For obvious reasons, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the plight of women in America and specifically, why do a large number of Americans — men and women — hate women?
As if anticipating my thoughts, a rather helpful little article popped up for me this morning:
These stories may sound fantastical today, but for ancient people, they reflected a “quasi-historical” reality, a lost past in which humans lived alongside heroes, gods and the supernatural, as curator Madeleine Glennon wrote for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. What’s more, the tales’ female monsters reveal more about the patriarchal constraints placed on womanhood than they do about women themselves. Medusa struck fear into ancient hearts because she was both deceptively beautiful and hideously ugly; Charybdis terrified Odysseus and his men because she represented a churning pit of bottomless hunger.
And I started to think, how much of this misogyny continued to this day? How much of what passed as “gender normal” storytelling influenced the thinking of society and men in particular? I mean, come on, is there any bigger tell what men thought of women than the terrorizing trope of an enternal maw hungry for more men? Or a woman so beautiful (and yet, ugly) that she could turn a man to stone?
(As always, a caveat before you click through: don’t read the comments. Altho to be honest, they reinforce my point)
I mean, think about it: most of our Walt Disney fairy tale movies had a woman as the villain: from the witches of Snow White and Cinderella to Cruella de Ville, this is the imagery we grew up with. Scheming conniving women who would stop at nothing, including puppycide, to get what they wanted.
The hero? Usually a man. Usually, a rich man. Usually, a rich white man. Prince Charming, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast (no, he’s not the villain, he’s a royal victim of an evil fairy and he must fall in love with Belle in order to free both her and himself).
In other words, our formative image of gender is based upon “Women weak or evil, men strong and pure,” when reality would definitely beg to differ. Is it any wonder, in this great nation, that woman have second class citizenship?
Now, to be sure, some of this has changed over the years. Encanto not only features a heroine but it is set in a civilization of people of color. Frozen involves two (ok, white) sisters who must find a way to set aside their differences in order to protect their nation — bonus, the villains are scheming rich white men.
I think simlar things can be said, some worse, about race and its portrayal in American culture.
There’s a reason conservatives are creating brushfires in order to shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. They know the truth: a lot of their beliefs, their racism, can be directly tied back to their upbringing and their single-minded bullheadedness not to become more sophisticated and tolerant.
History is replete with stories that have been whitewashed. Take the single biggest accomplishment in post World War II America: the GI Bill. The GI Bill took working class men and aided and guided them to a middle class existence. It paid for college — including room and board, it gave veterans months of unemployment payments, it helped with mortgages and low-interest business loans…it pretty much gave America the suburbs.
But only if you were white. Blacks and dark-skinned people were specifically excluded from its benefits for many illegitimate reasons, starting with the very racist policy of the US Armed Forces of discharging black soldiers dishonorably, as well as leaving it up to individual states to manage the benefits.
Why isn’t this taught in American history classes? Isn’t the failure to bring up to speed those who were the worst off, who could have benefited the most from the GI Bill, an overarching story and a way to introduce the civil rights movement?
American history should correctly be taught as the evolution of a nation from a landed aristocratic monarchy to a thriving economy that at least pays lip service to opportunity and freedom (I’d argue that’s gone by the boards since the 1980s) and as such discussing the grand experiment of “liberty and justice for all” should absolutely include those trials that failed to implement diversity and fairness.