Good thing about life, it’s that it surprises you in ways you couldn’t even imagine. Im my last post I wrote about this communication experiment, that consisted in “fishing” web perverts with tags about Italian Big Brother’s transgender participant and then count how many of them ended up in a blog about Mediterranean culture looking for something juicy. Well, I must admit they’ve been pretty much, but there’s no wonder in that. Jerks’ mother is always pregnant, as we say around here.
However, in doing this little experiment, I had to check frequently the Search Engine Terms thing, which is a window that makes a real time report of through what kind of search people end up in your blog. Among all of the transgender hunters there was one query that really surprised me: “How do people from Rome look like”.
Now, we have the chance to do a job that makes us overcome every kind of stereotype ever invented, as we meet every day people from all over the world thus having the opportunity to know how they really are, beside the Coran, the veil and the couscous. What I mean, is that we learn to classify people in “nice”, “funny”, “jerks”, “idiots”, “good workers”, “bad workers”, “bad breath”, “aweful shoes”, “can’t understand a word of what he/she’s saying”, “sleeping beauty”, “retard”, “hunk” indipendently from the Country they come from or the God they worship. I mean, If I take a look over my laptop, I’d see the funniest and sweetest girl ever ( but I’d better don’t stare at her too much, since every time I look at her she makes the printer fall, or tries to feed me with bananas saying I’d better eat a little more fruit. She’s some mix between the Tazmanian Devil and my mother and that scares me) . Her name is F, and I notice that she’s a muslim only when it’s Ramadan and she starves while the rest of us sips regardlessly hot chocolate. Well, I guess that our point of view towards the “others” doesn’t represent the avarage’s, but anyway. If someone feels the need to search the web to find how do Romans look like, that could mean that:
- He has never read Asterix. Real Romans still look like Centurioni, beside the fact they don’t wear those feathery helms anymore nor those nice steel skirts, and that’s a pity, because some Romans have really nice legs though a little hairy. Well, they could always wax, couldn’t they? They speak like Centurioni (putting an e at the end of every word: bar = bare, tram=tramve yes= yesse), they stomp on your feet in the subway like Centurioni surely did, they are rude, loud and during Sunday football match they would be able to kill a bull with their bare hands if the referee acts unfairly.
- He has never seen 60’s movies: Romans are handsome, swim in the fountains with Anita Heckberg, drive Vespas and slap in the face people on trains.
- He has never seen The Gladiator: Romans look like bitchy Australian actor and, before doing something very annoying ( like fighting against lions), they always grab some dust from the floor. For this reason Roman’s wives are very happy, because they don’t have to clean up the house: the dustier, the better.
The thing is, that we still need stereotypes to understand the world around us, even if we don’t even have to make any effort in creating them: the world changes faster, things are getting more and more confused, and Media help us out in organising our knowledge. Now I gotta go, I’ve plenty of things to do: wearing my Armani coat, driving to the Pizzeria with my Vespa, drink wine with friends and maybe play a little my mandolin.
