[LMB] OT: squ/ick in some ``feminist'' sf; was sequential tartthread

[Mitch Miller]

About 10 years ago, when they were 10 and 12, I took my kids to
a production of South Pacific.  They couldn't get it.  It took me about
a half an hour to even convey the idea to them that only 50 years before,
there would have been an issue about a "white" woman falling for a guy
with half-Polynesian children. Or that a "hunky" white young officer wouldn't
go with a "real hottie" whose skin was dark.  It was inexplicable to them.
I finally got them to accept my word that it had been that way, but they 
never really assimilated the concept and didn't respond at all to the show.

I don't know whether it's good or bad, but they don't even use or think of 
people as "white."  Being from Los Angeles, they will refer to somebody as
Hispanic, Anglo, Persian, Russian, Jewish, Armenian, or whatever, but never 
"white."  Not that they wouldn't apply stereotypes to various ethnicities,
they just don't say "white people."  Maybe it's because of our multi-ethnic
city, but "race" is used here as it was up until the 1920s and '30s, to mean
ethnicity or nationality, as in "the British race" or "the Irish race" then,
and "La Raza" now.

Mitch Miller


From: Azalais Aranxta <tiamat at tsoft.com>

<snip>
I run an online RPG set in the year 1942.  Many of the younger
players, even those with a fair amount of historical knowledge,
have to be reminded firmly that modern attitudes toward sex,
dating and gender roles did not yet exist, and that the attitudes
which are found in the wizarding world (which is far less sexist
and not terribly homophobic, not to mention largely somewhat
irreligious) are still problematic, only in different ways.

It's so hard for the people I meet who were born in the 1980s or
later to wrap their minds around the idea that some folks are
just naturally inferior to others because of skin colour or
gender.  There are exceptions to this rule but those exceptions
are largely people whose families have deliberately instilled
sexist ideas in them and controlled their access to information
during the formative years of their lives.
<snip>

~malfoy