The thing that the United States must realize before it is able to change as a country is that we were built upon the pillars of patriarchy and racism. Thus, as members of our society, members of our country, we are a product of the many factors and values and ideals and practices that formed the country itself, meaning that we are intrinsically racist and sexist. It is a fact and though we may push it down inside of ourselves or ignore it or deny it, this will not help it go away. Our own racism must be confronted and evaluated and understood. We must realize and examine the thoughts and actions we produce that are sexist.
Just as we are products of our country’s history and values, our popular culture can be used as a barometer for the values of our country. Especially as a nation functioning through capitalism, our individual monetary power is our cultural power in many ways. We express our interest in something by purchasing it and our values are reflected in what is a lasting staple in pop culture.
Two important factors of a culture that measure its values are popular culture and religion. In some cases, the two are one and the same. Such as ancient greece, in which the epics were both the popular culture of the time and the religious communication of morality. Epic poems were entertainment and doctrine, and as the travelling rockstar bards would recite “history”, they would give shout-outs to whatever locale they were visiting, as if saying “Hello, Cleveland!”, except in a much more drawn out, lengthy way.
The epics of our day take many different forms. Heroic tales which the populus can relate to while revering the actors, characters, and personas are present in television, movies, music, and the incredibly rich. What do these figures and their epic tales tell us about ourselves? That’s what I hope to find out.
Laura
- batgirl
- San Mateo, California
- I'm currently in grad school at USF to become a high school English teacher. I love to write, believe in social justice, and I am obsessed with Batman.
1 comment:
I think an example of your idea in practise is the way that we have old laws, but ever-new interpretations. After all, when Jefferson wrote 'We the people', he wasn't talking about women or blacks, but today we consider the word 'people' to mean exactly that - people.
In the late eighteenth century, a English legal scholar named Matthew Hale suggested that when a women marries her husband, she gives to him her complete, irrevocable consent to sexual activity. To say 'I do' was to say a constant 'I do' to every time the husband would proposition his wife for sex.
Under this consideration, which was adopted by the British courts, a man could be criminally liable for hitting his wife, but not for raping her. After all, how could you rape someone who indefinitely said 'yes'?
It took almost two hundred years for this case to be changed. In 1989, a man raped his wife, and the case was taken all the way to the House of Lords, the highest court in the England, who found that the Hale doctrine came from a time where the status of married women was equal to the modern status of material property. It was barbaric, and only from 1991 could a husband legally rape his wife.
Also with the NCAA-sponsored case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. An initial ruling had found that segregated education was in fact constitutional, but with the changing minds of men (and it was men at that time), a case was fought to show the segregated system's barbarism.
So while in many cases the laws of old are terrible, and we are stuck with them, we do at least have the will of modern men and women to get rid of them. If you want to see that we came from terrible things, if and when we did, just look at the legislative books. It'll show you that we're changing, and winning, also.
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