I have about a year to decide what to do with myself after I graduate college, and right now I'm in a delightful late-Spring lull during which I have plenty of time to think about the future. Floaty thoughts of post-grad freedom combined with a healthy dose of Weeds and reality wedding TV has somehow landed me on the topic of traditions.
Here's my slightly convoluted question of the moment: How important is it to do away with traditions that carry historically harmful meanings if these meanings have little power in our current world?
For example:
To me, a father walking his daughter down the aisle and "giving" her to her husband-to-be at the altar communicates a message of gender inequality and carries with it a terrible history of women as property. But is this tradition harmless in modern society? If the bride and groom treat each other as equals and the bride is legally a free and independent woman, does it matter if their wedding ceremony contains this symbolic gesture?
Many would argue that there's no point in destroying this "sweet" tradition simply because of its possibly sexist undertones. I might agree if I believed that we lived in a post-sexist society, but that is simply not the case. I think that in order to really move forward, we need to wash ourselves clean of traditions that are rooted in inequality and oppression whenever we can stand it.
Another issue in the same vein: People have been talking about this Canadian Storm baby. Storm is a child whose parents have chosen to keep his or her sex a secret for as long as possible in order to free him or her from the confines of gender roles imposed by society. Hmmm. A lot of people out there think that these parents are total whackjobs, but I believe that their hearts are in the right place. Starting very early, children get bombarded with lessons - both implicit and explicit - about how to fulfill their assigned gender roles, and I think that these lessons can be extremely harmful to EVERYONE. I'm definitely in support of examining and reworking concepts of gender in order to create a healthier, happier, more equal society.
But are Storm's parents really helping their baby? It seems that in de-emphasizing biological sex differences, they might actually be over-emphasizing gender. I mean, doesn't this situation leave us all waiting to see which gender Storm will choose as Storm's own, thus emphasizing gender over other qualities that Storm will discover within?
Now I'm actually watching the link that I posted for Baby Storm. Ugh...some of these View women are really annoying. I love Whoopi Goldberg, though.
Anyway, if anyone ever actually reads this, I'd love to hear your thoughts! I have a lot of unanswered question marks in here, as well as several disputable points.
The image from the top of this entry is from subversivecrossstitch.com.
Update: Okay, well of course Jezebel wrote about this and I love just about everything that they ever say. I should have linked to that instead.
