A Culture of Self Obsession

No, the irony of blogging about self obsession is not lost on me. And, as a disclaimer, before I start spouting off my opinions I want it to be crystal clear that I do not mean to speak from a position of authority or superiority. I am both a victim and a happily aware perpetuator of this self obsessed culture. But my intention for the next several minutes of your time is not to convince you of a better lifestyle nor is it to make you feel like a bad person. We all seem to be in this boat together, after all. No, my intention is to highlight aspects of our society that I am convinced act as perpetrators of this culture of obsessive narcissism. For the sake of ease, I will divide them into three parts: Social Media, Technology, and Self Help. I'll even bold the parts where each section begins so that your inevitably wandering mind will remain at attention. I might even throw in some pictures. 

Social Media

This one is so trite and overly discussed that it's almost not worth the exasperated breath we all waste on it. Yes, we get it. Facebook is melting our brains and, most likely, our corneas. I'm not as concerned with Facebook and Twitter, however. Certainly, the obsessive need for validation from our peers and a rampant desire to garner as many likes as possible on Instagram are unhealthy aspects of our society. But we all know this. Hell, we are fully aware of the damaging aspects of these platforms yet we continue to use them anyway. Ironically, of course. But before you roll your eyes too far back into your head, hear me out. Irony is the new asshole on the block. Particularly, irony has arrived in the form of Buzzfeed quizzes. Perhaps you've heard of them? They come in all shapes and sizes ranging from which US President you are to what piece of furniture you are. 

My psychological profile.

I'm not saying these aren't fun. Hell, I've taken more than I'd care to say and if you say you haven't you're a damn liar. What I am saying, however, is that they are indicative of something more than they appear. On the surface, they masquerade as "ironic" outlets for entertainment, allowing us to fulfill our curiosity about whatever stupid thing we may be akin to. But below the surface, they reveal something much darker: our craving need for validation. Some absolute genius in the Buzzfeed marketing department realized this and that's why the company is churning our hundreds of these things a week. Why do we take a test to find out which fucking member of Destiny's Child we are? Because we want to know more about ourselves. We are obsessed with the idea of our own personalities. We want to be reassured that who we are is cool and that someone else or something else reflects that. Facebook granted us the opportunity to share every intimate detail of our real (and often overly exaggerated) lives. When we became comfortable with the idea of sharing our outermost world, we started to become anxious about what was on the inside. Buzzfeed gave us an outlet for that anxiety and obsession. But are we growing up to be a bunch of people that identify as Beyonce-William Howard Taft-Coffee Tables? Part of me hopes not. (The other part is thrilled at the prospect....ironically, of course.) 

Technology 

Arguably similar to social media, technology is the second third of the three part mix that defines our culture of self obsession. Once again, it's sort of beating a dead horse to bitch about the damaging effects of a technology obsessed world. Hell, Orwell did it in 1948. But, much like social media, the effects of technology have gone from ruining our interpersonal interactions to making us self obsessed narcissists. In an earlier blog post of mine, I did a quick overview of the nauseatingly self righteous attitude of those who thought that they could help the clean water deficit by merely not touching their phones for five minutes. This is merely the tip of the self obsessed iceberg. Diving below the surface reveals a world full of millennials, each carrying a phone shaped computer filled to the brim with quick updates on world issues and two minute videos about world hunger. Technology has made us into navel gazing pricks that furiously type out tweets about fair trade chocolate from behind the safety of our Apple products. Suddenly, we have the opportunity to vomit our views and morals into the stratosphere and to every phone we can reach. But why?

