Hushpuppy5-blog - Truly, Clearly

We were together. I forget the rest.

source: annalaura_art

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

In the USA during the 1960′s legally a woman couldn’t:

Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.

Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.

Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.

Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.

Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.

Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.

Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.

Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.

Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.

Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.

Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports

Apply for men’s Jobs   The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

This is why we need feminism - this is how we know that feminism works

hideji oda’s miyori’s forrest || 小田ひで次の『ミヨリの森』

I can't help but vent on this one. My parents get upset whenever I dare to have a social life, because that means I can't play the third parent for my younger sisters. They never wanted a female child, but boy are they glad I exist when it's time to take the "mommy" role. Unfortunately, I often get frustrated with myself because of it. Whenever I say "no", they say I'm being ungrateful and useless, then bring up the fact that they did everything for me, so now I need to return the favor...

I got so used to being on my own schedule while away at school. I had an apartment then, so I got a taste of what independence felt like. Now I'm back at home, and I have all these responsibilities dumped on me as a result until I can afford my own place. I didn't ask for these responsibilities and it feels weird getting blamed for not taking care of the kids I never asked for (and kids THEY never planned). They say I'm single and child free so I should have ALL the time in the world. It doesn't feel like that at all.

And my 5 year old sister calls me Mama sometimes. I'd like to think that it's a joke, but something tells me that I'm not just a sister to her.

I think there's another reason. Go on say it. You know what it is.

What to do when you don’t feel or look beautiful? Every where around me is beautiful women and some days I look at myself and feel I don’t measure up :/

Cultivate yourself in ways that make the way you look the least interesting thing about you. Read and learn, develop hobbies, pour yourself into friendships and craft and experience. The more varied and creative and entertaining your life becomes, the less and less it matters the shapes your flesh and bone make.

Who cares if your forehead has a line or two when you fill your days exploring the landscape around you? Who cares if your stomach pooches when you've read a hundred fantasy novels that take you far away? Does the sharpness of your jaw matter when you're laughing so hard with women you love that your gut feels like it's going to split? Does your calf firmness mean anything to the vibrancy of your vegetable garden?

Then, when you don't feel beautiful, think of all the things about you that are. Your knowledge, your kindness, your place in your community.

On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more time on your appearance, or more time pursuing that which you love?

"What will you do if you don't have friends, a relationship or a community when times get rough?"

The problem with this way of thinking is the amount of effort I have to pour into a black hole, for an undisclosed amount of time, out of fear. Not out of love or genuine connection. Today, almost every relationship is created out of fear or lack therefore it is a counterfeit connection. I have to invest hours per day/week talking to somebody about nothing so I have a HOPE that they will bail me out one day. I'd rather use that time to practice the art of remaining in a positive state of pure consciousness; commit to the Great Work of restructuring my mental patterns so I can create what I want at the moment I need it. To depend on somebody, who isn't even a real person but an amalgamation of identities that they think we share, is Soul-death. In other words, I don't plan on my life imploding nor will I use somebody else's life as an example of what could happen to me. If I must engage in useless pondering, I will always use constructive examples, not destructive ones. All I can do is remain in the present moment and take each minute at a time and I will always choose my happiness right now over a past trauma or future anxiety.