Brave New World & Social Conditioning

EVERYBODY!! Let's explicitly return to social constructions for a post, shall we?

I've been reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for the past few days. It's not the pinnacle in difficult literature (mainly I feel like it's something I should have read in high school) but the ideas in it are good. I agree with its place in the high school literary canon and I also think it's a good piece of literature to use to view capitalist society.

Regardless, the novel has some interesting ideas about social conditioning; namely, hypnopaedia, in which the children are taught ideas about their caste and societal functions through whispered repetitions in their sleep.

Which all brings me back to a recent post on Jezebel. The post deals with Natasha Walter's notion that sexism has gotten "worse" over the last few years (since the 1980's and the rash of the power mom). The editor who wrote the post doesn't seem to take that bait, but the commenters certainly did--by agreeing with Walter. Many of them were horrified by the notion of raising a daughter in the current cultural climate. This hypothetical daughter, they argued, would have to live in a culture that sexualizes her by age 5, that demands that she is skinny, that wants her to be hairless, tan, blonde, big-boobed, etc etc etc.

My initial reaction to the Jezebel commenter reactions was: WHAT??! Do we, as women and as mothers (or future mothers), live with absolutely NO agency when it comes to raising our daughers? It seemed preposterous to me that we couldn't prevent the perpetuation of women like Heidi Montag who, if given the resources, will plastic her body to oblivion in order to fit some vague beauty ideal. So I posted as much on Jezebel. And, to some extent, I stand by that comment because YES, I do happen to think that my mother did a good job of raising me outside of some standard idea of beauty and that my college did a good job of waking me up to all the gender problems there are in this world. However, this post posits that sexism has gotten worse in the 2000s and as I grew up in the 90s, I suppose my experience as a feminist is somewhat invalid in the argument about our daughters' futures.

The bottom line is that yes: social conditioning exists, as it does in Brave New World. We might not be whispering our children to sleep with lies about how good it feels to be an Alpha-Plus, but we're entertaining them with commercials that claim they need that new backpack or that all girls love pink. And even if I, as a mother, refuse to let my daughter watch television or look at fashion magazines, one commenter pointed out that the girls at my daughter's school won't necessarily live by such strict rules, and she will be exposed to these ideas in some way.

Backing away from the idea of future children for a minute: the bottom line is the my own experience has told me that I'm socially conditioned by my gender, for better or for worse. This fact was triggered for me while reading Brave New World: in one part, the Director talks about the fact that the lower-caste peoples were conditioned to love sports in the country. This conditioning had a two-fold effect: first, the people would consume transportation to get to the country; second, they would also need to purchase sports equipment in order to participate in these activities. This way, the demand for products is higher and society benefits from everybody's consumerism.

And yes, it seems that women are specifically targeted in this way. Growing up we are inundated with information about our beauty. We need this kind of makeup in order to cover up the circles under our eyes, or we need this kind of pore cleanser to prevent blackheads. Yes, it's true that men aren't entirely unaffected by this kind of gender-based advertising, but the advertising geared towards women typically has the kinds of products that, frankly, most men don't feel compelled to buy. I try to spend wisely because I don't make all the money in the world; however, I have noticed it is a lot easier for my brother to live a spartan lifestyle than me. Aside from our basic differences in personalities (I have an obsession with owning design and art objects that he does not necessarily share), I also find myself needing to buy makeup, clothing, hair products, and any number of basic hygenic products more often than he does. Because of my gender-based consumer conditioning, I incur more expenses than him in the month simply because I am a girl.

I will, of course, exempt all people who live outside of the traditional gender binary in this critique of society: of course men who perform as women have to buy makeup. I'm not saying we're so heavily conditioned that it's physically impossible for us to buy products that are typically intended for one gender or the other. But the point is: if a man decides he wants to buy makeup, he gets a label. And these labels are often pejorative, ranging from the mildest (metrosexual) to the most severe (she-male). One is even at peril when crossing the invisible consumer gender divide. And we have social conditioning to thank for that.