Is “UnCultured” Desirable or Even Possible, for Our Girls?

What’s the opposite of uncultured, I’m wondering today.
Cultured? Which antonym means natural, pure, authentic — cultured, or uncultured? So is cultured a good thing or not? Do we (collectively, as a culture) have consensus either way, have we thought to ask? Is it even a meaningful question, or is it nonsense?

Based on Wired Magazine power of story, Dana asks today just what we are teaching our girls. I saw this at the same time, which suggests that as Dana herself says, it’s not the current state of technology so much as timeless human psychology (mostly of their parents!) that shapes the culture kids will then see reflected back to them, in the most successful public messages.

Maybe youth culture is like driver’s ed as a subset of the general culture, as tweens and teens learn to operate their own psychology according to current road conditions, and affect those conditions for us all at the same time.

Favorite Daughter unschooled, unchurched, and therefore uncliqued, nevertheless identified with the Disney princesses as she danced almost daily through her tween-teen years with a small class of girls self-selected from public and private Christian school cultures. She has a lot to say about Girl Culture for Thinking Parents to consider, especially if it still looms ahead of their children. So here goes (maybe get a cuppa something, it’s long.)

Girls who stay with dance tend to be beautiful, slender, graceful girls blessed with great bone structure, aspiring ballerinas seduced to Dance as little girls by princess-pink tutus and tiaras, by handsome princes, bouquets of flowers and bows to the adoring crowd. Beautiful culture, nothing to fear?

But the world of dance is also unrealistically same-sex segregated. It’s also a culture of heavy stage make-up beyond one’s years, sensual and provocative if not downright sexy moves and costumes, investment in and obsession with appearance to the point of eating disorders, competing against peers to impress teachers and judges and earn external validation, petty dressing room gossip and elaborate in-bred social rivalries because there’s no time for any life outside that world –

At age 16 Favorite Daughter blogged:

Growing up female at the tail end of the 20th century, I hear a lot about the way the media unfairly influences my vision of myself. I can’t help but hear the news reports and studies and talk shows about yet another girl who got lost in a glossy magazine, yet another young woman whose blind ambition to be beautiful ruined a life not yet begun. . . yet I’ve survived spending almost every day with people who challenge my physical self-esteem.

Allow me to explain: I dance.

Nance then offered her a little cultural affirmation:

Yesterday I was talking with a my wonderful sister-in-law about my DD and her friends. They are in the 10-13 age range. And they THINK!! They try different things like being vegetarian — with varying success — and they try different styles. And they try different looks and makeup and attitudes. But they THINK! They do not confuse skinny with healthy, for one important thing. And they revel in being their own unique selves.

Unschoolers all!

May they continue to hold fast to discovering who they want to be, exactly as they want to do it, with you as a wonderful example!

Btw the dancers who stay in that world and thrive, especially ballerinas, are stereotypically far from scholars and curious academic minds (dance professionals we met would use the word “bunhead” for this type, and not in a good way.)

Bunhead cliques pre-date fashion video games and fast food, modern marketing and Disney princesses, just as criminal gangs pre-date violent video games, MTV and sugary cereal marketing.

FavD’s first job was at that studio too, so between dancing and working she spent most of her waking teen hours awash in bunheaddery — including family members who one way or another, surely helped make the bunhead culture individually and socially who they were– yet she wasn’t of that culture, or in it. She never wanted or bought into it, but became a cultural observer and critic of it.

I don’t know how much of that came from nature and how much from nurture, how much was her homelife and unschooled education . . .what I can certify beyond any doubt, is that she had unlimited access to Disney and the Olsen Twins and Barbie, television and movies, music, wigs and hair-dye and ear-piercing, snack food and make-up, even School and Church (but became cultural critics of those as well.)

So let’s stay real — the corrupting influence of exclusive, expensive and desirable culture didn’t just come along with video games and iphones. (Ever read F. Scott Fitzgerald?)

When we worry in my house about what’s being marketed to our teens by a corrupt culture worth working to change, it’s more like this:
Those Who Would Like to Pre-Approve Us All

Of course like teen gangs and cliques, paying for school as Complex Moral Dilemma is older than *I* am never mind older than our daughters, and it wasn’t invented by greedy credit card companies but by the general culture that has ALWAYS gamed higher education as exclusive, expensive and the gateway to the American Dream.

He’s about to get kicked out of med school because he can’t pay for classes. He is quite destitute. I worried about him, how was he going to manage? Wait tables? Become a grease monkey? Sell his body? (I mean, of course, his organs. )

Marketers and movie-makers and storytellers reflect our culture back to us, in the languages we’re speaking, more than force it on us. (Even Shakespeare was just giving people what they wanted, back when his plays were meant to play to that.)

Barbie dolls first became controversial cultural message a half-century ago when I was a little girl. In mid-twentieth-century conservative southern culture, that was before television was much of a factor at least for me, much less before video games. I was preschool-aged, too little to listen to rock and roll on the radio, before the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, before the Kennedy assassinations. But I had one of the first Barbie dolls (several, truth be told) and so did high-tech baby FavD decades later:

If your child is looking to Barbie as her primary role model, maybe you should let her read, or watch television, or leave the house. In a world in which Michelle Obama is the First Lady, Sandra Day O’Connor is appearing on talk shows, and Tina Fey exists, are girls today hard up for flesh-and-blood role models?

And sure, youth culture is about us parents, too. All of us collectively if not so much individually, how we choose to live and die and why. So there’s much we can do and everything matters, but we parents need to be discerning to accomplish that, too smart as “idea consumers” to blame human culture on itself just because it exists, just call it evil and gang up on it because that’s the popular message being peddled to us, too smart and savvy to just define tv commercials, snack food and video games as The Problem. Or to blame a world in which the whole family doesn’t sit down to dinner together anymore, rather than raising children more concerned about how much of the world gets no dinner at all.

Or fashion dolls, cliques or the culture of dance:

More culture of dance? — girls as a group are better dancers (students) than boys and like it more, but still must wait to be asked, held back by the less willling and able boys? How many girls finally become frustrated enough to just dance alone or with each other, forget about waiting for the boys to catch up? Seems to me girls already adept at the dance of cultural change, will not wait long and will be right not to, that they’ll tend instead to make over their identity once again, and never mind those trying to engineer their differences into some standardized social configuration.

Will our nation’s cultures and creeds, our empowered parents and our world-renowned educational institutions, merely keep up our stylized minuet as we go right on fancying ourselves the belles of the cultural ball, uniquely superior to all those backward places where geography and demographics are destiny?

Culture’s got everything! It’s so complex that there’s ample opportunity to choose our own emphasis. So each of us can choose, ask and answer ourselves — will I spend my life-force fearing or cheering youth culture, parenting culture, high-tech culture, global culture, creative culture, the culture of dance?

From the President’s transformational speech at Cairo University to the 20th anniversary of Tiannamen Square to our family here in Florida, where the kids danced all weekend in styles from around the world and where during rehearsal I met another dad with a dancing daughter adopted from China, this week’s power of story is an internationally inclusive progressive dinner, a timeless serial story told with creative, meaningful nuance, cultural sensitivity and — dance!