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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29199 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I would guess it’s because we already have a stable of tropes ready to go for dysfunctional marriages. It’s not like Gone With the Wind was fighting the Patriarchy.

All the most fundamental conflicts are internecine. Cain and Abel, Kronos eating his children, Oedipus Rex.

I wonder if it's because the traditional tropes were the 'happily married couple raising a family' or at least the social pressure was the perception of such, so to depict unhappy marriages or divorces or single parenthood was fresh and daring and revolutionary. And then critiquing mainstream society and the model of marriage and family got taken up in the 70s political struggles of feminism and gay rights and the rest of it, so deconstructing marriage as "that 50s model of Mom in heels and pearls as the happy homemaker is wrong, in fact it was Mom zoned out on legal drugs hating her life" was the new paradigm.

Then they got stuck in the rut of "of course all marriages are awful, with people ending up hating each other, women being trapped and men being exploitative" and that was the pattern set, so that now "happy couple" is the fresh and revolutionary concept.

fresh and daring and revolutionary

I think part of the issue is that SJ to a fair degree hasn't actually realised that it isn't a counterculture anymore, so it still thinks SJ is fresh/daring/revolutionary.

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