Many may argue it is to prove to our friends and family that we are globally minded and culturally aware. After all, why else would we pore through websites to find the best (and easiest) ways to help the global community? But really, it's because we want to reaffirm our own morals. We want to convince ourselves that we are not just better than everyone else, but a genuinely good person deep down underneath. We already know that technology and social media are bad for us. With thousands upon thousands of words being written about it, how could we not? So, in an effort to distance ourselves from a downward spiraling society, we try our hardest to utilize our technology to be morally "correct." We use technology to, effectively, bitch about the effects of technology. In a way, it's sort of a laudable decision. To take the shitty world around us and try to use it for good is a noble pursuit. But are we actually doing any good or are we merely masking our own useless contributions by doing them with style and fanfare? Starving children in Africa will probably go with the latter. 

Self Help

Ah, the crown jewel of self obsession. Our parents encountered this multi-billion dollar, profit driven beast in the form of books. We're getting it in the form of vague, unsubstantiated articles written in websites like Thought Catalog and Elite Daily. These aesthetically pleasing websites are chock full of pictures of attractive people and articles that reaffirm how cool life is and how we should just accept that by learning a language, going outside, and reenacting J. Crew ads on the beach.

Look how much better this woman's life is than yours.

The articles are, for all intents and purposes, a constant conveyor belt of rehashed ideas about self acceptance. So why do we continually eat this shit up? Most likely because we're depressed and anxious about our futures. A shitty economy and a culture of fear will do that to you. But, the faults of politicians and bankers aside, there is a sinister and self-serving group of assholes that is hellbent on squeezing every bit of profit and opportunity from our generation's anxiety and depression as possible. They are known as TED. 

TED Talks are incredibly short and entertaining lectures given by interesting and charismatic people about, well, anything. The topics are usually intellectually worthy and the talks are typically given in a way that makes the concepts easy to understand. But there is a major problem with the entire system. It fosters a desire to know as opposed to a desire to learn. TED has already received wide backlash and criticism for oversimplifying concepts. And it should. The problem with TED Talks is that people don't actually want to spend hours learning about complex ideas. They want to spend 20 to 30 minutes learning about the basic concept of something so that they can repeat it during a conversation. TED Talks are incredibly good at getting the main point of something across in a short amount of time. But it's really not good at actually teaching anything at all. Most of it is very vague information aimed at falsely enriching the lives of young people, knowing full well that we are in a vulnerable state of self obsession. 

TED Talks don't just teach academic concepts, though. The organization has a wide variety of self help seminars, aimed at preaching life advice at a bunch of twenty somethings who are shitting their pants at the idea of stepping into the real world. But this isn't actually helping us. Watching these videos and trying to repeat the vague and often senseless advice is doing nothing but confusing us further about how we should live. Because that's the real crux of the whole ordeal. We are so concerned with how we should go about our lives that we look to people we deem experts on the subject for help. TED takes advantage of our vulnerability and that's just shitty. But the real problem, and the problem that I am certainly a part of, is that we are just too damn wrapped up in our own obsessive self image. Not an image to the outside world, but the image we see when we look in the mirror. We are so obsessed with being content with what looks back at us that we spend countless hours listening to people give exciting presentations about problem solving. Lest we forget, those people haven't figured this shit out either. And, hell, maybe we aren't supposed to have it figured out. Regardless, I take solace in the fact that I never will. Perhaps you may do the same. 

Don't Listen To "Dissident Feminist" Camille Paglia

As you may have noticed, there has been a severe lack of wit as of late. To be quite honest, I have been on a sort of break and have been focusing my attention elsewhere. But then a friend brought an article to my attention that warranted cutting my break short. The article was short and to the point, but dripping with Coulter-esque venom. The article, titled "It's a Man's World, and It Always Will Be" was written by famed "dissident feminist" Camille Paglia back in December 2013. Known for stirring up controversy among the feminist movement, Paglia uses the space given to her by Time magazine to make an argument against a perceived misandry by feminists.

