boobs

Continuing the conversation started in yesterday’s post:

I think gurton did a pretty good job echoing my point in responding to Alison, but I’ll add my two cents for what it’s worth.

Italicized quotes are taken from Alison’s comment in that post.

“And just for the record, [Janet] didn’t apologize, she refused to…”

I admit I haven’t seen her videotaped apology, but isn’t that what it was?

“are we not just as guilty of giving them a voice by reacting to [them] as [Janet] and [Justin Timberlake] for starting it up in the first place?”

That was my point, yes. I’m not sure if you were agreeing with me or trying to correct me, so I reiterate. Sensation feeds on itself. That’s why the media uses it to sell ad space.

“…who has the upper hand. The media or the consumer…. would we all not still be smoking? It may not be readily apparent but the general public as a group has a large say in what the media presents.”

You make it sound like I’ve been saying the world started with an ad agency and a blank template for human behaviour. Not at all. But since the ad industry began to develop theory into behavioural psychology in the 60s it’s been abundantly, demonstrably, and overwhelmingly proven that consumers can be herded. Advertising sells a better life. This is getting off topic, so let’s save it for another post, but I can shower you with evidence that while consumer lust is a powerful force, it’s being endlessly molded, using human nature as the primary tool. Briefly, let’s use your own example. Why in the world do people start smoking? Why do considerably more girls start smoking than boys? Because smoking has been presented as sexy, mature, and tough by the media. It keeps you thin. And even though none of these things are true, and everybody knows it, they still do it. You tell me: why?

But let’s try to drag this ailing horse back on track.

”They give us… controversy that we can brush off, that doesn’t affect us too emotionally…. We should be talking and thinking about…people… starving and… children living on the streets.”

You’re right. But what came first? The media’s attitude or ours? What if, instead of impulse buying a magazine just because it documents a recent scandal, we invested that money into well-planned long term programs that dealt with these issues? What if we prioritized education and made it completely government and commercially funded? What if that meant that within a single generation North America was 95% literate with at least high school diplomas? What if these programs dealt not with handing out meals, but finding gainful employment for all? What if social relief programs were streamlined into steering people back into the workforce as soon as possible, and abuse of the system was punished? What if we made military service mandatory, and this huge cheap workforce was used as a resource for civic projects like highway maintenance & picking up litter, saving us untold millions in tax dollars and pouring it all back into the economy?

Because, dear reader, all that would be inconvenient. Because this is the Me Generation, and we don’t like anything that isn’t a quick fix. The news is always miserable, so give us a juicy scandal to brighten our day.

I’ll even go one step further and say that you yourself could solve these issues if they were that important to you, but being part of this Me Generation you are like the rest of us, who shake our heads at the shame of it all, and then we go back to our lives. We don’t run for office on a platform of drastic social upheaval, no matter how much sense it makes in the long run.

”…you can bet that if it had been a stage full of white guys it would have been a much bigger deal.”

Actually, my theory is that it would not have been a bigger deal. White guys making stupid racially-sensitive blunders is old news, and it would have been largely ignored.

“…minorities mocking minorities…”

No one said the mockery was malicious. The primary complainant, Tiokasin Ghosthorse said that while it felt like a slap in the face, it showed a lack of sensitivity and understanding. He suggested that in addition to an apology on the same public scale as the offending performance, Outkast live with the Native community for a long while to develop that appreciation.

”75% of men still make for money then women for doing the same job. A married white male is still more likely to be hired for a job then a single man, woman or minority with the same experience and education. The majority of people living below the poverty line in north america are black, native or hispanic. Less then 1% of CEOs in north america are not white men. Givin these stats, is it no wonder that that people are a little resentful?”

I could really fly off the handle here. I’m not questioning your portrayal of these stats, although I will back gurton in his assertion that a white male is the least likely of any group to get hired in any situation, all qualifications being equal. But regarding the stats you’ve presented I have to stand on the soap box and say loudly that they are merely bullets, with no contextual grounding to give them meaning. For example: married men get hired more than single men because they are believed to be more stable. And when you quote the ratio of CEOs I just want to bounce my head off the desk. What makes a CEO? Don’t you have to earn the job? Don’t you have to work your ass off? Don’t you have to have the qualifications and shake the right hands? I’ll tell you flat out if I were in a position to hire my CEO I would pick the one without the chip on her shoulder, who thinks she should have the job just because there should be more women CEOs. And yes, I may end up with a less qualified CEO, but the bottom line is I do not have time in my life as a Member Of The Board to deal with a self-entitling Amazon who thinks she’s more deserving just because she’s a woman.

