2011-08-30

HTIC: Stuck From Birth

We don't even get a break when we're children: the media starts imposing things on us from day one.  There is loads of good commentary on this, but I'd recommend the video on Feminist Frequency .  Implanted in us at an early age is the idea that girls need these pretty things and that boys need to make the world for themselves.  Even as preschoolers we have it pushed on us that females are second class and only really there to serve and support men until its time to get married, then its up to the man to pay for everything or else he doesn't really love you.  Fundamentally, the way the corporations infiltrate childrens' minds is violating, but if you're too young to know you're being manipulated, who can stop them?
As we get older, its easier to prey on people with guilt, shame, or proposing their lives will be better if they just do X.  Teenagers get sold how to fit in and look "normal", which is its own giant bag of bullshit.  Girls continue to get the short end of the stick because if they doesn't fit into certain archetypes then they straight up don't exist. Some of the what we get pushed to just accept are certain hygiene standards, being submissive, having to be a certain type of pretty, even how we're supposed to behave sexually is commodified and sold to us.
Once the teenage market starts getting becoming relevant to where you are in life it loses most of the subversive touch, its stops implying that this is how you should act and just presents how you're to be molded as the only option.  Sexual education programs in schools are sponsored by the same companies that sell extra whitening toothpaste, deodorant and leg razors.  After school specials only show girls that fit the desired future consumer mold having a decent life.  Even "alternative" people are regulated, and its handled to only properly be a phase.  At the hands of the media, we're encouraged to hate ourselves, fear our natural bodies, and conform to things that make your life expensive and miserable.  We're even sold an overpriced and disrespectful death at the hand of social norms.
There is one advantage that we do have: as soon as you decide to pull back from the vortex of consumerism, you can start pulling apart all of the damage its done.  Online, there are huge libraries of counter-culture information about how to quit living by the corporate blade and most big cities will have some kind of anarchist group.  It will never be too late to take charge of your own life, and there will never be a better time then the present.

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