She's not entirely wrong. But broken clocks and all that jazz. There is certainly a disproportionate amount of hatred lobbed at men by certain feminists (See: Tumblr) and the idea that every man is a ticking time bomb of rape that has been adopted by a certain sect of the population is certainly worthy of scrutiny. I understand her attempt to defend men from the more fringe sides of feminism, but to then turn around and tell women that they would be nothing without men is, well, stupid. More than stupid, however, it is offensive. Her entire "logical" argument centers around the idea that women are being deprived of a strong male presence and, thus, are worse off for it.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

Oh lawd! What will all those poor meek women do without a big strong MAN to protect and care for them?!

The problem with Paglia's argument is that is considers men as benefactors to women. She once wrote that, "[i]f civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts." She considers the progression of mankind to be a purely one gendered accomplishment, bereft of female contribution.

Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

Thank your man, ladies. He made sure that you no longer had to do all that house cleaning and can now sit at home, pecking away at your computer. Like Jesus, men have been unjustly vilified in order to sacrifice themselves for your eternal salvation. Sarcasm aside, Paglia's self-assigned moniker as "dissident feminist" rings hollow when everything she says about women is degrading and archaic. She acknowledges that feminism's "proper" goal was to "attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women." Yet she attributes, seemingly solely, the abolition of these practices and the current well-being of women to hard work by men. She is forgetting, of course, the painstaking process that women have had to go through in order to get to where they are now (which is, arguably, still not ideal) and bemoans women for speaking any ill of men. But to understand the insane contradictions of Camille Paglia, a quick jaunt through her past quotes and sayings might prove fruitful.

Paglia identifies as a lesbian yet believes that the idea that all gay people are born gay is "the biggest cannard." She voted for Barack Obama but was a prominent member of the Birther camp. Oh, and she believes Chastity Bono's decision to get a sex change was a "mutilation" of her body. It's unclear whether Paglia says shit like this for the sake of being a contrarian or if she honestly believes in what she's saying, but it's irritatingly stupid either way.

Paglia's assertion that men are indispensable is, biologically speaking, correct. (For now, at least) But to presume that women are weak creatures that are unwilling to get their hands dirty is completely ignoring the fact that women, for a very long time, were considered to be lesser members of society. It was due to a male-oriented society that women were condemned to lives of "being seen and not heard" and menial house work. Birthing machines not good for much more than looking pretty, women couldn't engage in other work because it was expected of them to behave in a way that suited their gender. I don't know who drew the first gender distinction, but considering how men ended up on top, I can take a wild guess. Yes, men are cool and created a bunch of cool inventions and started civilizations and all that shit. But we (my gender, that is) also did a bunch of other horrific shit. And we shouldn't be judged solely by those actions either.

We could argue all day on if the world would have progressed beyond grass huts if women had been in charge (probably) but it would be useless speculation. Yeah, men do a lot of heavy lifting that women don't do, but that doesn't mean that the latter should fall at our feet and thank us daily for braving the horrors of the world so that they can enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Each gender possesses a lot of shitty people and a lot of good people. No one gender is responsible for the greatness of society because, like it or not, we are biologically codependent at the end of the day. In the same way women cannot exist without men, men are entirely incapable of existing without women. This is not to say that one leans on the other for support, but that we should have a mutual respect for one another for the sake of coexisting. We are, after all, stuck on this planet together. We should at least try to sit down and understand each other a little better and with a little more clarity.

Advertising's Role in LGBT Equality

As an advertising major who aspires to work in the industry, I am often met with disdain and "You're going to brainwash our children." And, to be honest, I can't really blame people for these reactions. The advertising industry has a rich history of manipulating the public into buying a lot of crap they don't need. (See: Any advertisement aimed towards kids.) Sometimes it's scary to consider how much power the advertising agencies and marketing departments have over the population without the population knowing. (See: Any Apple product) But, as an overly-quoted fictional man once said: With great power comes great responsibility.