That said, I feel the same about anyone who thinks they deserve anything just because of who they are or what they look like. In a world where we would like to think we can get the jobs we deserve because we deserve them, what’s wrong with earning them? To point out a simple reality: if Person X has to climb Mountain 1 to get to the top, and Person Y has to climb Mountain 2, then shouldn’t they just get on with it and quit bitching about whose mountain is taller?

If a woman today has to work harder to prove she’s capable of doing a given job, then she should just get on with doing it, so that the next woman who comes along tomorrow can enjoy the precedent.

You say that’s what they’ve been doing? Great. It’s working, isn’t it? You said so yourself. I’m not saying the fight is over, if it can be called a fight. I’m just saying that you don’t have to convince me. If a woman can do a job as well as a man, then she deserves an equal shot at the job. ’nuff said.

”So we want to keep moving forward right?… We do our best to respect each other and each others heritage.”

That’s the rub. Respect versus walking on glass. That’s been my whole point with this massive tangent. It is not disrespectful to call a black person black. Call him brown if you want to be accurate. Or cinnamon if it suits. The term African-American is completely stupid, in my opinion. Unless, of course, this person emigrated from Africa. There comes a point in trying to be PC when you loose all sense of what it is you’re trying to do. If you want a melting-pot colour-blind culture then go ahead, PC yourself into an early grave of ridicule. I would much rather have a mosaic culture, where the differences are celebrated and the colour of your skin is accepted as just one more facet of what makes you interesting. In that culture, the only challenge is integration. You just don’t wear a turban in MY police force. It’s a uniform, baby. Not a polyform. But all these things should work themselves out if you maintain the original mandate of making the mosaic work within the greater whole.

We got dragged way off topic there, but I think I can tie it all back together (to segue back, if you will).

We’ve been talking, essentially, about how the few fit into the many. How the media, for the sake of sensationalism and to sell some ad space, will take anything remotely smacking of a tingle of shock value, and blow it galactically out of proportion. How one person with a forum can, for a day, rock the country. And why we let them get away with it. Why, in fact, we encourage it.

In this particular question of which came first, the human chicken or the media-hype egg, the chicken did come first. Over the past forty-five years or so we have built for ourselves a septic tank of circular feeding. Because humanity is at heart selfish, both individually and as members of a group, and because we’ve built a society that encourages that selfishness, we will continue to see petty issues blown out of proportion while the larger problems are left to fester. This is how committees work- getting bogged down in the details and losing the Big Picture, so it’s no surprise that the community is any different, on any scale.

And so it falls to us, as individuals, to keep poking at the pieces of this mosaic. Keep fiddling around with the shapes until we find a better fit. Some pieces break along the way, and some pieces confound us for years. But as long as we individuals keep trying to make the whole thing come together, then maybe it will. When enough individuals are poking in the same direction, a pattern suddenly coalesces, and a piece of the Big Picture leaps into view. The little pointy bits around the edges are still clamouring for attention, but they don’t really do any harm.

The Superbowl Boob happened because all involved knew it would cause some conversation, and every large-scale publicized event has to have some scandal these days or next year’s ratings go down the pipe. The Outkast thing happened because these guys live larger than life. Anyone who knows anything about the group knows that they have outrageous fashion sense but their lyrics are quite socially conscious. The song they performed, Hey Ya, seems to be about ambivalence and how we dodge deep issues, so maybe it was intentional and they simply overestimated the intellect of their audience.

And Conan, I apologize for Canada. Ontario hired you to help salvage a global profile damaged by SARS, and apparently it never occurred to them that Triumph, being an insult comic dog, would take the obvious route when planted in Montreal. I hope you don’t think less of the rest of us because of this overreaction.

Eggshells. They get broken.