Quotes About Culture

Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.

The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies.

In our interpretation of the damages done by the beauty myth, it is not yet possible to lay blame anywhere but on oneself. I can say finally, for myself at least: at thirteen, to starve half to death? Not guilty. Not that child. There is certainly a charge of guilt to be made, long overdue. But it doesn't belong to me. It belongs somewhere, and to something, else.

at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood.

It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep as any ethnic or racial pride, a woman's determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.

Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.

This ritual use of constant surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth: Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will be good, but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

Beauty" is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman; the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts.

A man's right to confer judgment on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given.

Tatiana Mamanova, a Soviet feminist, responding to a question about the difference between the West and Russia, replied, The pornography... it's everywhere, even on billboards... [it] is a different kind of assault. And it doesn't feel like freedom to me.

As with "remote learning," Zoom rolled out everywhere as a cultural expectation without question or variation. It wasn't as if some businesses met or polled their workers or created a hybrid model — no, the social norm was established almost overnight. Everyone suddenly knew how to navigate it, and a whole Zoom culture appeared at once.

They reclassify healthy female flesh as "cellulite," an invented "condition" that was imported into the United States by vogue only in 1973; they refer to this texture as "disfiguring," unsightly," "polluted with toxins." Before 1973, it was normal female flesh.

Others have looked at this war from a biomedical perspective, or from a strictly political one. My focus is on how this ongoing war against us is far more basic, aimed at nothing less than dissolving the meaning of humanity itself and undoing of the rich cultural legacy we in the West have long treasured and passed on to succeeding generations.

Their goal is to subvert Western cultural norms and ultimately to alienate Western children from their families' influence and from Western history and freedoms generally.

Their aim was to construct engines of history designed to dissolve human culture, closeness and community. United in an alliance of convenience, these forces see human beings and the troublesome individualistic West, with its stubborn insistence on human rights, on joy, on spontaneity, on quirkiness, acceptance, and tolerance, as obstacles to be managed, drained of power and resources, and sidelined.

Both went from having been part of America to being coerced into another culture, having been forced over the next two years into another dimension of human experience, with another political system and a completely different, grotesquely lesser, set of options for human life and community.

As Carlyle put it—"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been—it is lying in matchless preservation in the pages of books.

I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped around your tongue today And broken to shape and thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now.

Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties," Galton predicted.

Po naszej Å›mierci – pisaÅ' Dawkins – pozostajÄ… po nas dwie rzeczy: geny i memy

Quella che lei chiama Bologna, è un cosa grande, che va da Parma fino a Cattolica [...] dove davvero la gente vive a Modena, lavora a Bologna e la sera va a ballare a Rimini [...] è una strana metropoli [...] che s'allarga a macchia d'olio tra il mare e gli Appennini.