The Modern Woman

A couple months ago I was rereading Gone With The Wind when I got the lyrics to Anaconda by Nicki Minaj stuck in my head. The combination was such an odd one that I had to stop and think about it and this is what I came up with.
For those of you who have had the grave misfortune of not reading all 1400 pages of Gone With The Wind multiple times, or watching the three hour movie, I will give you an extremely brief summary. The story is set in the last dying days of the Old South. The Civil War is displayed from the view point of a spoiled and opinionated Southern Belle, Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett, like the other Southern women around her, struggles to cope with the world she was raised in and knows, disintegrate around her. The women can do no more than watch helplessly from the sidelines. That was the Southern woman. She was helpless. She was ornamental. She was not expected to have ideas of her own. Scarlett is all but cast out from decent society when she becomes a career woman and takes charge of her own life. The women though, while ornamental, were the backbone of society. They were the neck of the household; anything they wanted, they could obtain, though it had to be manipulated through the head of the man. Women were highly respected and required the protection of a man. The young men were not allowed to call the young women by their first names without preceding it with "Miss" and even that act was one worked towards for months and could only take place after the express permission of the female. Marriage proposals were not accepted the first time, or even the second, but the third. Women were protected and men were expected to know how to protect them and treat the women like the fragile delicate creatures they were.
Contrast this with Nicki Minaj's recent Anaconda music video. The most known line of the song is "My anaconda don't-My anaconda don't-My anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns hon." Obviously you can work out the sexual innuendo in this line for yourself. Nicki expresses that women have been empowered. They do not need a man to complete them. They are free to have ideas, to have their own goals, to do what they want, to sleep with whom ever they please. Men have accepted that women can think for themselves and are not, in fact, fragile helpless creatures.
But at what cost?
Objectifying a women in the Old South was done in secret. The "bad woman" in Gone With The Wind is not a part of society. Men of dignity do not enter her house or even entertain notions of doing such a thing. The "bad woman" made a choice not accepted in polite society and she embraces it, even though the rest of society can hardly stand to talk about her. Objectifying women was a hidden process in the Old South. Meanwhile, we have a famous pop singer objectifying herself for reasons known alone to her and the objectification of women is so commonplace that she's barely scandalous. However, no one can deny that what Minaj did worked. I know who Nicki Minaji is. I have watched some of her music videos, even if I lost interest half way through. She's built career for herself, like thousands of other women today, and probably made more money in a couple years than I will ever make in my lifetime. She's a career woman and I give her my respect for having the guts to put herself out there and make something of herself.
Women have gained a lot in the world of business since 1864. Unfortunately, I believe we may have lost on the home front. People's eyes bug out when I tell them I want a lot of kids and stay at home with them. Marriage is a suggestion rather than a social norm. Motherhood is prolonged until almost the last possible instant. Michelle Duggar is an oddity for welcoming as many children as she is able to have.
All in all, a woman's mind is far more respected today than it was 150 years ago, but I don't believe the same can be said for her body. We have given up respect for our bodies for respect of our minds. Now the problem is; how do we attain respect for both?
Scroll down for respect!
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Marriage: A Controversy

Florida became the 36th state in the Union to legalize gay marriage today. In light of that event, I thought I'd write a post about it all.
A couple weeks ago I was skiing for the weekend at a resort in West Virginia.  I couldn't get a girlfriend to be my ski buddy, so I found myself spending the entire weekend with my dad. This was fine with me. My dad and I have an excellent relationship and, as I spend most of my time at college or camp and away from home, I treasure every minute I get to spend quality time with him. A bit of back ground on my dad; he's got a PhD in History and spends pretty much all of his time thinking about what's going on in the world and how it's going to affect him. We got onto the topic of gay marriage while 30 feet in the air, our legs dangling off the ski lift. 
While my dad and I don't exactly see eye to eye on the topic of gay marriage, personally I don't really have much of an opinion one way or the other as long as I don't have to do anything I don't believe in, my dad brought up an excellent point. His very unnerving factoid was that he has never seen any statistics on how many gay marriages there have been since it was first legalized.
Once I got home after the weekend and warmed myself up, I powered up the old laptop and did a quick Google search. Now, gay marriage has been legal in the US since 2004, when the state of Massachusetts decided to legalize it. That means, that since 2004, if you were gay and really wanted to get married, you could move to Massachusetts. I did a quick search after that to find out the number of gay marriages there have been since 2004. Firstly, it was a little murky to find the actual number of marriages. About the fourth link down, I found one article by a place called Pew Research Center. This article did hold exactly what I was looking for. It  gave me the numbers of gay marriages to happen in each state, there were nine at the time, that allowed gay marriage, withholding Maryland and DC. The number they gave me? 71,165. Over a time span of about nine years, 2004-2013. The Numbers from 2014 hadn't come in yet. I then ran how many marriages happened in the United States in 2013 into Google. The first link I came across told me exactly how many marriages happen a year, how old the bride commonly is, how old the groom is, how much money they spent on the wedding. The number of US marriages a year? About 2.3 million. Multiply that number by 9, and you get 20.7 million marriages. I then divided 71, 165 by 20,700,000, a trick I learned in grade school to calculate my test averages. My number? .00343. That's .003 gay marriages to happen in the US since it was first legalized.
It isn't that gay marriages aren't happening. It's just that the demand for them isn't as high as the media would have you believe. It isn't even close. It's virtually a non issue. I'm sure, if you happen to spend any time on any social media platform with young adults, you've seen the image of the two little old ladies who got married in their 90s after decades of waiting. You know multiple celebrities, like Ellen Degeneres or Neil Patrick Harris who are gay and have gotten married. I'm not saying that you shouldn't believe in gay marriage if you do or stand up for it. I'm here to say that gay marriage is drastically over publicized and given far more media attention than it deserves. Focus your energies on a cause that affects a much wider percent of the population, like racism for instance, and work on erasing that. Gay marriage isn't going to go away and it will probably become legal everywhere eventually, but affects too small a percentage of the population to justify all the hype. Do your research, find a cause you believe is worthy of fighting for, and don't just go with the flow.
Scroll the day away!
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