I'd love to write about rationalism and oppression, capitalism and domination, but I just have to comment on Britney Spears's shaved head. I'll return to these other isms tomorrow.
Now, certainly there have been more than enough people writing and gossiping about it - Britney's bald head, that is. And I am reticent to comment. However, I just have to, in light of a project I worked on last fall which dealt with the balding of a woman.
Last November, I did a media analysis of an episode of Law & Order SVU, wherein a woman named Hailey is battered and raped. As a finishing move her attacker shaved her head. It was this shaven head - this stealing of her last trace of beauty and unadultered femininity - that ultimately enraged Olivia, the cop who took up the case, even despite Hailey's repeated requests that she not pursue finding her atacker. For all of the police officers involved, the shaven head was understood as the ulitmately cruel act that propelled them to pursue the perpetrator until s/he was arrested and detained. To be charitable, we have to assume that the rape was somewhere in the back of their heads, right?
Now, let's fast-forward to Britney. Her strange and dangerous behaviour over the last months and years has really only piqued the gossiping interests of the tabloids and her fans. Most of her behaviour has been shrugged off as typical young female celebism (I think I just coined a new word). However, with her own shaving of her head, all of a sudden people are actually concerned for her and for the safety of her children. This simple - what should be a fairly benign act - has catapulted her into the (new) spotlight of 'out-of-control,' 'on-the-edge,' 'danger to herself,' 'breaking down,' bi-polar mental case.
What?
I mean sure I'd agree to these statements (based only totally partially on her media representations). But I would have agreed to them LONG before she stripped herself of her 'last asset' - that is, before she REALLY went crazy and shed her feminine appeal.
Yikes.
5 comments:
What would a man have to do to have everyone make such a fuss?
What would a man have to do? Shave Brittany's head!!
Well that was a pretty glib comment but you're smart enough not to be baited. (Or I'm dumb enough to try). Good question though.
What outrages people is when others seem to deliberately step outside the norm. We think we are free and generous thinkers, but really it is extremely difficult to find someone who is not constrained by socitey's very conservative norms. Brittany is the prototypical dumb blonde. Too dumb even to be a mother. It is outrageous when she deliberately steps out of her image. Beautiful blond - hair is beautiful - she cuts it off - she no longer fits the norm - horror.
What could a man do to have everyone make such a fuss? Well Mel Gibson did it by making racist remarks to a police officer. Professor Phillipe Rushton did it by suggesting that black people have bigger penises but smaller brains than white people. Racial intolerance is almost a taboo in our society so we are horrified, but this was not always the case and will not always be the case.
Each generation needs to abandon some of the previous generation's norms, but they do it together and in the same direction. That's why generations have personalities.
Last night at Carleton some well-respected scholar spoke out against inter-racial marriage - she said it was the equivalent of the Holocaust for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, as if the purpose of such marriages was to get rid of Jews. Yesterday the United Nations said the term 'visible minority' was racist and asked the Canadian government to stop using it. No one has reacted much to either statement but a decade or so ago when Dr. Rushton made his statment it was deemed racist (it kind of is to someone with my generation's perpective).
So in a few years when all the trendy women are bald they'll call Brittany's kid mental for letting hers grow.
So now I guess the question is: Do society's norms ever get less conservative or is the conservatism just focused somewhere else? We would be tempted to jump to the former but I think people are just as tight now as they always have been, just for different reasons. ('specially our friends down south).
Or maybe we do get more laid back over time but that the rate of reduction of conservtism of a population depends on it's state as a population. (hence the reason why the whole Mohammed cartoon uproar and the reasons behind the assasination of Theo Van Gogh came from Denmark and Holland respectively - these are seen to be pretty laid back countries and they got in trouble with certain Islamic leaders for being so. (sorry I opened that can of worms from a discussion on Britt's head)
I'll finish b saying that intolerance is obvioiusly not productive for the human race. This remains one of our biggest challenges as a species.
Hi Pascii and Grampa,
Thanks for your comments. I assumed the first two were rhetorical. However, to Grampa, I'll mention that Britney did go to a salon to get her head shaved but no one would do it. They knew this would be a very bad idea. So she took the clippers and did it herself. The salon owners, though unable to do the deed themselves, were savvy enough to sweep up the hair and create a website to auction it off.
I agree that we are still a very conservative society. Feminism and other isms still have a lot of work to do. This question of domination and objectification is central to all struggles against oppression, whether it is women struggling, gays struggling, African-Americans struggling, or any other group that is struggling. Central to all of these movements is a commitment to end their oppression. I think that in order to eradicate one oppression we need to undo them all. When relationships of domination exist they undermine the struggles of others. In this sense, human domination of nature is particularly problematic. We need to think about all of our relationships and see where relations of equity exist and where we can make improvements.
Conservatism does get moved around or in some places goes underground. But that doesn't mean we can't overhaul the system, a little at a time. Raising conscious children is one occasion to do this. Yes Pascii, intolerance is not productive and when you really examine this concept from an anthropocentric point of view it is actually completely irrational. We are starting to see the fallout of this already - environmentally and socially, and on a global scale.
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