Don’t immediately hit the back button on your browser, but the other day I was reading a blog about feminism. I think I linked to it via aldaily.com or some other source of reputable essay and opinion, and you can link to it here. The post was some sort of progressive-feminism thing, positing that women could wear makeup and short skirts and still be feminists. Whatever makes them happy is my feeling, I’m not addressing women’s issues today. The article held my interest well enough, until I got to this jewel of a sentence: “At the same time as being more emancipated than ever, we have never been more obsessed with youth, thinness and celebrity.”
I’m sorry?
Does that sentence give anyone else pause? If not, you may want to read it a few more times.
The first half of the sentence is fine, it’s the part that begins “we have never been more obsessed with….”
Ok, let me say this very clearly – Stop saying things like that. Stop making statements about how things now are so much worse than they used to be. I hear this nostalgic junk all the time, one statement after another that essentially says, “People used to be better than they are.” Always made with no authority and no evidence. You weren’t there. Wherever there is for such an impressively vague statement. I’m not talking about just women’s issues, it’s only that this particular article got me going. Things are not bad today, and they were not better yesterday. They are better today than they ever have been. Let’s look in turn at each claim of that offending sentence.
Youth--------------
Not that I’m entirely sure what is means to be obsessed with youth, but I’ll take it to mean “obsessed with staying/appearing youthful,” and not “obsessed with the cast of ‘Harry Potter.” I’m certainly interested to see where the authors of that column got their data about people’s obsession with youth over the entire history of the world, but we can probably assume they just made it up. I can certainly see why it’s crazy that a woman in her fifties would be concerned about her looks or health, since century she would have been dead. I could guess people were more obsessed with youth “back in the day,” because they kept dying in the middle of it. Besides, isn’t saying “obsessed with youth” like saying “obsessed with breathing?” As if it’s obscene to preserve the image and feelings of health, virility, fertility, and everything else that goes along with youth. I’m sure the authors of that column welcome a short decrepit life followed by an ugly death, but I can’t blame others for trying to hold on to the good parts.
Thinness-------------
Women used to wear corsets. Now they don’t. It’s just that simple. Also we are fatter then we have ever been. So…there goes obsession with thinness. Next!
Celebrity-------------
There is merit to this claim, in large part because technology has enabled global exposure. But that doesn’t mean we are more obsessed than ever, just that we’re able to act on our obsessions to a much larger degree. I might not care about Natalie Portman if I'd never been exposed to her through the internet, cable tv, and magazines in every checkout aisle. I also might not care about here if I were tilling a field and dying of the pox, or had died in infancy as used to be so common. Here’s an important point: I was all fired up to dismiss the claim of “obsessed with celebrity” as a bunch of crap because it was in a sentence with two completely false assertions, and because I just didn’t think it was true. But before I claimed anything, I did some research. I read about how global media has changed the nature of celebrity, and now I’m informed and can make knowledgeable statements instead of just having knee-jerk reactions.
I don’t need to single out a poor sentence in an otherwise decent article. Misconceptions abound in every part of life. I highly recommend the book The Science of Fear, which basically shows how we are all stupid and gullible, although the author puts it much more kindly. I will not.
We can look at almost anything. People talk about being afraid to lock their doors at night, and how everything has gotten so dangerous, but violent crime has been decreasing. Go to the DOJ website and look at it yourself. Also consider the reporting of crimes. The data shows an increase in rape over the last hundred years, but what counts as a rape now was probably standard behavior for a job interview in the fifties. Obviously a facetious fabrication there, but the valid point is a large part of the escalation is probably increased reporting of rape, and tougher definitions. The rise of women in college probably has an effect, but I don’t know many women who would give up all the progress that let them have equal educational opportunities because of dicey behavior at frat parties.
There’s a commercial that’s been on lately, I don’t know what the product or company is, but it shows a young girl of probably nine looking at a sexy billboard, then it flashes through a bunch of similar images before the voiceover says, “Girls today are under more pressure than ever before. Blah blah blah.” (my edit obviously). Again, the first problem here is how do you know? How do they know that girls are under more pressure today? Has there been a decades long study involving questions like, “how much pressure are you under?” I can see how they might be under extra pressure at school, because now that people are finally coming around to the idea that girls can be as smart as boys, they might feel some pressure to get good grades and maybe, I don’t know, go to college. And then they have the pressure of deciding if they want to try to raise a family right away, or maybe wait so they can have a career, or try to do it all at once. You know, there was a time when all of those decisions would have been made for them, since all they had to worry about was finding a husband (easily done, since no one back then obsessed with being thin!).
This debunking can go on forever. “People are wusses today.” Well, none of us are as strong as a gorilla, so I guess we should all lament the day we started walking upright. “People are so lazy today.” Yes it’s true, people just don’t value a good hard day’s work any more. Why, time was a man would spend a whole day making candles, dipping the wick in and out of hot wax hundreds of times just to make one candle. Nowadays we lazy bastards just go to the store and buy them. Shameful.
Almost any statement of this type is blatantly false, and the ones that do have a shred of truth always turn out to be for the best. I believe people may have been physically stronger decades or centuries ago, but that’s because life was difficult and unpleasant. If you had to walk everywhere because there were no cars, then yes, you’d be good at walking and “in shape,” but it would mean you’d spend the whole day on a social call. The fact is, life is easier now. Humans don’t work any harder than they have to, so any small superiorities we may have had in the past (and I’m sure they are few and minor) were only from necessity.
Take obesity. Yes, we are all fat pigs. Yes, our preceding generations were not. Because they had no food and had to walk everywhere. Today US Agribusiness produces 3900 calories of food per day per person, half again as much as is required. And while that is a terrible bit of profit-making irresponsibility on their part, and a terrible failure of self-control on our part, we eat cause it’s there. I firmly believe that if you go back any number of decades or centuries and offer then 3900 calories of food per day, they will plump up like those sponge dinosaurs you throw in a bathtub. Can I prove that statement? It would be tough, because I wasn’t there, and neither was anyone else. We could look at wealthy people throughout history, the ones with access to copious amounts of food, and see what the incidence of obesity was among them, if such data exists. Then look at other wealthy countries without high obesity and see what they’re doing. How many calories per capita are produced in
Bottom line is, things are better than they’ve ever been. Health care is better. Roads are better. Opportunities for women and minorities and better. The Civil Rights Act was only in 1964, for god’s sake! Only forty years ago, and as a nation we’re just getting around to the idea that segregation is bad. So now tolerance is better. Education is better because our knowledge of the world is growing by leaps and bounds. And the best part is, it’s only going up from here! Even this economic crisis has an Other Side, and things will be even better once we get there. So rejoice that you’re alive today, and not yesterday. Leave idle and specious speculation about the past and look towards the future, because things are better than they ever have been, but not as good as they will be.
