The show, aired on network TV in 1974 for children, assumed heterosexual, mom-and-dad families; it doesn’t distinguish between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Its gender-neutral optimism might now ring naïve, after a half-century of backlashes and “Can women have it all?” features.
If you’re going to ask how well “Free to Be” has aged, though, it’s only fair to ask how well we have, too. Sure, “Barbie” grossed more than a billion dollars by saying, like “Free to Be” did, that women and men are held back by stereotypes peddled in the toy aisle. Kids’ entertainments like “Bluey” model egalitarian parenting.
But gender essentialism is still alive and well. It starts before birth: Parents-to-be blast pink-and-blue confetti cannons and burn down forests with gender-reveal parties. Culture warriors and state legislatures are consumed with angst over how much authority children (and even adults) should have to assert their gender identities; some young people are bullied and physically attacked for refusing traditional categories. “Men’s rights” influencers sell the idea that women’s gains are men’s losses. Politicians use macho displays to assert dominance and not-so-subtly telegraph nostalgia for the old days.
And having reached middle age, not a few of my fellow Gen X-ers have decided, like members of generations before us once did, that the level of progress we reached when we were young was perfect and sufficient, and the world should stop there. They might look back at “Free to Be,” with its simple gender binary — every boy “grows to be his own man” and “every girl grows to be her own woman,” the theme song says — as evidence that today’s spectrum of identities has gone too far.
“Free to Be” was a product of its time. But it would seem perverse to claim that this wild, rebellious work about self-determination was intended to enforce any rigid gender boundaries. Its best claim to timelessness is its simple affirmation: Only you get to decide who you are.
In the show’s end sequence, the cartoon children gallop back to the park, turn back into flesh-and-blood kids and continue their carousel ride. As they grow up, they will spin forward for a while, and they’ll spin backward, and so on. That’s what revolutions do sometimes; they revolve.
But I hope that all of us who took the “Free to Be … You and Me” ride still carry some of it inside us. That’s the advantage that art has over carousels: Even when it brings you back to where you started, it doesn’t leave you in quite the same place. Because now you know what it feels like to get away.
