The women’s body, between gender stereotypes and new points of view. It is the topic at the center of two docu-series available for free on arte.tv, the European streaming platform.
Defended, discussed, censored, exposed: in modern society, women’s bodies are constantly under the spotlight. From the obsession with a toned physique, through youth at all costs, to the phenomenon of body shaming, the female body continues to be the subject of dispute on social media and in the main means of communication. If you look, for example allo sportwhich often leads athletes to expose their physique, it is noted that i prejudices on women’s bodies die hard, but the conversation is also about the sphere of female sexuality which, despite a hard-won emancipation, continues to be stigmatized when knowingly exhibited or deemed overexposed when attempts are made to normalize it.
Both declinations of this debate, sport and sexuality without taboosare at the center of the two new docu-series of arte.tv: “All gymnastics” And “Free!”. The two creations aim, through a fresh gaze and a journalistic approach, to make people reflect on the gender stereotypes that still today revolve around women’s bodies and the way they are experienced and shown.
On the one hand, “Tutte gymnastics”, created by the director Camille Juza, emphasizes how a purely male-dominated vision still persists in sport which forces women to fight to secure a supporting role with respect to their male counterparts. A story that ranges from the sports activities to which girls are directed, up to the mechanisms and rules that permeate sports competitions, even at high levels. On the other, the animated series “Free!” returns with the new episodes which, through the screenplay by the Ovidie-Sophie-Marie Larrouy tandem and the drawings of the illustrator Diglee, try to tell the taboos on female sexuality and to make us think about the prejudices that revolve around seduction and the ideal of perfection, which women sometimes feel compelled to pursue.
All gymnastics
In an environment jealously defended by men, for women, who have been forbidden for a long time or allowed only under certain conditions, to practice a sport it is an achievement fruit of a hard struggle. The four-episode documentary “All gymnastics”, by Camille Juza and Matthias Vaysse, photographs a very complex current reality: a world in which there are women obsessed with abs and glutesbut still full of restrictions and obstacles in top-level women’s sport.
Free!
Many and all different themes at the center of the new episodes of the animated series signed by the director Ovidie and the journalist Sophie-Marie Larrouy: from the imposition of new aesthetic models (which see Kim Kardashian as the ideal female to aspire to) to seduction, an art much debated today especially by men, who claim it was in some “inhibited” mode from contemporary feminism. Central topic of the series “Free!” it is once again sexuality of which, in the 10 new episodes, new facets are told, such as the controversial G-spot theory or contraception, a burden that in heterosexual couples falls almost exclusively on women.