One of the biggest widespread mistakes this culture has made in dealing with rape and sexual assault is in the repeated insistence on telling people (primarily women) how not to get raped. Colleges spend scads of money every year on education sessions, passing out free rape whistles, tipsheets, and safe ride services. City police forces […]
Tag Archives: social attitudes
Notes from the Urban/Rural Divide: Yes, We Have Doors, and Yes, They Lock
I’ve always hated it when people leave a door open and someone says ‘what were you, raised in a barn?!’ Everyone knows you leave the barn door shut so the animals don’t get out, obviously, which is something city people never seem to grasp. (They also have an annoying tendency to leave gates open, apparently […]
Distancing Ourselves Doesn’t Erase Veterans from the Social Landscape
Almost 100 years ago, celebrants spilled out into the streets to commemorate Armistice Day and the end of the First World War, a brutal conflict that changed the face of society as well as the nature of warfare. But it wasn’t a totally joyous event; at the same time people were happy the war was […]
San Francisco Values
I always get a little chill of delight when politicians dredge up the dreaded ‘San Francisco values’ to describe some sort of horror of liberal thinking, a reminder of how depraved we libs are, running around naked in the streets rutting to the sounds of the Doobie Brothers. It’s a dogwhistle that comes up in […]
Why Can’t Abortion be Value-Neutral in Pop Culture?
Here is my television dream. A person gets pregnant, and the pregnancy is unexpected or unwanted. That person goes to a physician’s office where a test confirms the pregnancy, and then doctor and patient discuss the situation and the options. The patient decides to get an abortion. The doctor provides it or refers to a […]
Pop versus Reality: Mexico
Living in a border state like California, you experience an inevitable amount of cultural bleedthrough. It’s not just that we have a large immigrant population, or that businesses with signs in Spanish and services aimed at Mexican and other Latin American communities exist. Nor is it just that our English is spattered with Spanish terms, […]
Do You Care About My Health, or Just Think I’m Gross? Be Honest.
Hi. I’m fat. I’m what most people call an in-betweenie—I have a heavy build, I wear plus sizes, my stomach poofs out, I have folds of fat along my back, I have chubby arms and legs. I can still buy clothes off the rack at a lot of stores, though. Don’t rush to tell me […]
‘I’ll show you how valuable Elle Woods can be!’
My copy of Legally Blonde is so heavily viewed that I keep expecting the DVD to develop a scratch, something which would send me into paroxysms of grief, because, let me tell you, I love this movie. It’s funny, it’s sharp, and it’s also a fantastic commentary on gender, presentation, social attitudes, and society in […]
Mental Illness, Medication, and Social Attitudes
This is a society that hates mentally ill people and wants nothing more than to suppress craziness in all its forms. Whether it’s forcibly committing people to institutions, excluding people with mental illness from society, or pushing for exceptional legal treatment to make it easier to abuse mentally ill people, there’s a long history of […]
