If you were an outside observer of modern society, I think you’d probably call it the Sandra Fluke Event Horizon.
In February 2012, Fluke, then a law student at Georgetown, appeared before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee to discuss why Georgetown, a Jesuit university, should be compelled to offer health care that included contraception coverage to students. Her claims included the statement that 40% of female students at Georgetown were facing economic hardship due to this lack of coverage, and that female students were forced to endure “financial and emotional burdens.”
As of the 2014-2015 academic year, full-time Georgetown Law students must pay $53,130 in tuition fees. The median household income in America during that same time period will be about $51,000. Therefore, if the average American family was exempt from all taxes and spent every time of its income on sending a child to Georgetown, they’d still come up short.
Yet, somehow, the idea that a student at Georgetown, a student who had already graduated from Cornell with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, needed the school to pay for her contraception was not met with universal derision. In fact, quite the opposite happened. She somehow became a featured speaker at the DNC. She’s now a candidate for a State Senate seat in California. Rush Limbaugh’s comments on the situation led to the creation of the term “Slut-shaming,” which apparently means making a woman feel ashamed for behavior that back in the old days would have been, you know, shameful.
After that, we passed a point of no return. The advent of the social media era means that societal change happens nearly instantaneously. The result is a near hivemind—the community decides quickly and with great severity on every issue. Since social media is largely dominated by the liberal-trending 30 and under set, ideas that would have been dismissed as loony twenty years ago have become nearly universally accepted.
The end result? Nothing is shameful anymore.
Having sex with multiple people in a month? A week? A day? Not shameful! Just search “tinderfessions” on Twitter for confirmation of this. What used to be slutty (for both men and women, although certainly more for women) is now funny. The impermanence of relationships is becoming a serious societal issue. Oddly enough, just as courts across America are coming to the conclusion that marriage is not the exclusive domain of heterosexuals, heterosexuals are coming to the conclusion that monogamy isn’t for them.
Being overweight or, God forbid, obese? Not shameful! Search #fatkini on Instagram. We aren’t talking about women who are not just ten or fifteen pounds over their ideal weight—we are talking about glorifying and supporting morbidly unhealthy behavior. All a woman has to do is post a picture of herself on her Facebook profile with a little bit of makeup and hairspray, and within an hour, thirty of her closest girlfriends will have posted “OMG GORGEOUS!” It’s all part of the social contract they have with each other to support each other’s mediocrity.
Being poor? Not shameful! With record numbers of people on government assistance, it’s less shameful than ever to get food stamps or other forms of welfare. Rather than trying to improve their job skills or education, people would rather protest for higher minimum wages—why not just make the minimum wage $25 an hour? Or $40? Or A MILLION? Why should anybody try to improve his/her station in life?
Being stupid? Not shameful! Don’t worry about studying more or working harder in school—districts
all across America are eliminating traditional grading methodology in favor of systems that improve the self-confidence of students.
In short, the combined power of social media and traditional media outlets has made all lifestyles and all lifestyle choices acceptable. The problem with all of this, however, is that the world doesn’t really work that way. We all laugh at the Tinderfessions twitter account…but does anybody want to bring one of those guys/girls home for the long haul? Someday, you’re going to have to have the “number” conversation with your girlfriend—we already know she’s lying when she says “three,” but wouldn’t you rather have the number be closer to three than three hundred? You may say you don’t care, but you still get a sick feeling in your stomach thinking about all the other men who have already been there before you, don’t you?
Sure, we may have discouraged people from outwardly mocking the fat or the ugly, but who gets the most attention in the real world? When I recently got back on the workout horse and dropped twenty pounds in twelve weeks, everybody noticed. I have received more compliments for my weight loss than I ever have for anything I’ve done or for any music or words I’ve written. My Facebook posts about my weight loss have received five to ten times as many likes and/or comments as anything else. While we
are all trying to make each other feel better about being fat, we all secretly want to be thin. Society pretends to accept the obese while rewarding the fit.
The poor and stupid are celebrated in society simply because it suits society’s purpose for the poor and stupid to be happy. As long as they are placated with their own version of soma in the form of food stamps, cable television, and cell phones, they’re content. They all thought they voted for a revolution eight years ago. They largely haven’t noticed that the world is exactly the same for them that it was then, it’s just a different flavor of soma now. They should be mad about being poor and stupid, but they aren’t.
There’s just one remaining sin — hypocrisy. Anyone who fails to get on board with the general trend is accused of being a closet case, a hater, a hypocrite. Yet this society, in its inequality between what it claims to value and what it actually does value, is the greatest example of that hypocrisy one could imagine.
Still, appearance isn’t just more important than reality in many cases. It has the power to shape reality. The longer society appears to celebrate these things, the closer we may get to truly celebrating them. Do any of us want to live in a world where the morally loose, fat, stupid, and poor are glorified? The choice is up to us.