Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Travelings of Middle Class White Women portrayed in Pop Culture

I've been reading the book Tales of a Female Nomad. I've been thinking about the culture of traveling to "exotic" places and it's role lately in popular culture. With movies such as "Eat, Pray, Love," "Sex and The City 2," or popular books like Medicine Woman. It seems that women, on the brink of divorce or with nothing better to do, go traveling to foreign (non-Western) countries or to visit non-Western cultures. With the exception of Tales of a Female Nomad, these books and movies include predictions from the very wise non-Western people from these "exotic" cultures. It gives the impression that every older non-Western person must have psychic abilities.
When I think about it, I think that's it's not only rude to the "exotic" culture, it's rude to the people in United States. Where are the movies about the men going on adventures in foreign places, the ones that don't include guns? Where are the movies or reality TV shows about letting a poor person of any race go on a grand vacation to some place they would never dream of or to those hard hit areas where assistance is needed? Where are the documentaries about the countless church goes who are building houses, going to orphanages, and who are assisting people in countries outside the United States? Are there good documentaries about cultures outside the United States, maybe ones where you just observe, no narration about what outside cultures who don't speak the language think that these other cultures are doing? I would rather see those and hear about those than to have these ideals about women in foreign countries and how safe, amazing and bourgeois it is.

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