Culturally, the proverb “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has always been true. The concept, however, is not valid for moral behavior.
During her summer in Haiti, my college friend made many friends. One day as she chatted with the Haitian teens, they asked to fix her straight, loose hair. She sat still while they combed, braided and tied her hair to match theirs and then declared “now she looked beautiful.”
She did not agree, but recognized that in her culture the popularity of braids had waned.
Traveling to Indonesia, I adjusted my wardrobe to match the unwritten national dress code. Although no way existed for this pale-faced giant to ever be mistaken for a petite, black-haired Indonesian woman, I could wear blouses and dresses with sleeves and a headscarf.
Back in the States, fickle fashions and peer expectations change our national apparel rapidly. My daughter, now a mother of three, smiles at the styles she had to have in junior high and now would not touch. In a few short years, so much has changed in clothing and hair.
The rapidity of the change partly hinges on teenage peer pressure. Parents, rightly so, have their concerns about peer pressure, but of even greater concern should be the cultural pressure to conform to rapidly changing mores.
A thousand years ago and more, few, if any, questioned the practice of enslaving any person of any race captured during an invasive military action – or to enter slavery to settle a debt. Then economics and culture shifted to frown on the practice of slavery. Nations began abolishing the practice of slavery, but still there are an estimated 12 to 27 million persons bound in slavery, according to the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Slavery still exists where parents can, and do, sell their children to be household slaves or dishonest men promise to provide education to third-world teenage boys at a school far away – when they really intend to take the boys to work in primitive mining camps.
In the United States slavery is no longer acceptable – a person’s body is their own and cannot be sold into slavery.
Yet it is fashionable – even acceptable – for young teens and adults, male and female, to sell out to peer pressure and give up their virginity long before their wedding night. Contrary to the morals of previous generations, many in our culture now expect that the couple will share a bed long before the wedding. Even the accommodations on popular television shows reflect this: Consider “Shedding for the Wedding” – where engaged couples compete to lose the most weight to win a fancy wedding day; the contestants have one bed in one bedroom. On “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” programs – the final decisions often includes checking out the dating options physically. Ironically, for all the hype and romance, to date, none of the bachelors have married their final choice; and only a few of the bachelorettes have.
Sexual behavior once considered quite abhorrent must now be embraced as beautiful. In the past, scandal surrounded the revelation of couples living together, or being “friends with benefits.” Now, some parents even prefer a one-night stand (or many more) before taking marriage vows – and the only reference to avoiding STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) is a reminder to practice safe sex – not to avoid sexual intimacy.
It may take a while for the winds to shift away from our current cultural acceptance of sexual activities. Perhaps it will change for medically sound physical reasons.
In the 1500s, Europeans acquired a new habit – smoking. From then until the mid-1900’s, tobacco held an accepted, if dubious, place in society; so much so that in the movies any good host offered guests a cigarette as they settled down to converse.
As the research mounted against the physically destructive aspects of tobacco, smoking on screen – and in public and private places – disappeared. Ironically, at the same time advocates began rising up for the legalization of marijuana. “Such schizophrenic thoughts,” as Jeff Stinson, El Dorado Police Department’s narcotics investigator, said at a recent Civitan meeting, “both are smoking leaves … we just don’t know as much about marijuana as we do tobacco.”
Such cognitive dissonance continues to hold sway. We smile at yesterday’s height of fashion as today’s fashion faux pas, yet, when yesterday’s morally reprehensible behavior becomes today’s accepted – even desired behavior – it is time to step back and think twice because “there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” Proverbs 16:25 NIV.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)