I have always been a bit of a pop culture addict – I was a longtime reader and early subscriber of magazines like People, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Esquire, GQ, Us Weekly – no plane ride would be complete without me lugging along the latest glossies. I still consume a great deal of culture content, although I now do it primarily through online outlets like Vulture and content creators.
As I mentioned before in this space, I like to track lots of different discourse threads, and I also like to consume content with no clear purpose other than to learn about other people and other ways of existing. As an example: I am extremely afraid of heights, but I love to hike, so I watch a lot of videos about what it’s like to hike places I will never be able to do, like climb up the cables of Half-Dome in Yosemite, or summit Angel’s Landing in Zion. I also watch GRWM (Get Ready With Me) videos even though I hardly ever wear any make-up or style my hair. (I am especially fascinated by curly hair videos, even though my hair is super-straight and fine.)
In other words, I am just a curious being! And I am also interested in outcomes and trends, when it comes to culture – what people are gravitating to, what is motivating them, what is grabbing their attention. I would argue it’s a fundamental part of communications, actually (my profession) to understand these different levels of engagement, interest, and activation, and I am also just a curious, maybe even nosy sort of person. Most writers are. We look at strangers on the street, in other public spaces, we have chance encounters with them and then we immediately have a backstory for who they are and what makes them tick.
This piece came from me thinking and wondering about how much other people, particularly Americans, get outside their cultural home zones. As a reminder, the strict definition of culture is: a shared set of values, beliefs, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that a group of people uses to navigate the world. (I’ve shared this definition before, in a previous post about culture.) This is a fairly innocuous definition on its face – you can see how “culture,” in a positive sense, can operate as that which binds together a family, or a community, or a region. But to me, there’s an obvious downside to the “shared” quality of culture, in that when cultural norms become ossified, and people get overly invested in THEIR culture over someone else’s, they can end up having an isolating, polarizing, and exclusionary effect, with the end result being that people are more ignorant and blind than they truly ought to be.
I hope that many people in the world would agree that being curious about other people’s cultures – cultures you have not been exposed to – is a positive thing. In America recently, there are many days when it feels like that is not the case. The people who are in charge of our federal government, at the moment, have a culture – a culture based on ostentatious displays of wealth and exclusion, with no regard for the suffering of or harm done to others. In fact, the suffering and cruelty seem to be the point. How is this culture manifested? In their rhetoric about women and gender identity and sexual orientation and Jesus and guns; in the fake gold-leaf paint that Trump applies to everything; in the tearing down of historical edifices to build tacky monuments to one person’s ego and power; in the too-large, ugly shoes that the Cabinet members wear because otherwise, they would displease their Dear Leader.
While not wanting to be overly harsh about cultural norms not my own, I am shocked and nauseated by the vulgarity and cruelty of the MAGA culture on a daily basis. But then I wonder: where are the harmful cultures and beliefs being sustained and spread, outside of the federal government and the Heritage Foundation and MAGA rallies? Are there corners of discourse where the rotten and decaying culture of MAGA is being maintained and even revived?
I once had this idea for a nonfiction book, the type of book that I generally don’t read or want to write, about how certain types of political power was being exercised in the shadows of the regulatory state. As an example: during the era when conservatives couldn’t outright ban abortion, they sought to create limitations on abortion through regulations – like imposing absurd zoning requirements on women’s health clinics, for example. (These were called TRAP laws.) Another example: fossil fuel favoritism in public utility commissions, a state-based regulatory body that few, if any, pay attention to, but it’s in those venues where decisions are made about whether, say, to buy energy supply from clean, renewable sources versus dirty, climate-altering fossil fuel sources.
I will likely never write that book, but like my theory about political power in obscure regulatory spaces, I am becoming increasingly interested in the shadowy corners of our universe where particular cultures are taking root and perhaps spreading. There are times when those underground cultures become mainstream – I am old enough to remember when MTV’s The Real World was a novel form of television, and now reality television is mainstream, and everywhere, and it’s a form of culture that people consume or subscribe to according to very specific cultural norms they follow about gender roles, employment situations, lifestyle, and beauty. (Don’t get me started on how the Kardashians influenced cultural perceptions around beauty and cosmetic surgery in ways that I think are quite harmful to people of ALL genders.)