The responsibility in this case is the equal and fair representation of gay families/couples/individuals. To be clear, equal representation does not mean the forced inclusion of a token gay family in every advertisement so that you can get your ticket into the Progressive Cool Club. It means the sincere portrayal of gay families and gay people as normal human beings. Because, you know, they are. But despite the fact that it's 2014, there are still people that think homosexuals are deviant perverts who are determined to turn your children to their ways. Which I imagine, in the minds of these ignorant individuals, involves a lot of glitter, leather, and Sex and the City marathons. However, extremes aside, there are also people that are merely ignorant towards gay culture, believing the aforementioned stereotypes not out of hatred, but because of the media's depiction of the LGBT community. For years, we have been subjected to news stories about gay pride parades that only depict the most extreme behavior.

Typically looking something like this.

You can understand then that people who aren't exactly privy to the less fringe aspects of gay culture might be put off by the blatant sexuality. So how do you fix the stigma? Ignorance is cured by education. This is a time honored truth right up there with "The Sun is really big" and "Fedoras are for assholes." But a far more important truth to keep in mind is that "Social norms are dictated by media depiction." In other words, wide spread ignorance can only be cured by education if what is being taught is in line with the social norms of the day. And to change the social norms, the media's portrayal of LGBT people must become more prevalent and more honest. This is where advertising comes in. 

Certainly, the news networks carry a heavy responsibility to portray gay people in a positive and honest light, but this does not diminish the role of the advertising industry. Advertisements are everywhere, telling us what to buy, how to dress and where to eat. It's not telling us how to think, per se. Rather, it's influencing our decisions and casting things in a certain light in order to make us more inclined to buy them. This power of influence is precisely why the industry has a duty to portraying gay men and women as normal people. Sure, they may never convince the firm believers that gay people won't snatch their children up in the night, but for the purely ignorant people, it may shed some light on an issue shrouded in body glitter and ABBA songs. 

But credit must be given where credit is due. The advertising industry has already taken steps towards the fair portrayal of the LGBT community. Most recently, Honey Maid released a 30 second advertisement titled "This is Wholesome" that showed a gay couple amongst many others, including an interracial couple. It was harmless, nuanced, and tastefully done.

Obviously, it was cause for uproar and rioting in the YouTube comment sections. But, as I mentioned, you can't change them all, especially not the hateful ones. Honey Maid, knowing this, responded yesterday with another ad. It was beautifully done.

Honey Maid isn't the only company to profess its love for the LGBT community. Earlier this year, Banana Republic released several ads that depicted real life couples modeling their clothing. One of the couples happened to be gay. Chevrolet also put out two advertisements that included gay couples doing normal human things. These ads weren't done with the intention of being provocative nor were they done to throw the idea of equality in your face. They were done merely to integrate the idea of gay families as normal into the minds of the average viewer. This may have been done subtly, but it was certainly intentional and with an agenda in mind. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The agenda of introducing the public to the idea of equality is a step in the right direction for an industry often associated with screaming about Oxyclean. Using its power of subtle influence for good is, while certainly motivated by a cause, a positive change.

That being said, I do not discount the efforts of more overt displays of support. Oreo's pride ad comes to mind.

Even more out in the open are the cause-related advertisements that directly associate themselves with the LGBT community. Recently, this older advertisement from Australia (a country notorious for draconian laws concerning homosexuality) has found its way back on to social media. It's quite lovely. 

So what's my point? Advertising has the ability to come at the issue of LGBT equality from a variety of different angles. It has already made a valiant effort but it's important for it to continue for the sake of ingraining in our minds that homosexuality is akin to normalcy. It's important for kids to see these ads from a young age so that there is never a doubt in their mind that their gay parents are normal or that they themselves are normal. It's important for people who may be isolated in a small town or community that isn't really exposed to gay culture to become aware that gay families can be just as happy and stable as straight families. It's important for everyone to see these advertisements not so that we can write blog posts or rant on talk shows, but so that we can stop talking about it entirely in favor of merely accepting it as a normal part of life. News networks may have the ability to spread awareness about the cause of the LGBT community, but advertisers have the unique ability to spread the normalcy of it. They have the ability to show gay families and people for what they truly are: families and people.