[78-L] Negative.

[Donna Halper]

>Julian said--
> >Have you noticed that people who live normal lives are often described
> >in negative terms, e.g. non-drinker, non-believer, non-smoker,
> >non-driver etc?

It's a "dominant ideology" thing-- why do we use BC and AD, which are 
Christian terms, rather than more neutral and non-religious 
terms?  Time did not begin with the birth of Christianity, yet this 
is how we mark our calendars because Christianity became the dominant 
belief system.  In cultures where drinking and smoking and believing 
in a religion are the norm, those who deviate from it are marked in 
language.  Ditto for those who deviate from the accepted rules about 
careers:  years ago, women who were doctors were considered unsual-- 
the norm was men, so it was "doctors" and then "women doctors", or 
conversely, since most nurses were female, a man who entered nursing 
was marked in language as a "male nurse."  In movie magazines of the 
20s and 30s and 40s, women who were successful and independent had to 
do the requisite publicity shoot in which they were shown with their 
family, and usually quoted as saying how much they really preferred 
being wives and mothers to being performers.  Most women performers 
back then seemed to understand the drill:  if you wanted to be 
accepted, you had to walk a fine line, never overtly or openly 
challenging society's expectation that a woman's chief role was 
marriage and family, even as she gained her own success in the world 
of music or film or radio. Yeah, some women like May West spoke up, 
but for the most part, women entertainers seemed to understand the 
need to "act feminine" when necessary.

Btw, one of the things that does NOT make this an OT conversation is 
that in reading the old magazines and listening to the lyrics of old 
songs, we can find the way the norms of that culture were expressed, 
and what the average person was taught about being "normal."