Hi! I have a new article for Pillow Talk, a series I am doing with Xdress!
When I was younger, there was a wall in our school’s lunchroom that had carpet on it (this was in the early eighties, after all) but along the way the wall became tile. For some arbitrary, unknown reason, the carpeted section was “the girl wall” and the tile was “the boy wall”.
If you were a boy, you were not allowed to touch the carpeted wall. It wasn’t an unusual thing for some boys to push other boys into the girl wall which was hilarious and shameful.
Could anyone explain why the tiled wall was for boys? God no. But that’s how it’s always been so that belief was still maintained and the status quo was firmly in place.
Our collective perspective on gender norms isn’t much different for adults almost fifty years later.
Love, Hannah
Hannah McKnight 