A common theme of this blog is that politics is downstream from culture. By focusing on business and politics, and largely ignoring academia and entertainment, conservatives ceded the culture.
Examples abound. But I was most recently reminded of this when listening to an interview with Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History Of Wonder Woman (the interview first aired in 2014). This is from the introduction to the interview on NPR’s Fresh Air:
The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, led a secret life with his wife and his mistress. He fathered children which each of them, and they all lived together. His vision for wonder woman reflected his interest in the women’s suffrage movement and in Margaret Sanger, the birth control and women’s rights activist who also happened to be his mistress’s aunt. Wonder Woman’s costume was inspired by his interest in erotic pinup art.
(Keep in mind, this took place in the early 1940s.)
I’m not suggesting that Wonder Woman is the devil — or that her influence was even that great. But the above paragraph struck me as one more example of how a relatively small number of elites (with fringe views) disproportionately impacted mainstream culture. It’s also another example of why it’s simplistic for cultural conservatives to blame the 1960s for the current state of affairs.
