In a fit to avoid writing the last four pages of my script for Writing for Television, I scrolled the length of my facebook homepage to see what friends facebook deemed worth my noticing at that moment. In that one scroll, I found a post about the practice of giving a girl diamonds and a post about gay marriage and how unfair it is that gay individuals cannot marry while the current state of affairs of heterosexual marriage is shambles. These two posts brought me to the same thought, one that's been brewing for awhile.
The first post brought up something that's been hitting me every Monday night for the past month. Every Monday night I go to my friend Danny's place and we watch Monday night Raw and I love every damn minute. Raw, you see, is marketed towards a certain section of American culture: the culture that believes violence is still applicable in society. I am of the view that it is not, but i still watch it for the spectacle, for the story-telling, for the genuine human drama behind the scenes, and for the physical abilities of the wrestlers. Marketing on television is complex, even I don't pretend to fully comprehend it, but i have enough a notion of how it works to be able to spot it.
Here is an example: the usual ad spots for Monday Night Raw range from diamond stores like Zales and Kay to hunting and fishing video games, fast food and franchise restaurants, and, of course, spots for upcoming WWE events. The usual ad spots on, say, Comedy Central, are much more varied because they get more than one audience and must act accordingly. Advertisers buy time on shows they feel their target audience will be watching.
First off, what does that say about those that are watching Raw? Second, what does that say of advertisers' perceptions of those people? Are they right?
The diamond ads. I see them every commercial break. The one that played all last night was for Zales and essentially suggests that you're supposed to buy a woman diamonds. end of story. You buy her diamonds to make her happy, to make her marry you, to make her sleep with you. Despite how far we've come, this is still very much a society founded on the desires of the male. This raises a question i think is worth asking: is equality in the sexes a good thing? I think so. I feel that a society can function with men and women's only difference being their sex organs, but I've yet to truly witness this. Our perceptions are too tainted with the dominant male system.
Why do men buy women diamonds? Mating. Diamonds are part of an evolving mating ritual that has become tradition. Tradition is the ultimate antithesis of evolution, simply because it suggests that we have come as far as we can go. The mating ritual, along with sexual desires, exist so that we will procreate and continue the process of evolution until we can no longer.
I have only recently decided that evolution is worth pursuing. Up until now, i disagreed with tradition, i didn't feel we'd come as far as we could, but i felt we'd come as far as we would. that was a major source of my depression: that we weren't going anywhere as living beings, we were stuck in our own bullshit. That and the sheer meaninglessness of it all was just too much for me. I couldn't accept the fact that my life, all our lives, meant nothing. I tried for a long time to accept this, for awhile i did, but now I've reached a different conclusion.
I refuse to believe this is as far as we can go. I have seen that it is not so. I see it every day. I feel it. We're still evolving. You and I will never see the final fruition of our advancement, if there is such a state as perfection, but we've already come farther than any known species and we're only going forward.
what is evolution? I'm not sure, to be honest. I believe evolution derives from the basic instinct to survive and to make life as comfortable and as happy as possible. I believe that we've come a long way because we can have roofs over our heads, we can always be in touch with the ones we love, we can eat wonderful foods without having to know how to make it wonderful, we can play wonderful games, watch wonderful stories, even make our own, we can experience truly amazing things with ever sense the human body possesses. We have come so far in making life more enjoyable and comfortable.
What am I getting at with all of this? That marriage is a part of tradition. And, like tradition, it will eventually give way. Is it nice? Certainly, for some. But it isn't necessary, and that is what evolution is concerned with: necessity. Somewhere back there we got our wants confused with our needs.
Marriage isn't necessary. The decay of the "traditional" relationship is just a part of evolution. Old ways fading in favor of happiness. Once they made marriage necessary in life, they opened up a lot of happiness, but even more pain. Pain for those that couldn't have what they'd been taught to want, pain for those that refused to want what they'd been told to, and pain for those stuck in marriages with people they didn't want. I will not mourn marriage when it dies. Most likely I won't be around to see that day. I don't really mind. So when you see people unhappy in marriages, people getting married for a matter of hours, and other people barred from getting married, don't worry too much about it. Yeah, it sucks, but it won't be like this forever. It'll change in time. I believe marriage will be available for all sexual persuasions in due time. Gay marriage is on the horizon, so long as the forces of evolution don't lose out to the forces of tradition. That's a tough fight, though, because evolution teaches us not to fight, while tradition believes we must fight to survive.
We don't need violence to survive anymore.
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