I must have missed the part where the wife did anything but look at a guy thoughtfully

Not that I care about the original issue, but cultural studies and being deliberately obtuse don’t mix.

Nothing like an endorsement of adultery to push an agenda.

I must have missed the part where the wife did anything but look at a guy thoughtfully.

Nothing like an endorsement of adultery to push an agenda.

I must have missed the part where the wife did anything but look at a guy thoughtfully.

You may be out on the timing there.

annajcook
May 7, 2008 at 8:05 am

Ha! I’m surprised no one has yet mentioned the fact that when bicycles first became popular, just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, there was a raging debate among doctors and the public over whether the riding of bicycles was too–shall we say–exciting for women. Yes, seriously. They thought that sitting on the bicycle seat would cause women to orgasm.

That’s what the Kathy Bates character in The Road To Wellville was implying.

That movie also featured the late 19th century medical practice of doctors massaging women’s uteri from the inside, for strictly therapeutic purposes of course.

The Joaquin Valley is also the most productive agricultural area in the whole US (as is California overall), which many people from certain midwestern states don’t want to give us credit for.

But it is also crammed full of Koolaideratti.

So in the end, I don’t know if the productivity balances out the extreme rightwingyness or not…

This y’all might find interesting:

Politics

Culturally, the San Joaquin Valley is quite different from much of the rest of California. Among well-populated areas, the San Joaquin Valley is perhaps the most conservative in California.[original research?][citation needed] For example, signs can be seen around Pixley and Hanford supporting leaving the United Nations, and opposing abortion.(I’ve seen these myself, although they tend to be in a state of disrepair these days) Many commentators[who?] have noted the irony of the San Joaquin Valley’s prevailing “small government” philosophy, given that its farm economy is the product of more than a century of expensive federal and state government projects and that cotton, one of its most important agricultural products, is heavily subsidized. While the importance of agriculture in the area can curb environmentalism, air pollution is a serious and acknowledged problem in the area. Resentment of perceived condescension by Southern Californians and San Francisco Bay Area residents is a recurring theme in the valley’s politics, occasionally manifesting itself in laws such as Kern County’s 2005 ban on the importation of sewage sludge from urban counties.[citation needed]

Several prominent California politicians have come from the San Joaquin Valley. California state senator and unsuccessful 2002 gubernatorial and 2004 senatorial candidate Bill Jones hails from the Fresno area as does former California Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante.
Ethnic and cultural groups

Mexicans/Chicanos

While the barrios of East Los Angeles are California’s most famous areas dominated by persons of Mexican ancestry, both first-generation Mexican immigrants and well-established Chicanos are important populations in the San Joaquin Valley. Since the onset of the bracero program during World War II, virtually all of the agricultural workers in the region have been of Mexican ancestry. Ethnic and economic friction between Mexican-Americans and the valley’s predominantly white farming elite manifested itself most notably during the 1960s and 1970s, when the United Farm Workers, led by César Chávez, went on numerous strikes and called for boycotts of table grapes. The UFW generated enormous sympathy throughout the United States, even managing to terminate several agricultural mechanization projects at the United States Department of Agriculture. However, from the 1970s onward, farmers have mostly hired illegal immigrants, preferred for their willingness to work longer hours for lower pay. Today, Chicanos are somewhat better integrated into the valley’s economic framework.[citation needed][original research?]

European and Asian groups

The San Joaquin Valley has—by California standards—an unusually large number of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian ethnicities in the heritage of its citizens. These communities are often quite large and, relative to Americans immigration patterns, quite eclectic: for example, there are more Azorean Portuguese in the San Joaquin Valley than in the Azores. Many groups are found in majorities in specific cities, and hardly anywhere else in the region. For example, Assyrians are concentrated in Turlock, Dutch in Ripon, Sikhs in Stockton and Livingston, and Yugoslavs in Delano. Kingsburg is famous for its distinctly Swedish air, having been founded by immigrants from that country. Ethnic groups found in a broader area are Portuguese, Armenians, Basques, and the “Okies” who migrated to California from the Midwest and South. In recent years, large numbers of Pakistanis have settled in Modesto and Lodi. In addition the late 1970s and 80s saw an influx of immigrants from Indochina settling in Stockton, Modesto, Merced, and Fresno. The Filipino American population are concentrated in Delano and Lathrop.

These cultures are often the result of established ethnic communities and groups of immigrants coming to the United States at once. This is in part due to the founding of religious communes in the San Joaquin Valley: for example, the first permanent Sikh Gurdwara was made in Stockton in 1915.

Okies and Arkies

The Depression-era migrants to the San Joaquin Valley from the South and Midwest are one of the more well-known groups in the Central Valley, in large part due to the popularity of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and the Henry Fonda movie made from it. By 1910, agriculture in the southern Great Plains had become nearly unviable due to soil erosion and poor rainfall. Much of the rural population of states such as Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas left at this time, selling their land and moving to Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and fast-growing Los Angeles. Those who remained experienced continuing deterioration of conditions, which reached their nadir during the drought that began in the late 1920s and created the infamous Dust Bowl. (Small cotton farmers in states such as Mississippi and Alabama suffered similar problems from the first major infestation of the boll weevil.) When the onset of the Great Depression created a national banking crisis, family farmers—usually heavily in debt—often had their mortgages foreclosed by banks desperate to shore up their balance sheets. In response, many farmers loaded their families and portable possessions into their automobiles and drove west.

Taking Route 66 to Barstow or Los Angeles and crossing the Tehachapi or Tejon passes, they began new lives as fruit and vegetable pickers on truck farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Having gone from the relative independence of homesteading to a condition that was essentially peasantry, many of them lived in squalid agricultural camps and were deeply unhappy with their economic plight; domestic disputes, crime, and suicide were rampant, and occasional riots broke out. New Deal measures alleviated some of these problems, albeit belatedly: by the time that The Grapes of Wrath drew public attention to the Okies’ plight, many of them had already left the valley. Those that didn’t were assimilated into California culture and society where they and future generations became noted tradesmen, educators, legislators and professional business people.

Many of the Okies and Arkies left the San Joaquin Valley during World War II, most of them going to Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego to work in war industries. Many of those who stayed ended up in Bakersfield, which became an increasingly important center of oil production after major Southern California oil fields such as Signal Hill began to dry up. Their influence remains strong: Bakersfield resembles a West Texas town such as Midland or Lubbock far more than it does anywhere else in California.* Country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard came out of Bakersfield’s honky-tonk scene and created a hard-driving sound that is still deeply associated with the city.

*(Excepting The Dark Avengers’ present undisclosed location in southeastern Tulare County…..)

Where else can you see a bicyclist with a cigarette in his mouth?

Some parts of Austin. I am amused at the various clothes I see people bike in. The other day, I was biking along and saw a guy in a suit and tie, very hipster, and even a hat and glasses.