Born to win. Children's literature and male models

Abstract

Compared to the complexity that has accompanied the transformation of female models during the most recent centuries of our history, the male ones, up to very recent times, have mostly been limited to two, specular and unavoidable of each other: the winners and the victims; taking into account, however, how this last type does not represent, hardly ever, an active reference point, but denotes the spectrum of existential situations which men of any age would do best to keep well away from.The male models also proposed by contemporary storytelling are particularly worrying, as they tend to convey, more than the female ones, stereotypes and educational-behavioural praxis linked to a patriarchal type of stainless culture.