The day a relationship begins between two people, a balance game between personal illusions and social impositions begins: the romantic ideal must be fulfilled according to a rigid protocol, paradoxically constructed from fictions; in most cases – the majority – written by. Men, who have become obliged to pay special attention to women, are forced to internalize this paradoxical ideal from a very young age if they want to enter society. Gender equality advances unstoppably no matter who it is, but the hopes we place on a romantic relationship seem inexorably anchored in the nineteenth-century imagination with almost no movement.
This is a necessary reflection that we already find in works such as Liv Strömquist’s, but it continues to motivate truly interesting comics such as Aude Picault’s (1979) Standardized Ideal. The author of thought-provoking works such as Diosa and Amalia here focuses his gaze on Claire, a thirty-something nurse who sees the ideals set by society turn into an oppressive utopia that is as unreal as it is unattainable.
Picault ironically contrasts everyday reality with the established standard of what is “supposed to be”, that women are missing out on rice, that children are the measure of women’s happiness, or simply that the couple is the only form of fulfillment. Ideals that literally put pressure on the freedom of choice of women who seem to have to desperately comply with social dictates.
As Florence Dupré la Tour (Although French, Buenos Aires, 1978) argued in Doncella 2, it is an imposition that screams rebellion from its origins. Advanced, the second volume of the author’s private coming-of-age memoirs, with acidic humour, a radical rejection of the brainwashing that showed her from a very young age the standards of behavior she should abide by as a woman.
Florence discovers firsthand that viewing her body changes as a shameful taboo is not only the obsession of her ultra-religious family, but also a systematic form of humiliation by women who humiliate and publicly humiliate her. Dupré la Tour is a must-read, leaving no stone unturned in this debate as it is harsh.
toxic dyes
But the intersection between reality and assimilated ideals takes on toxic implications when the relationship is based on an inequality where admiration and love intersect, positing difference as a value in itself that forces one of the relationships to be overridden. Lizzy Stewart (Edinburgh, 1985) explores the relationship between Alison, a young painter who leaves her husband and pursues a successful artist much older than herself, who promises her things she can never have in her small town. A Pygmalion ideal in every sense, but one that establishes a deeply asymmetrical relationship between his passion and his narcissistic selfishness. He attributes his development as an artist to his trust that love also means learning and support; He has a young woman with whom he can go to parties and consolidate his status as a success not only artistically but also socially. But Stewart tells this story from the maturity of the already elderly Alison, who holds no grudges but has the ability to construct a reflective story in which even shadows have counterparts.
Alison is also the story of friendship, of a support network in the face of adversity, of learning to believe in oneself without leaving oneself in the background, of looking forward without looking back at the ideals of the past.