Small Strokes Big Oaks

I have just finished reading White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger for my class on the literature of diversity.  It is a decent read, especially for anyone interested in the problems surrounding race in our society;  I particularly appreciated the mix between Berger’s academic style of writing and a more fragmented, story-telling style of writing, which I believe allows the reader to weave his/her own personal experiences with those of Berger’s and his interviewees.

Given the title, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, I think I found the thesis, or at least the premise for the book, in the chapter titled “Myth” (95-97).  In this chapter, he talks about Barthes’ idea of contemporary myths.  Berger says:

Barthes argued that contemporary myths play a central role in our media-rich society: They conceal the undesirable, make bearable the unbearable, and whitewash the contradictions and dissonances that threaten to disrupt social order.  They are a “virus” that infects our reasoning and our politics.  These contemporary myths, he concluded, serve “not to deny things” but to take the troubling images in our everyday lives – depictions resonant with our fears, our intolerance, our bigotry – and make “them innocent… give … them a natural and eternal justification.” (96)

He goes on to tie the definition of contemporary myths back into Barthes’ example, and then spread it out to his own, discussing the definition of contemporary myths as they apply to race and racism – namely that whiteness is pure and good and blackness is evil and violent.  Also, he discusses the myth that “race and racism are too confusing or too dangerous to articulate,” (97) and he seems to work against that myth throughout the entire book.

I’m curious about this idea of contemporary myths in society.  Since my paper for this class is about gender, I began thinking about the contemporary myths surrounding gender, particularly women, in our society.  In my opinion the biggest myth in our society is that the fight for women’s rights is over – that after women earned the right to vote and started keeping the jobs they held when their husbands went off to war, there was no need to further the fight for equal rights.  Of course, there were a few inequalities that have been brought to light since then: unequal pay for equal work, women being objectified, violence against women, etc.  However, with the onset of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and the Gay Marriage movement going on right now, women’s rights has been put on the back burner.  Women are not yet equal, and the biggest, most public example of this is seen in public advertisements, where women are still being objectified, and as Norman Douglas said, “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.”  These ads (two examples below) show that women are sex symbols, and not much more.  These ads sell things to our youth, who will grow up with these subconscious messages that this is what women are good for; that they are not meant to be equal in this society.  This idea that the women’s rights movement is over, that women are equal in our society, is one of the most pressing contemporary myths hurting women’s rights in our society today.

Two examples of ads objectifying women, and making obvious that the fight for women’s rights isn’t over, can be found below.  The Burger King image is courtesy of Buzzfeed.com, and the Calvin Klein add is courtesy of The Undomestic Goddess.

What do you think are the contemporary myths in our society regarding women and feminism?  How are these myths hurting the feminist cause?