Jill Nelson’s VOLUNTEER SLAVERY, Marjane Satrapi’s THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS, and Rachel Resnick’s LOVE JUNKIE are all about women on the run—sometimes toward something, sometimes away from something.Satrapi’s memoir begins when she, a child of ten, was confronted by 1979’s revolution in Iran and decided to run with the revolutionaries and become a prophet when grown.She was shattered when grownups laughed saying only men could be prophets.
Resnick ran after sex with men just as unavailable and demeaning of her as her dad had been.She craved submission to their will and held fast to them even as she was brutally and unapologetically kicked to the curb.
Nelson ran from a jacked up marriage, to Columbia journalism school then all the way to a job at the Washington Post just in time to cover DC Mayor Barry’s trial.No doubt perfect timing for an ambitious, beautiful Black woman in Chocolate City, right?
These three women of significantly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds ran because they were assailed by the same enemy:death of self-esteem at the hands of backward looking, atavistic cultures.Their self-esteem was killed by domination of old culture.In Iran the domination was mediated by return of the old religious culture.In Los Angeles, Resnick was put on the run by continuation of an old culture but complicated by her mother’s madness.And Nelson suffered amidst the dying embers of two cultural systems: racial and gender hierarchy.
It is tempting to believe that culture will change in tandem with technology.One may theorize, for example, that American slavery ended when machines of the industrial revolution could replace it.To some extent, culture begets technology and mediates the speed of its change.It may be dangerous to place highly advanced technology from one culture in the confines of a culture that is moving more slowly.This is the pitfall Star Trek tried to avoid with its “Prime Directive.”
Does male domination of women have a cultural time limit that technological advance may trigger, as African American slavery might have?Given that Iran has many engineers and uses advanced Western technology, can the reinstitution of ancient laws restricting women hold sway for long?Will art students, like Marjane, always have to cover their bodies completely and paint only fully covered human models?
Rachel also ran afoul of her stepmother’s orthodox religious traditions and was openly shunned both in Israel for wearing shorts and in New Jersey for traveling on a holy day.Can such restriction stand as technology advances?
Of course, secular, post-civil rights Washington society cannot be so blatant and Jill reports that she had to guess at what assailed her.The Post, she believes, danced around giving her the front-page stories she craved and buried the one she’d been assigned way back in the Style section.She says, ”It’s not any one thing or one person, it’s the institution.I was poor when I came here, but I had a good rep.Here, I’ve been disappeared.”
Culture and tradition are major components of human interaction and the processes that improve them are both subjective and normally slow moving.Jolts in history have sped these processes up from time to time, however.For example, the birth control pill was a major factor in encouraging greater independence for Western women and likely contributed to Jill’s belief that women--of any culture--should have the same opportunities as men.
But cultural change is usually a competition between some sectors of the society that urge change and others, often the more established and more powerful, which do not want change.This was the case in the 1979 Iranian Revolution where university student revolutionaries who enjoyed the Shah’s Western orientation were superseded by senior clerics who had opposed the Shah for decades.
It is often hoped that the differentiated sectors decide to “agree to disagree;” that one sector of a culture may change substantially while another does not and the two can retain relative amity despite their differences.When pre-teen Rachel’s Jewish dad divorced her non-Jewish mom and married an Orthodox Jew, Rachel knew few Jewish traditions and was put under intense strain.The fact that minimal conflict exists in general between American Jews and non-Jews could not protect her, however, from a very personal rejection by her parents that left her starved for love.
Rather than urge cultures to Westernize or even modernize greater and more broadly spread liberty is what is needed.Contemporary Iran and the Amish of Pennsylvania seem to demonstrate that advanced technology is not a cure for cultural atavism.Some people seem to like the comforts atavism provides.But what of those who don’t?And what of those who suffer it due to lack of education?Might atavistic cultures be convinced to allow people to opt out?Perhaps a new interpretation of the old culture is due, aimed to consider the realities of things not around hundreds of years ago.
Battles within and between cultures over cultural change have likely been around as long as cultures but perhaps they are numerically less as time advances.Once battles between European states were frequent but there have been few in the last fifty years and those have been relatively small.This bodes well for individuals at the crest of cultural change.If the leaders of cultural formations can be convinced to lighten up and look forward rather than backward a new cultural contract may be possible.