Are stereotypes real?

Stereotypes: Where do they come from? Are they really real?

I started thinking about the nature of stereotypes when I moved from Italy to France. That’s when I had my first baptism about how my people are perceived abroad.

The Italian guy is macho. Women usually stay at home and obey. We live with our mothers until more than 30 years old. We keep loving our mothers even after we leave. We are not very serious and reliable. All men use hairgel and court all women. We are never on time. We like la dolce vita. We use gestures a lot. We speak too loudly. Men often cheat on their partner.

For the first time, I saw an image of myself and my people that I had never seen before.  But that image didn’t really mirror my experiences as an Italian. All the boyfriends I had had before moving to France were Italian, faithful, respectful and never asked me to stay at home and wash dishes, on the contrary they were usually the ones who cooked and cleared the table. I was 24 and I had moved abroad alone. I was always on time and I never liked the movie La dolce vita, even if I watched it several times trying to like it. I used gestures a lot but I spoke very lowly. Oh! I forgot something: My boyfriends had never used hairgel! I was puzzled.

I started trying to understand where all these myths came from and I realized that many of them came from cinema, all those French people had watched all the movies with Sofia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio de Sica, ecc…ecc…  but none of the real people I knew and had been hanging out with corresponded to that image. (To what extent is cinema inspired by real life and to what extent is it based only on a few characteristics and behaviors of the country of origin, extrapolated from a much deeper and much more complicated reality?) 

Later on, when I went to the US, I received a different feedback: Americans saw Italy as a Garden of Eden where everybody wears Prada bags and beautiful shoes, where plants grow lushly and people don’t need to work to eat, because food grows on trees. Mothers cook very well and women are beautiful. Life is dolce and the Vespa is the most wonderful bike ever created. We play beautifully the mandolin, cars are sublime and architecture brilliant. 
They were stressing completely different things. As for me I had never had a Prada bag, I liked beautiful shoes and being well dressed and I knew for sure that food doesn’t grow on trees in Italy, unfortunately.

At this point, I would love to check the opinion of South-American, Asian, African and Australian people about Italy and the Italians. It might be something else again. 

My point is that stereotypes are real and unreal at the same time. They actually stem from some real aspects of a culture but then they are rearranged according to the values of the foreign culture that created them. Everyone spots a part of the whole and interprets it according to their own values. That’s also why some foreign movies are successful in some countries and not in others, because the perception of what they talk about will necessarily be mediated by the target audience’s culture.  


How can we deal with stereotypes ? I suggest to float among them without fumbling about, backing them up sometimes and distancing ourselves from them at other times, 'cause they might be real for certain geographical areas, social classes, religious groups and levels of education but not for others. Maybe Prada bags and the elegant shoes the Americans were talking about are easier to spot in the rich Florence, Milan and Venice, whereas most Italians have surely never seen nor desired them. Social conditions and geographical locations can no doubt contribute to stereotypes. 


So: Does spaghetti really grow on trees? Yes, but only in Ticino and Po Valley. Have a look here. 

  
E.