Troubling Nostalgia

I know I haven’t posted in a while. The new semester began, and I’ve been busy with that. (Excuses, excuses….)

Taking the advice of a friend who read my earlier posts, I’m going to try to be more conversational. I teach an Opinion Writing class that blends traditional columns with blogging, and I have the students get feedback from a peer. So, thinking I should do what I say and not what I (usually) do, I asked a friend to comment on my blog. The verdict: I don’t quite have the hang of this blogging thing. Maybe I should be less structured, less didactic, and more natural.

So, okay, I’ll try.

A couple of people have sent me good stuff to write about lately. My friend Randy Nichols sent this link to an “In Media Res” clip about the new show Pan Am: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2011/09/19/never-been-flown-fall-tvs-paratexts.

And Michelle sent this link to a Business Insider story about sexist ads from the bad old days: http://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-sexist-and-racist-ads-2011-6

In the first one, Randy’s colleague Jennifer Gillan has some good comments. I particularly like her comment that networks have “dispatched their female casts on paratextual containment duty.” There’s a troublingly bemused nostalgia that often accompanies media retrospectives on sexist portrayals. What’s that about? Is it actually part of what we might call the process of post-feminism—the ongoing temporal denial of sexism that actually keeps it firmly in the present by constantly placing it in the past?

It’s nothing new. In poring over 1920s women’s magazines for my book, I found a similar bemusement at Victorian attitudes. We wouldn’t have such bemused nostalgia for Jim Crow-era attitudes. Why is it okay when it’s women?

Efforts like Ms. Magazine’s “No Comment” column took a lot of heat (mostly in the form of ridicule and scorn) for helping to raise consciousness about sexist advertising. I, for one, thank them.