Of pin curls and hoodies

I was born at the tail end of the pin-curl culture. In 1950s Rhode Island you would see women at Woolworth’s and Kornstein’s covered in small, flattened spirals of hair plastered to their scalps with crisscrossing metal fasteners resembling implements of torture. Some wore brown hairnets on top of it. The effect upon removal of the bobby pins was a nice Betty Boop look. But who ever saw it? Maybe a dozen people at a soiree?

As a child it never dawned on me to ask such a woman, “For whom are you trying to look beautiful, Madame Dubois? Certainly not for the hundreds of us in the daytime in department stores and supermarkets who must endure the ugly duckling stage and not the swan’s emergence.” It never dawned on me because, by and large, people accept their own cultures unquestioningly.

Cultures always seem normal to those in them and weird to those outside them. It is important to remember that, and the thought of it has always helped me be accepting of other traditions—to the point that I married a Korean.

Cultures always seem normal to those in them and weird to those outside them.

The Koreans have a no shoe rule in the house, and it is strictly observed. Also, you had better have a beverage in your Korean visitor’s hand within two minutes of his crossing your threshold. My Asian husband once scandalized his mother by eating a hot dog in front of her at a train station in Seoul after she had declined one. Cultural correctness would have dictated his passing up on one too. But he was hungry, so he ate, an act of defiance of the zeitgeist. Such things are the beginnings of a culture giving way.

I see young men on hot summer days wearing knit caps or hoodies. I’d like to tell them: You wouldn’t have done that in the 1950s, young man, because you would have been laughed out of town. You do it now because it is safe and somehow even cool. (What we will not do for cool.) The same goes for jeans clinging on for dear life below the round of the buttocks, a style whose passing I will not lament.

I teach English as a second language to Peruvians, and one of the sample sentences in their test prep manual has the word “inappropriate.” I explained to Raul and Carolina that we never used the word “inappropriate” in the United States until the 1980s, but that they had better get used to it because their 4- and 6-year-olds will hear it every single day in the public schools here. I explain that in the 1980s absolutes went under for the third time in the Northern Hemisphere and we were no longer allowed to consider an action “wrong” or “right” but only “appropriate” or “inappropriate.” I like how Edward Skidelsky put it in Prospect Magazine:

“No words are more typical of our moral culture than ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unacceptable.’ They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.”

I have a friend who used to be very solid on what’s “right” and “wrong,” but then she started working with inner city people who don’t share suburban values about showing up to work reliably, and she started going wobbly on culture and telling me that it’s not their fault because they’re caught in a cycle of poverty and they didn’t have parents who taught them. She told me that their culture is different from ours. I came away feeling oddly guilty, like it would be wrong (not only inappropriate) to judge this culture harshly.

Thankfully, the Lord will sort out cultures with a perfect understanding of all mitigating factors.