A more recent and hyper-specific example: I’ve mentioned before said that I quit legacy media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post because of their highly-compromised and problematic business goals and corporate ties that have all but obscured whatever journalistic integrity they once had. Towards the end of my quitting, I was primarily playing the NYT games, and so I turned to random little games I could play on my iPhone. They are not as satisfying – in fact, they are a little dumb – but they are highly addictive and some of them scratch itches in my brain related to spatial reasoning and sequential puzzle-solving.
These dumb games come with a LOT of ads – in that, you can buy ad-free versions, but when you are seeking to get extra lives or moves, you can watch a sponsored video in exchange. And to my surprise, many of these ads were for “books” offered by online publishers which are apparently located in Singapore or China. The ads would allow you to read the first few chapters of the book, then you’d have to buy a subscription to keep reading.
Seeing these ads made me remember how, when I used to have “writer” as my main descriptor on LinkedIn, I got a message asking if I was interested in writing “erotic romance novels featuring Mafia wives and their strong, somewhat violent paramours.” I was of course like: ewww, no, and also, why me? Now that I’ve encountered these book app ads in these games, I know exactly what type of “books” they were asking me to write.
People: the writing in these book samples (because yes of course, I read the free chapters, because remember, I’m curious about any and all things) is TERRIBLE. Like, barely literate. Like, I can’t even imagine AI agents putting out something so bad. But what is worse to me is that the cultural norms portrayed in these so-called stories are just the worst of the worst – patriarchy at its most toxic. The men are always ferally attractive and also, borderline abusive and violent and unhealthily possessive. The women are submissive, panting with desire for men to dominate and possess them, and absolutely lacking in agency or personality. It reminds me of how JD Vance talks about women, except he’s such a damply unattractive, fake, desperate person, he can’t even aspire to embodying the toxic ideal of patriarchy.
But: these ads have alerted me to the fact that yes, the retrogressive patriarchy and toxic masculinity of the MAGA Republicans aren’t just on display in Trump’s mewling, pathetic little Cabinet members –these cultural norms are also fully present in these obscure little advertising campaigns that support the dumb games I’m playing. Meaning, you can always encounter the cultural norms that you find to be harmful, or unhelpful, in more places than you might think. Culture has a way of seeping and leaking and spreading until it’s taken more hold than one might imagine. And while cultural norms can positively influence people to do good things and respect and love one another, they can also serve to bind the worst of the worst together – like, all of the disparate individuals and groups who voted for Trump and continue to support him.
I do think a lot about whether, as a part of a communications or narrative change strategy, we can be better about shining a light into those shadowy corners where toxic cultural norms still exist and perhaps even uprooting and replacing those norms with something better. But what I am most curious about is whether we who want culture to be positive, binding, and uplifting – we who want culture to foster wholesome, healthy curiosity about one another, rather than feeling divisiveness and fear – we who want culture to teach people about respect, humility, and shared dreams and visions for brighter futures for more people – do we know how to do that? Do we know how to seed and grow the cultures we want to see and learn about – the cultures that make people feel seen and heard and valued? Do we know how to root out the violent, misogynist cultures lurking in shadowy corners, or do we at least know how to teach people to ignore them, and not be susceptible to them?
I don’t wholly know the answers to all of this. What I do know is that there was a week this summer where my feeds were dominated by the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, and the Knicks winning the NBA championship, and during that week, what I heard and saw were people from many different cultural backgrounds coming together in celebration of great accomplishments and also sounding notes of hope for the future. Of course, a presidential center and a particular underdog team are not everyday occurrences, nor can those cultural zeitgeist moments be manufactured. But I feel like we ought to be searching for more moments like that – moments when we can show up with our fervent desires for progress and positivity and optimism, moments when we can learn about and even merge the best of our respective cultural backgrounds and norms, and maybe, together, build something off of that. Maybe it’s possible to let cultural influence bring more of us together, rather than pull us apart.
Minna Jung Consulting 