What to teach our children: beauty and worthiness
In early October Mythago of of Mythago Performs a Blog Dance for Your Amusement pointed to this YouTube video and said
I can teach my daughters about Photoshop, and patriarchy, and that people who tell them “you’d be beautiful if only….” are just trying to get them to fall into line.
But is all that going to be as powerful as the onslaught of messages they get from everywhere else?
Actually I think maybe the trick is to teach our daughters about men's "worthiness myth trap" that corresponds to women's "beauty myth trap" indoctrination just as we teach our sons about the myth of beauty that corresponds to their myth of worthiness. Each is taught in his or her own way that to be loved... or at least to find a partner... one must not simply pass some threshold of functionality (beauty, worthiness) but hijack one's entire being to even hope of achieving it.
Boys must learn that girls don't require them to have a Ferrari as much as girls must learn that boys don't require them to have perfect skin. And girls must learn that boys don't require them to perform like porn stars for the same reasons boys must learn that girls don't require them to blow their knees or brains out on track or field. Because each is a lie each tells *themselves,* and while I think it must be hard to tell about *one's own* myth trap, I think it's easier to point to reflections in the other's myth trap.
At any rate, having both a son and daughter who I want passionately to have the same chances for happiness in the world, I plan to make them aware not only of their own indoctrination but their counterparts' as well.
(Note: and lest anyone ask, no I'm not saying beauty nor worthiness are meritless. I'm saying only that when those entirely laudable attributes become *fetishized* you get... almost all the articles we see teased on the covers of popular women's and men's magazines for starters. When these attributes are fetishized -- in the Marxian as well as sexual senses of the word -- they make people into things: ourselves into objects to be made beautiful or worthy, our partners into objects that are rewards for our accomplishments. Which doesn't work because, of course, people *aren't'* things.)
Update: Terminology update: I've started referring to the twin gender issues as traps rather than myths, because I think it's more descriptive and it puts the emphasis on what happens when we get stuck in them.
Good point.
It's probably especially easy to see holes in the other gender's indoctrination (at least for heterosexual people) because you look at what they *think* you want from them as a partner, and what *you actually want* and see where they differ (as they ALWAYS do).
A good tactic I think.
[Thanks, Whatsername. Yeah, saying "see this thing happening to him and notice how he doesn't seem to be able to see that? The same sort of thing is happening to you when you..." --fl]
Interestingly I picked up the French version of the Dove campaign when I was in France, where women are bombarded with exhortations in pharmacy windows to lose weight, firm up your skin, etc, etc, by buying this, that, or the other very expensive product (and some of them are as bad as that Clarins ad promoting a facial spray to protect against artificial electromagnetic rays).
Now I've never really been aware of quite the same pressure to worthiness for men through the media, but perhaps it's another transatlantic difference. When my sons were young the pressures from their peers seemed to be almost more negative ones, some of which I had a lot of work to counteract: don't be creative, don't read, and don't work too hard, if at all.
I'm going to have to discuss this with them.
[I think with boys and moving into men there's some media pressure (James bond gets girls because he's so good, plus almost any ad for a car, whiskey, and so on that implies "when you've made it...") but there's more interpersonal pressure. And yes, they often bail out and, thus, proclaiming their cool slacker sensibilities. But irony and sarcasm being refuges of the powerless (or, more accurately, the *self-perceived* powerless) slacker-hood is still an acknowledgment of the underlying principle. Or at least that's my working hypothesis -- it's pretty compelling to me, and it seems to really resonate with people, but also very new and thus not very tidy. Thanks, A. --fl]
Having spoken (virtually) to one son this afternoon, he suggested that women are put under media and other pressure, not only to look the right way themselves, but also to aspire to a certain types of man (with a fast car, plenty of money, etc) and that it's a self feeding viscious circle.
I see what you mean about the slacker-hood being an opt-out. It's very interesting because the son above came out of slackerhood when we moved to France, and I need to think about why that happened.
[And also notice the fast care, plenty of money == "worthiness." And meanwhile the boys think that if they run hard enough on the worthiness treadmill they're *entitled* to the girls who think they're entitled to them who think... and then, in true fetish fashion, they get so focused on their respective manias they can actually let them interfere with actually getting the girls/boys the whole rat race is supposed to be about. Thanks, for the great corroboration, A! --fl]