Since decisions about what sort of content to air or allow on TV are made by elites, is this actually a theory of how elite mindsets influence broader opinion and culture?
In India, the Ramayana aired on state-run TV. There were choices made to produce and air it. I've heard the then-prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, encouraged it. Similarly in Pakistan, the push towards a greater role of religion in society (and mandatory headscarves for women on TV) was Zia ul Haq's doing.
Even if TV isn't state-run, the decision-makers are high level executives at TV networks. They are the ones who choose whether to air culturally liberal or transgressive or conservative content. Of course, they do it with the goal of profit maximization, but artistic products have enormous room for curation and discretion.
State authorities can then decide whether to allow/encourage this content or restrict it. Artists receive explicit or implicit state subsidies/tax breaks in many countries.
To continue with your metaphor of culture as a fistfight, are there any instances of powerful elites losing the fistfight? I'm referring now to cultural conflicts between elites and the broader population, rather than between elites. Or does backlash only win out when there are other powerful elites behind it?
Heretical comment. I don't regard the rise of women's labor force participation per se a good thing for women because the work women do outside the home is for the most part worse than housewifing. Yes, it's good that women are less financially dependent on men but there are trade-offs. I'd rather be a housewife, at the cost of being financially dependent on a man, than do most of the jobs most women who work outside the home are forced to do. I go back to the idiot movie 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' and the TV series it spun off. Waitressing was supposed to be liberation for Alice, from her unsatisfactory marriage. Gimme a break--housewifing is a whole lot better than working in Mel's Diner.
I loved that movie. For those who never saw it: Ellen Burstyn plays a woman with a young son, who leaves her domicile after her husband dies in a traffic accident. She hopes to return to the life she had before she was married, when she was a singer. She discovers that is not possible anymore. But after some stumbles she manages to build a new life, in a new place, with new friends. What is so "idiotic" about this movie ?
I'm a woman. I lasted two and a half half days as a waitress and I'd sure as hell be a housewife. 'Alice doesn't live here anymore' was one of the period pieces that rationalized women's being forced out of the home and into the workplace by the flattening out of male wages and the growing service sector economy that needed women to do agonizingly boring pink-collar shit-work at low wages. Ironically, housewifing is one of the few women's jobs that didn't have the miserable features characteristic of pink-collar work: endless repetition, close supervision, public contact, physical inactivity, constrained space. Think, e.g. supermarket checker. While all the noise has been about women's entry into the paid labor force there has been little interest in addressing occupational sex segregation, which hasn't been much effort to address ongoing discrimination and occupational sex segregation which hasn't decreased since the 1990s. Things have improved: the lucky few women who manage to get saleable college degrees compete in a unisex labor market for jobs in management in the professions. Most women are still forced to do boring, low-wage deadend service sector jobs, locked out of blue-collar 'men's jobs'. As a feminist I am f*ing furtious at the failure of most of my fellow feminists to address that issue. And BTW Alice did not give up a career as a singer. She was a working class housewife with a dream, a model for working class women of the period pushed out of the home into Walmart cashiering, data entry, waitressing, and other pink-collar shit-work: 'you've come a long way baby'. Those of a certain age will remember that was the slogan of 'Eve', a cigarette brand advertised specifically to women, 'liberated' to get lung cancer.
The idea that women are better off as "house-wifies", servicing their husbands, had and still has, terrible consequences. E.g. it is the basis for the US non-immigrant worker system. If there were in the US some real feminists left, they would have been ffing furious how a group of well-educated/skilled women is treated, diminished into Marthas (as found in the Republic of Gilead). However I never heard an angry peep from them about this issue. The general feeling about work-bound immigrants - not wanting more of them - probably supersedes possible empathy.
I would still prefer to be a housewife 'servicing' a husband than a cashier 'servicing' Walmart or a data-entry operator 'servicing' a firm. I don't care about the 'servicing' aspect. What matters is what one does day to day, hour after hour and would prefer what one does as a housewife to what one does at most jobs--being free to organize one's activities, working to the task rather than the time, being free to move around and leave the house, not being trapped in a confined space behind a checkout counter or in a carrel, not being forced to do endless, repetitive tasks, doing a good deal of physical work, not performing for customers. Of course, I prefer being a tenured full professor to being a housewife, but that's a job most people can't get. Housewife would be my second choice--not cashiering, data entry, retail sales, childcare, waitressing, or clerical work, which are most women's alternatives to housewifing. In fact most educated women are not choosing to be housewives. For one thing, career housewifing is no longer available as an option which means that less educated women are forced to do jobs that are much, much worse.
You obviously have no idea what I am talking about. And yet you give an opinion. As I said, we have found there is no help from US women in powerful positions.
Have you ever been a waitress, a supermarket checker, a clerk-typist in a bus company, a label typist in a lampshade factory? I have and I cannot imagine how those jobs, the only kinds of jobs available to most women, could be prefereable to housewifing--where you're not trapped in a confined space, supervised, forced to do endless repetitive tasks--where you have some freedom. I busted my ass, I grubbed for every grade, to be safe from ever having to do that pink-collar shit work again. I was married at 22 and I made my husband swear that he would never force me to do that woman shit. Marriage, along with my PhD was one more safety net.
The authors make the converse point: conservative religious movements in Brazil are also very proficient in using media, including telenovelas, to proselytize. As you say, culture is fistfight!
Very neat brainstorm of “Does life imitate art?”
Since decisions about what sort of content to air or allow on TV are made by elites, is this actually a theory of how elite mindsets influence broader opinion and culture?
