oursin | Padlocking the lovely unsullied mind (Reply)

Further to my snark yesterday I have realised that the article in question manifests a phenomenon (or two related phenomena) which were in play in a couple of my other posts towards the end of last week.

One is the designation of a group which will be the manifestation of certain qualities that we, the privileged and the ones with cultural power, will deem desirable and worthy and which we have absolutely no intention of practising ourselves. (We may think of this as some kind of unholy hybrid of Angel-in-the-House-ism and Noble-Savage-ism. Members of the group in question will act as attractive containers for the qualities in question and keep them tidily out of the way of Real Life.) In spite of all evidence to the contrary and all practicality, we will insist that this group (and so many cultures have designated this group as specifically female) will be the custodians of (for example) pure traditional values.

I think this also relates to the sex-ed post because of the extent to which people go on believing, all evidence around them not withstanding, that until they are exposed to Evul Sex-Ed Lessons in the classroom, children today don't think about sex and have no idea what it's all about and continue to believe to an implausibly advanced age in storks and doctors' black bags as the origin of baybeees.

The other phenomenon is the We Will Tell You Wot Real Culchah Is! - we note that in the Hewlett story a large element of the problem seems to have been that the young Chinese were enthusiastically engaging with cultural forms that Hewlett and Albarn disapproved of.

On whoever is On Topp designating cultural value, I think of two sf riffs on this: Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, in which what the hegemonic Japanese are looking for as molto-tipico USian art is things like Mickey Mouse watches, much to the distress of the antique shop owner; and in Walter Jon William's Drake Majistral series, in a somewhat different register, the alien species who are the masters of the universe have appropriated Elvis impersonation as the preferred human cultural product.

This also (in my mind, anyway) intersects with the trope of 'women writers gain respect for writing about srs bznz of Real Manly Kinds, like WAR'. Because yet again that's about what subjects Matter, rather than being OMG totally trivial.

Though when a man (HAI! M Flaubert) writes a woman-centred novel focussing on female experience, it is Searing Indictment of Society: when women do this it is (but of course) Mills&Boon/chick-lit/Aga-saga.

/end rant