A granddaughter has difficulty with photos of her grandmother as a child: she would prefer not to encounter the bare-chested photos from the 1960s and 1970s. Grandma doesn’t get it: doesn’t her granddaughter think it’s so important that men’s nipples aren’t viewed differently than women’s nipples?
Truus has yet to sit up and get going, clearly loaded. He says that he has a conflict with his granddaughter. The thing is, they were flipping through a photo album along with all kinds of family snapshots from the past; These were often beach holidays. So far nothing is happening, but what her granddaughter reacted strongly to was the fact that she kept seeing her grandmother with naked breasts in her photo.
The granddaughter believes that these types of photographs do not belong in a family album: “You may be able to keep them hidden somewhere, but the fact that I, as a granddaughter, only see this is transgressive.” Truus was surprised, especially her granddaughter considers it very important that men’s nipples are not seen differently from women’s nipples.
The granddaughter is a fan of a certain Nicole, a woman who shows on Instagram that she is rejected on a terrace for having a naked torso. This Nicole wants to do something about the fact that women’s breasts are considered porn and men’s breasts are considered neutral. But Truus doesn’t understand it anymore. “Why…” he asks his granddaughter, “…is it wrong if I put photos in a scrapbook?”
Her granddaughter can’t get over the fact that her grandmother doesn’t understand: “I don’t want to see my grandmother with her breasts naked, I’m ashamed, you can see for yourself, you’re not a porn.” star or something! “And then the granddaughter walked away from her carelessly, as if she had everything in the world right.
Stricter standards
I have to say that I myself don’t understand everything about it. Sometimes it seems as if the people who fight the hardest for justice also have the strictest standards. Truus herself was a teenager in the sixties and seventies and, according to her, everything was very different then. “We stood on the barricades and made sure that free love and sexual freedom had the right to exist. We challenged the existing order and that made life really different. “Bare breasts were common for a while.”
When I ask him if there are any parallels to his granddaughter’s attitude, he is silent for a moment and then bursts out laughing. She says that she once had a heated argument with her mother about her shameful bourgeois customs. And she also thought that her father was entitled, because he didn’t grow a beard. And when she, after much nagging, convinced her father and mother not to dance together at a party, but separately, she was terrified. How freely they danced, without seeing! She can now laugh about it and she realizes that she now looks a lot like her granddaughter. Dancing freely was very important, but her parents were completely ridiculous and never allowed her to dance again.
All types of behavior have taken on a completely new and forbidden meaning, but is it really that different? Or is having to be free actually not free?
Bernard Maarsingh is, among other things, a psychologist and innovator, where psychology and knowledge of the brain go hand in hand with ICT and virtual reality. Together with his girlfriend he owns Maarsingh & van Steijn. In addition to being a lover of stress, he is an avid supporter of rest.
