I am shamelessly ripping off from one of my textbooks, which is in turn ripping off (less shamelessly, per subcontracting) from Beth Bailey in From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (1988)*.
I have heard many people recently dismissing the influence of society and popular culture, saying it doesn’t really affect us as individuals, or that it doesn’t have to (the old myth of the meritocracy and individuality: we choose to be influenced, HA). This small excerpt explains why this is not the case. Even if you choose not to follow the national culture, and limit its influence in your own life, it still affects you. This is why:
“The national culture defines conventions and lends meaning and coherence to individual experience.”
This is why national trends matter, why they affect and impact your life even if you defy them. This is why it is not enough to simply say, “I am not opressed/repressed” or “I am not sexist” and take no further action.
We DO have a national culture, one that devalues women and children and their experiences. One that is cut-throat, measures success only by dollars and not by values, one that is, above all, CONSUMING. We are consumers, and we consume. Everything and everyone around us. We are all little individual digestive cells within the great American horde, the massive gluttonous beast, and we are eating up the world like a slow but steady python, leaving nothing left.
We Americans don’t seem to be able to grasp that we are sending a collective message to a) every other American citizen, and b) every government and individual in the world — and that collective message is one of consumption, opportunism, and greed. It is not about death and destruction so much as indifference — we don’t WANT people do die or the resources of this world plundered, we just don’t care if they are as long as our goals are met. We don’t see that we are sending this message because each of us sees the variety and disparity of messages amongst individuals and groups, so we do not think we are acting collectively. But we are. We are a nation of over 300 million people — the rest of the world doesn’t see the sub-groups. Hell, many of US don’t see more than a dozen sub-groups, which doesn’t even come close to encompassing the true variety of America. But this doesn’t matter. They, and we, just see “Americans” and “American popular culture”. And it is not a pretty sight.
Changes in your own life are not an end, they are merely a springboard. One of us cannot make a difference if we are the only one trying, the only one stopping and thinking and beating our lonely drum. We can only make a difference as part of a whole, as a group. And the only measure for success is by whether our national culture reflects our changes.
Feminism will be dead when it is no longer necessary, and it will be no longer necessary when women — and men — are no longer exploited, no longer raped spiritually, mentally, and physically; when we are no longer forced into categories based on genitals; when it is not genetics but choice and ability that determines the path of your future. When the meritocracy is REAL, and when human life has a basic, intrinsic value that is not determined by the marketability of one’s talents or your mental and physical abilities, but by the fact that you are human, and alive, and deserve dignity and respect and self-determination, PERIOD.
When this happens, feminism will not be dead, it will simply be — ascended into culture, a basic element of existence, a block in the foundation of our society. It will impact more than women, it will impact the world. If done right, it will not be about consumption, about freedom based on what you can buy and value based on objects you own, but about simple acceptance of your value. All feminists have ever wanted was to be taken seriously.
Part of that future involves a radical shift in American values. When will we stop consuming the air, water, and earth as if these are inexhaustible resources, an infinite supply? When will we stop consuming people — their bodies, their lives, their souls — as if these are insignificant?
Will we change?
* This is an adaptation of the above title for publication in OAH Magazine of History, for the July 2004 issue.