gallantry, if it is historically overcome at least in these gestures, can offer us a point of restart, as Jennifer Tamas has tried to demonstrate in its pamphlet Can you still be galanti? (Marietti1820)?

A game or a form of power?

Decades of feminism have warned us that gallantry, or what we exchange for gallantry, such as offering a hand to climb a step or pay an account, can constitute a form of power. At least reveals an attitude that, more than protective, is paternalistic: assumes that a woman cannot do it alone, whether it is to overcome an obstacle or cope with an expense.

In reality, he has a game component in himself. And, in the intentions of those who, over 300 years ago, theorized it in France, above all have a link with tenderness and friendship. Perhaps this is exactly what Gen Z is looking for: not only under the hashtag #princessreatmentbut also in his relationships.

Italian Renaissance and French seventeenth century

Galantery, Tamas explained, was born in France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries To regulate the relationships between the sexes that were then marked (as they are almost always in history) to a certain brutality or roughness and to the prevalence of those who – men – take advantage of physical strength but even more than the laws, traditions, religions, philosophical and scientific theories, to justify its domain.

It had already happened in the Middle Agesin centuries not crossed by twenty of pity and compassion for the most fragile: the ladies of the courts, in particular French, and southern Germany and Italy, had managed to impose the knights who followed precise rules and that at least apparently provided for a constant tribute to their graces.

Once the tournaments were removed, fought precisely under the banner of a lady, the weapons silent in castles and courtyards and to be the master were poetry, music, dances and galant conversations. A patina? Of course, also dripping with the blood of duels and crimes of honor. But in the meantime, courtesy and cavalry had been theorized. Dante Alighieri would also have been heir.

Our Renaissance, or rather, the ladies, very blank, of our Renaissance, made more: they invented that civilization of the conversation, so well illustrated by Maria Teresa Guerra Medici in the essay Civil Conversation. The cultural revolution in the small Italian courts of the Renaissance (Encyclopedia of women), who once again forced men to lay down the weapons before entering the frescoed halls, where he conversed instead of belancing himself, we read poetry, made music.

And complex political issues with the arts of diplomacy also diluted. Once again, a patina? Certain. It would be enough to think of Lucrezia Borgia, used by her father, Pope Alexander VI, and his brother Cesare, as an exchange commodity for their political aims. In summary, although triggered by the poets and respected by (some) leaders, a woman was never a mistress of her life.

The French arrived later. But with a peculiarity: in six-eighteenth centuries, the ladies did not limit themselves to theorize a correct and kind dynamics in the living rooms among the sexes. Put it on paper. To be honest, everything had also done some Italian intellectuals between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But France, you know, in the eighteenth century managed to become the reference for the high classes of all of Europe and beyond. Love, for a long time, could only speak in French. And, despite Shakespeare’s verses, it was in French that he assumed a modern meaning.

The code of the “precious”

Today, it is true, the TV series are largely inspired by an imaginary Georgian periodor to that window between Giorgio I and Giorgio IV of England, between 1714 and 1830, of which today we remember above all the highest literary fruit, Jane Austen (1775-1817), but that the series often relive in a imaginative way.

Actually, Around 1750 a women’s cultural and literary movement had already been born, the Blue Stockings clubwhich, in claiming women’s right to deal with books, also established the principle that conversations with men should be equal and marked to respect.

In any case, It was above all the French intellectuals, called with contempt for the “precious” and also diluted by Molière, to make gallantry a code of mutual respect Based, in fact, on two keywords: tenderness and friendship.

Of course, to the small privileges granted to women, apparent services, the main data was opposed: sentimentally and sexually they did not enjoy the freedom of menalso because the constant danger of remaining pregnant and the risks of childbirth made, together with the costcism for mothers and adultere girls, any relationship is completely unbalanced. But this, in fact, did not prevent it from being friends, nor of being kind, if not affectionate.

In 1654, in the very long novel Clélie, Histoire Romaine (ten volumes), Madame de Scudéry He outlined a land called tenderness to which we arrive starting from new friendship and crossing various villages, sincerity, goodness, respect, gallantry, sweetness. It takes very little to make mistakes and end, for example, in the lake of indifference. In the Bibliothèque Nationale de France a map is kept, attributed to the engraver and painter François Chauveau.

Shades (and still points)

So what is Jennifer Tamas’ conclusion? That We must not “sexualize” gallantrythat is to load any kind gesture of erotic meanings, but make sex gallantthat is to make it a tender but also joyful and playful experience. Maybe, unlike pornography, in which not everything is explicit: perhaps it is of this that the boys of #princessstreatment have tired.

It is no coincidence that in a television interview, Tamas recalled a work by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (1685-1755), La Belle et la Bêtewhich was then rewritten in a thousand ways and which Disney made it famous. But that, at the base, retains the same message: In front of the no of the beautiful, the beast stops. And this has a lot to do with the current debate on consent (no it’s no). And therefore with the indispensable value of mutual respect.