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The present, aired on community TV in 1974 for kids, assumed heterosexual, mom-and-dad households; it doesn’t distinguish between organic intercourse and socially constructed gender. Its gender-neutral optimism would possibly now ring naïve, after a half-century of backlashes and “Can girls have all of it?” options.
If you’re going to ask how effectively “Free to Be” has aged, although, it’s solely honest to ask how effectively now we have, too. Sure, “Barbie” grossed greater than a billion {dollars} by saying, like “Free to Be” did, that men and women are held again by stereotypes peddled within the toy aisle. Kids’ entertainments like “Bluey” mannequin egalitarian parenting.
But gender essentialism continues to be alive and effectively. It begins earlier than start: Parents-to-be blast pink-and-blue confetti cannons and burn down forests with gender-reveal events. Culture warriors and state legislatures are consumed with angst over how a lot authority youngsters (and even adults) ought to have to say their gender identities; some younger persons are bullied and bodily attacked for refusing conventional classes. “Men’s rights” influencers promote the concept that girls’s positive factors are males’s losses. Politicians use macho shows to say dominance and not-so-subtly telegraph nostalgia for the previous days.
And having reached center age, not a couple of of my fellow Gen X-ers have determined, like members of generations earlier than us as soon as did, that the extent of progress we reached once we have been younger was good and enough, and the world ought to cease there. They would possibly look again at “Free to Be,” with its easy gender binary — each boy “grows to be his personal man” and “each lady grows to be her personal lady,” the theme tune says — as proof that at this time’s spectrum of identities has gone too far.
“Free to Be” was a product of its time. But it could appear perverse to say that this wild, rebellious work about self-determination was supposed to implement any inflexible gender boundaries. Its finest declare to timelessness is its easy affirmation: Only you get to resolve who you’re.
In the present’s finish sequence, the cartoon youngsters gallop again to the park, flip again into flesh-and-blood children and proceed their carousel journey. As they develop up, they’ll spin ahead for some time, and so they’ll spin backward, and so forth. That’s what revolutions do typically; they revolve.
But I hope that each one of us who took the “Free to Be … You and Me” journey nonetheless carry a few of it inside us. That’s the benefit that artwork has over carousels: Even when it brings you again to the place you began, it doesn’t go away you in fairly the identical place. Because now you already know what it feels prefer to get away.
