Cultural Influences

It's odd that I haven't written in this blog in almost 7 years and the thing I want to write about is almost a contradiction to my last blog...

The portrayal of single women in our culture is bothering me. I'm sure that is nothing unusual, it probably bothers lots of people. But I'm not sure if it is for the same reasons.

American culture in the last 100 years has been strongly shaped by our media. Hollywood started out with the "Dickensian" portrayal of women (no offense to Charles Dickens, who I am a big fan of... but I read him with an understanding of the times he was living in) - that women are either perfect saints to be put on a pedestal or evil whores to be dealt with (Mother Mary vs Mary Magdalene). That's not my beef (it should obviously bother everyone).

My beef is the portrayal of single women as desperate to find a man. It could almost be said that the portrayal of any single person seems to depend on them being desperate to find a mate - but that is not generally true when men are portrayed as single.

Hollywood movies do not seem to have caught up with the phenomena of people living happy as single people. Medical surveys come out all the time telling us how much longer people live and how much happier they are when they are married. I have to wonder if they are only surveying an older generation who was brought up to believe that being married was a necessity.

I recently watched the movie "bridesmaids" and while I thought it was hilarious, I am still disturbed by the portrayal of the single woman as an object of pity. Having been a single woman for the last 26 years, I can state categorically that I much prefer it to the hell I spent married for 5 years. Now I realize that was a pathological relationship and cannot really be used to justify anything - but it did expose me to the negative extreme of marriage which I can recognize immediately in other relationships and quash. A useful tool.

It seems that television is actually much further ahead in the "single" portrayal. There have been many TV shows in which women are single and happy - but really I can only think of Murphy Brown and Golden Girls from older days where the women were not desperate to get married. A new batch of TV shows - and I don't watch commercial TV if I can help it, so all my information is a few years old (I watch the TV shows later on Netflix or the internet) - seems to have emerged in which the single women are actually not desperate to find a man - namely Bones, Castle, Sanctuary and In Plain Sight. These are some of the shows I am currently watching and I am a few years behind of the current season, so my information could be out of date.

I guess my main disappointment with Hollywood is that even a movie like "bridesmaids" - which given the premise of the movie really shouldn't surprise me - that was written by 2 obviously talented women should fall into the same "single woman" trap. I have nothing against marriage if that's what someone wants to do, but it should not be assumed that everyone wants it.