Brooke Bumgarner Reflecting on 10/30

After discussing Horkheimer and Adorno in class on Thursday, I kept thinking about the concept of sameness in our society. I started to think about all the ways that sameness is perpetuated, both directly and indirectly in my life and in those I observe around me.



For a media text, I remembered the song Ordinary Human by One Republic that is featured in the new film, The Giver. See music video inserted above.



Throughout the lyrics, the idea of sameness is perpetuated. At one point it is sung that "And in the daylight I could swear, we're the same". When the song talks about how they're all the same, it further goes on to say "But I'm just an ordinary human". In the movie the citizens are all medicated so that they don't feel emotions or have memories. Because of this, society regulates the individual, perpetuating essentially the same "picture perfect human" that is sung about in the song.



This goes along with a lot of what Horkheimer and Adorno have to say. We are made aware that culture today is infected with sameness and that is it really hard to get outside of that. Without being medicated like the individuals in The Giver, we are perhaps "conditioned" or medicated in our own way. With consumerism and capitalism especially we have come to believe we all need the best items and society clings to the ideas of power and dominance.



It's really interesting in my opinion to think about all of this, and especially throughout the Halloween weekend, I definitely saw lots of this perpetuated. One quote that we talked about in class, "The dominant taste derives its ideal from the advertisement from commodified beauty" was really in play over the weekend. We can think about the cookie-cutter type ideologies that exist in our culture and about how they extend into our social spheres. Over the weekend I saw sexy nurse costumes, sexy animals, sexy maids, sexy school girls and many more. On the other hand, I didn't see any women reflected in roles of power such as CEO's or doctors or lawyers. I mentioned this to one of my best friends, in which she replied, "well no one is going to pay attention to me, or even know what I'm trying to be if I dress up as a CEO". So our culture has perpetuated these ideas of patriarchy and gender roles as normative, all the while furthering these ideas of sameness that make all women dress up in these roles. I don't believe I saw one college girl, or woman my age, dressed up in something NOT in attempt to appearing sexy and more often than not submissive.



Just a little something I observed over the weekend that I thought could relate to our discussion on Thursday. See each woman picks their costume believing in their individuality, however, pseudo individuality is clearly at play. Which is really perpetuated by the reproduction of such costumes and ideologies by consumerism. I guess women believe that if they buy the sexy french maid costume, men will notice them and they'll finally stand out. Thus giving them the power that the quote above talks about. But really, they are participating in the ideology of patriarchy and further participating in mass consumerism culture.