In India, the Ramayana aired on state-run TV. There were choices made to produce and air it. I've heard the then-prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, encouraged it. Similarly in Pakistan, the push towards a greater role of religion in society (and mandatory headscarves for women on TV) was Zia ul Haq's doing.
Even if TV isn't state-run, the decision-makers are high level executives at TV networks. They are the ones who choose whether to air culturally liberal or transgressive or conservative content. Of course, they do it with the goal of profit maximization, but artistic products have enormous room for curation and discretion.
State authorities can then decide whether to allow/encourage this content or restrict it. Artists receive explicit or implicit state subsidies/tax breaks in many countries.
To continue with your metaphor of culture as a fistfight, are there any instances of powerful elites losing the fistfight? I'm referring now to cultural conflicts between elites and the broader population, rather than between elites. Or does backlash only win out when there are other powerful elites behind it?
Great point, the elites in the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia, and Central Asia were secular, no? Ataturk, Pahlavi, and Soviets
About seven women I follow...
https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/last-week-in-the-space-part-1-dac
Heretical comment. I don't regard the rise of women's labor force participation per se a good thing for women because the work women do outside the home is for the most part worse than housewifing. Yes, it's good that women are less financially dependent on men but there are trade-offs. I'd rather be a housewife, at the cost of being financially dependent on a man, than do most of the jobs most women who work outside the home are forced to do. I go back to the idiot movie 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' and the TV series it spun off. Waitressing was supposed to be liberation for Alice, from her unsatisfactory marriage. Gimme a break--housewifing is a whole lot better than working in Mel's Diner.
I assume you are a male ?
I loved that movie. For those who never saw it: Ellen Burstyn plays a woman with a young son, who leaves her domicile after her husband dies in a traffic accident. She hopes to return to the life she had before she was married, when she was a singer. She discovers that is not possible anymore. But after some stumbles she manages to build a new life, in a new place, with new friends. What is so "idiotic" about this movie ?
I'm a woman. I lasted two and a half half days as a waitress and I'd sure as hell be a housewife. 'Alice doesn't live here anymore' was one of the period pieces that rationalized women's being forced out of the home and into the workplace by the flattening out of male wages and the growing service sector economy that needed women to do agonizingly boring pink-collar shit-work at low wages. Ironically, housewifing is one of the few women's jobs that didn't have the miserable features characteristic of pink-collar work: endless repetition, close supervision, public contact, physical inactivity, constrained space. Think, e.g. supermarket checker. While all the noise has been about women's entry into the paid labor force there has been little interest in addressing occupational sex segregation, which hasn't been much effort to address ongoing discrimination and occupational sex segregation which hasn't decreased since the 1990s. Things have improved: the lucky few women who manage to get saleable college degrees compete in a unisex labor market for jobs in management in the professions. Most women are still forced to do boring, low-wage deadend service sector jobs, locked out of blue-collar 'men's jobs'. As a feminist I am f*ing furtious at the failure of most of my fellow feminists to address that issue. And BTW Alice did not give up a career as a singer. She was a working class housewife with a dream, a model for working class women of the period pushed out of the home into Walmart cashiering, data entry, waitressing, and other pink-collar shit-work: 'you've come a long way baby'. Those of a certain age will remember that was the slogan of 'Eve', a cigarette brand advertised specifically to women, 'liberated' to get lung cancer.
The idea that women are better off as "house-wifies", servicing their husbands, had and still has, terrible consequences. E.g. it is the basis for the US non-immigrant worker system. If there were in the US some real feminists left, they would have been ffing furious how a group of well-educated/skilled women is treated, diminished into Marthas (as found in the Republic of Gilead). However I never heard an angry peep from them about this issue. The general feeling about work-bound immigrants - not wanting more of them - probably supersedes possible empathy.
I would still prefer to be a housewife 'servicing' a husband than a cashier 'servicing' Walmart or a data-entry operator 'servicing' a firm. I don't care about the 'servicing' aspect. What matters is what one does day to day, hour after hour and would prefer what one does as a housewife to what one does at most jobs--being free to organize one's activities, working to the task rather than the time, being free to move around and leave the house, not being trapped in a confined space behind a checkout counter or in a carrel, not being forced to do endless, repetitive tasks, doing a good deal of physical work, not performing for customers. Of course, I prefer being a tenured full professor to being a housewife, but that's a job most people can't get. Housewife would be my second choice--not cashiering, data entry, retail sales, childcare, waitressing, or clerical work, which are most women's alternatives to housewifing. In fact most educated women are not choosing to be housewives. For one thing, career housewifing is no longer available as an option which means that less educated women are forced to do jobs that are much, much worse.
You obviously have no idea what I am talking about. And yet you give an opinion. As I said, we have found there is no help from US women in powerful positions.
Have you ever been a waitress, a supermarket checker, a clerk-typist in a bus company, a label typist in a lampshade factory? I have and I cannot imagine how those jobs, the only kinds of jobs available to most women, could be prefereable to housewifing--where you're not trapped in a confined space, supervised, forced to do endless repetitive tasks--where you have some freedom. I busted my ass, I grubbed for every grade, to be safe from ever having to do that pink-collar shit work again. I was married at 22 and I made my husband swear that he would never force me to do that woman shit. Marriage, along with my PhD was one more safety net.
Great post, as always!
Just wanted to share this cool paper: https://marcelamello90.github.io/Paper/JMP.pdf
The authors make the converse point: conservative religious movements in Brazil are also very proficient in using media, including telenovelas, to proselytize. As you say, culture is fistfight!
Yes! Amazing!! Thank you! I must read this! Thank you!!!