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My kids were posing for a picture the other day when the older one, like big siblings since time immemorial, threw up a pair of bunny ears behind his little brother’s head.
“That’s not nice,” I told my older kid. He looked at me blankly.
“What?” he said. “It’s just a peace sign.”
I believe him. For at least a year, the peace sign has been my kid’s go-to photo pose. First day of school? Peace sign. Birthday party? Peace sign. Showing off the robot he made out of Legos? Peace sign, obviously. (By contrast, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen him do bunny ears, a common way for kids in my generation to lightly prank one another.)
It’s not just him. Every time his class takes a picture, it’s absolutely prickling with peace signs. An informal poll of kids and parents suggests the practice is widespread. “Everyone does it,” Rhodes, 5, told me. “I started doing it when I was in mid-to-late elementary school,” 17-year-old Allison said by email. Kate Ellen, a mom in the UK said her daughters, 9 and 5, and their friends all pose with the gesture.
The peace sign, or V-sign, is nearly a century old, and has been part of the American cultural lexicon for decades. But the gesture feels more ubiquitous now than in decades past, and it means something new to this generation of kids — even if that meaning is, sometimes, nothing at all.
The origin of the peace sign
The contemporary V-sign — two fingers, palm toward the viewer — originated during World War II as a symbol of victory over Nazism (the V-sign with the palm oriented toward the signer is an older, ruder gesture, whose origins are unclear). Later, in the 1960s, American activists began using it to signify opposition to the Vietnam War.
The repurposing of the gesture was part of a larger movement, said Julia Fell, curator of exhibits at the Museum of Bethel Woods on the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival. “During the 1960s, other cultural expressions, such as clothing, that were associated with the military/war were sometimes turned on their heads by counter culturalists in protest (think army fatigues styled with long hair and adorned with scarves or buttons and patches, a la Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock),” Fell told me by email.
Thus the gesture that had once meant victory came to signify peace (with a bit of a detour thanks to Richard Nixon). Over time, though, the peace sign became more general in its meaning. By the time I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it could be a greeting or goodbye, or a way to lend some added character to ubiquitous “hippie” Halloween costumes (other accessories included Lennon glasses, headband, tie-dye). It was not, however, at least in my memory, a go-to photo pose — at least not in the way it is for my kid.
So what’s driving the rise of the peace sign among Gen Z and Gen Alpha? One possible answer is the influence of Japanese pop culture, especially anime.
The peace sign began spreading in Japan as early as the 1970s, potentially popularized by a camera commercial. Japanese young people started using the peace sign in photos, and anime characters started flashing it too.
Today, the gesture often shows up in shonen-style anime shows, when a character celebrates a victory in a battle or tournament, Nicholas Friedman, publisher of Crunchyroll News and host of the podcast The Anime Effect, told me.
This seems closer to the sign’s original meaning. But it’s also common in a more peaceful context. In slice-of-life or romantic comedy anime shows, “people are just hanging out, they’re taking selfies, they’re in photo booths, and they’re throwing up the peace sign,” Friedman said. Especially in the latter context, “it’s often related to the cute or kawaii culture within anime.”
There’s even a Pokémon, Victini, who is essentially a living peace sign.
Anime has been popular for decades, but in some ways, it’s more interwoven into kids’ lives now than in the past. While millennials might have watched Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh on Saturday mornings, kids today are “discovering anime through word of mouth or social media or clips on TikTok,” Friedman said. They have access to thousands of shows rather than one or two. And a lot of the social media trends that form a big part of youth culture today come from anime.
Kawaii aesthetics, especially, are ubiquitous in American kid culture, from stuffies to coloring books. Characters outside anime — on Disney+ shows, for example — now routinely flash huge, dewy, kawaii-style eyes to express sorrow or love.
The popularity of the peace sign is, at the very least, linked to the larger cultural dominance of kawaii. People do it in photos because “they want to look cute,” Rhodes told me.
Why kids need the peace sign now
In talking to both kids and adults, however, I’ve come to believe there’s another force at play: Kids do the peace sign in photos because, more so than in generations past, they need something to do in photos.
“It just feels more natural than keeping your hands at your sides,” Allison told me. “It also makes the photo a little more interesting to look at, particularly if you’re the main subject.”
Whether because Gen Alpha are too pure to make fun of each other, or because it was never that funny in the first place, the bunny-ears gesture may be over.
Ellen, the UK mom, says her kids told her that no one really knows what the peace sign means, and that “it’s just a pose, like for pictures.” In my experience, the gesture is at least as ubiquitous as saying “cheese,” if not more so.
The process of cultural signifiers losing their specific meaning is a common one in recent years, Friedman told me. While millennials might have thought a lot about their use of gestures or other trends, Gen Z and Gen Alpha “just kind of do it.”
Some of that may be philosophical — an anti-overthinking, it’s-not-that-deep approach. But some of it is also almost certainly aesthetic: Kids are just photographed far more than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, they see photographs of themselves far more, and they’re growing up in a culture that thinks strategically about how to pose in pictures. It’s not odd that they would embrace a particular gesture that’s associated with cuteness — and that, as a bonus, gives them something to do with their hands.
My kid may soon have more options than the standard peace sign. Allison recently completed an exchange trip to Japan, and noted that “the gyaru peace sign, which is named after a popular fashion subculture, has the palm facing up and the fingers pointing out,” and that “a sideways peace sign with the eye framed between the fingers is also popular.”
Meanwhile, whether because Gen Alpha are too pure to make fun of each other, or because it was never that funny in the first place, the bunny-ears gesture may be over. When I asked Rhodes about it, he had no idea what I was talking about.
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