Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
As I read this week’s documents and essays, I couldn’t help but think: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The documents in Chapter 7 and the essay in Chapter 9 struck me as particularly timeless. Ads for soft-core porn, sexual virility, and snake-oil elixirs have been reincarnated in the 21st century as endless spam e-mails. The tension between First Amendment rights and obscenity censors is still unresolved, and the debate about women’s reproductive rights continues to rage. All in all, I decided it paints a pretty bleak picture of the evolution (or lack thereof) of American social discourse over the past 200 years.
Still, part of me wonders whether these issues are timeless, or even part of human nature. Did the Egyptians use hieroglyphics to advertise Viagra’s predecessor? Did the Jews, wandering around in the desert for forty years, set up portable Planned Parenthood tents? Clearly I’m being facetious, but it would have been interesting to read about the history and genesis of these phenomena in addition to the period-specific documents and essays describing their significance in post-Civil War America.
I think it’s interesting, however, that despite the apparent similarities between the 1800’s and today on a discursive level, the situation has changed profoundly on a practical level. We’ve lived through the 1960’s era of free love, sex education is taught in public schools, women have access to birth control and legal abortions, and spousal rape is recognized as a prosecutable crime. Obscene magazines travel through the mail every day, and two out of Angela Heywood’s “infamous ‘three words'” (259) are no longer taboo. Impolite, perhaps, but far from outrageous.
On the other hand, a large number of schools teach abstinence-only sex ed, 33 states consider spousal rape a lesser crime than non-spousal rape, censorship is thriving, Cee Lo Green has taken up the mantle of Heywood’s radical “critique of linguistic prudery” with his hit song “Fuck you!” and despite Roe v. Wade, abortion rights are constantly under siege. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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This short article, which describes how random hook ups are correlated with poor academic performance but romantic sex isn’t, reminded me of Lystra’s essay in Chapter 6, “Sexuality in Victorian Courtship and Marriage.” Lystra discusses how sex came to be associated with romantic love in the 19th century. Clearly, “the nineteenth-century view of sex as the ultimate expression of love” has produced cultural consequences that still exist today (230).
I also think this article, “Why Monogamy Matters,” is particularly relevant to our reading this week. It discusses statistics for premarital sex between 1951 and 2011, and reveals a “significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.”
As a final note, according to Google, today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day!
March 9th, 2011 at 10:16 am
Hi Ariana,
I love this reflection on sameness and difference in regard to debates about sexuality and social reform. I think of the Heywoods as the forerunners of George Carlin. Part of our analysis has to consider the means of persuasion, what’s at stake in the reform, and of course, the consequences within each of the time periods. It’s also the case that some of these efforts at reform simply take a really long time, so they may be seen as more continuous than cyclical. In terms of rhetorical persuasion, your tone of ironic humor works for me.
And thanks for the good wishes for International Women’s Day!