Social Pressure is a driving force for positive and negative change. Social Pressure begins when a small group verbally, physically, and even in subconscious ways push others to act in ways they would not necessarily follow maliciously or even conscientiously. Most of us have largely seen negative social pressure early in life when in school. Peer Pressure is a micro-level of larger social pressures. When students bully, intimidate, or judge other students the psychological effects can create enormous distress.
Such distress on a micro-level appears in Mim Udovitch’s essay A Secret Society of the Starving, the author reflects on high school female students encouraging one another to be anorexic, because they consider looking thin and sexy more hip and more important than eating healthy. This small level of social pressure reflects the larger society excessive emphasis on women as visual objects. Even several years ago, an example of extreme social pressure in school levels led seventeen fourteen-year olds to make a pregnancy pact in Massachusetts, where they all pressured one another to get pregnant by any means possible. As Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, noted in his research approach, one must study the extremes of society at times in order to better understand the manufactured norms of society. A pregnancy pact or hip anorexia, seem like extremes. But such means to social acceptance seem painful ways to belong.
Beyond the levels of school peer pressures, the pressures on image, identity and conduct are continually at odds with what seems moral and what seems inclusively hip. In George Orwell’s short story Shooting an Elephant, the classic author brings to the focal point, the colonial police officer in Burma pressured to kill an elephant that had run-off in a mad rage. By the time the British officer reached the elephant, the rage had seemed to pass; however, the villagers were excited to see a white officer shoot an elephant. Unfortunately, he had easily given into to social pressure to prove his manliness and his image of powerful imperial control, so he shot the elephant. The officer appeared limited to his accepted action. Afterwards, he did not feel any more accepted. Submitting to social pressure, in the end, did little for outside interests but a brief entertainment, and no one really cared about his emotional dilemma or the elephant minutes later.
Why submit to negative social pressure, as Orwell’s character had or the girls in American high school, when after submitting to such forces there clearly appears limited new self-assurances? In Gloria Steinem’s new project, which continues her life long commitment to women’s rights and human rights, she seeks to end the use of rape as a weapon of war. Nobel Peace Prize activists in 2011 had also committed the same determination at a summit in Montebello, Canada. Like Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams, Gloria Steinem with the new Women Under Siege Project seeks to gain global attention to stop one of the most brutal crimes against humanity.
Gloria Steinem addresses in a recent interview with Lauren Wolfe that rape and war were not always co-existent entities. Rape as a weapon for war has significantly been a 20th Century and today phenomenon. One of the earliest notions when an army pushed rape as a military strategy was during World War II, when the Japanese soldiers entered China, Korea, and other neighboring nations. The historic ‘Rape of Nanking’ was an extreme example of such policies during wartime. However, the US soldiers were guilty of the same crimes during the Vietnam War and the Serbian’s during the Balkan Conflicts.
Soldiers whether ordered to commit rape or soldiers who choose to commit rape as a social pressure among other soldiers during war, as seen in Iraq and Libya, are submitting to negative actions that only reflect the contradictions of just-wars. Soldiers enacting rape as a weapon of war, accepting such orders without civil disobedience, is a clear example of malicious social pressure. Gloria Steinem and her project are attempting to fight such practices with the positive social pressure of gaining enough ear and voice to create legal actions to stop the practice. If landmines and cluster bombs can be banned from war politics, certainly rape can be banned as well.
Positive Social Pressure can be a significant tool to make established norms change to a more moral and ethical practice. Rather than Orwell’s officer bowing down to social pressure to shoot an elephant, groups such as Green Peace use positive social pressure to overcome whaling boats and the fishing industry. Green Peace activists put their lives into the frontline to step in when malignant practices hurt and endanger the environment for animals as well as the public.
Positive Social Pressure can also be pushed during wartime. In the violent Second Civil War in Liberia in 2003, not to be confused with Libya in the past year, Leymah Gbowee organized a women’s peace movement to attempt to end the war. At the time, the dictator Charles Taylor was enacting atrocities across the nation; little did the US Government admit until 2011 that Charles Taylor previously worked under the Central Intelligence Agency. Leymah Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, and her peace movement were fed up with the war, so they encouraged women throughout the nation, Christian and Muslim alike, to stage in nonviolent protests and participate in a Sex-Strike. The Sex-Strike involved thousands of women refusing to sleep with any man until the war ended. Such acts of positive social pressure caused the war to surprisingly end faster than expected. This modern day acting out of the ancient Greek Lysistrata proves that there is a level of power that could be enacted through uses of Positive Social Pressure.
How can the acts in Liberia or the Women Under Siege Project be useful for those Americans and other high-Capitalist nations who are not in a war-zone or first handedly aware of their contributions to the globalized world? Most of the wars on foreign soil are directly connected to large Corporate interests in oil and other natural resources that wealthy nations are apathetically or ignorantly dependent upon at the expense of others: from Iraq to Vietnam, from Guatemala to Zimbabwe, et al.
We have the potential to awaken our fellow neighbors to participate in Positive Social Pressure that would overcome Negative Pressures. For example, in the past week, the musician Willie Nelson and more than 300,000 American activists have sued the giant agro-chemical corporation Monsanto. Willie Nelson’s new organization entitled “Occupy the Food System” attempts to use Positive Social Pressure to stop Monsanto from dominating the food industry nationally and globally.
Social Pressures, negative and positive, are imperative to human progress or human decline. We can choose to give into negative peer pressure and commit crimes we whole-heartedly wish not to accept, but accepting them we’ve become passive invisible voices. We must refuse to be silent. As Aurora Levins Morales notes we must work at “infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future.”
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