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Showing posts with the label pop culture

Probably right to (11 February 2009)

Probably right to ease off of Britney and Lindsay, but your impluse to go after Angelina is sound. I agree with you that though Angelina could readily be characterized as monster-superior, the press has wanted to imagine her more as MOTHER-superior. The reason for this, I think, is that the many of us who were born of mothers who used us as little playthings to ward off depression, and who interpreted our emerging desire to attend to our own needs rather than their own, as treachery, see in Angelina some version of the mother who must be praised and placated -- or else! Did you know that there are cultures which encourage their kids to play with knives. Not for their own good -- Angelina's purported motivation -- but because kids aren't valued all that much once they focus on their own independence. Take New Guinea parenting, for instance: "There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that a...

In response to "Seven things I learned from pop culture" (25 Dec. 2008)

Vanessa, Anyone who spends so many hours exploring popular culture probably not only enjoys it but genuinely learns something meaningful from it. Why not have written an article truly detailing the seven things you DID learn, that changed you, in promising ways, from pop culture this year? Such an article would have set you up for ridicule? Left you uncomfortably exposed? Probably; but the article as written has something of the smug, superior tone that Victorian gentleman brought to their articles, when they reported back to their London readers on the latest crazy goings-on in the colonies -- the kind of tone postcolonial critics now rant against as the voice of the empowered and unempathic. Link: The Tyee