from Hacker News

Pop Culture Has Fallen Out of Love with the Nuclear Family

by jriot on 2/18/22, 4:10 PM with 2 comments

  • by ericmay on 2/18/22, 4:30 PM

    Found this to be a pretty awful article throwing around a lot of wild accusations and grandstanding that just really isn't backed by any serious reasoning or interesting facts.

    For example:

    > ever been a time to really, truly reckon with the harm wrought by organizing our society around the married couple and the private household, it is now, two years into a pandemic that has killed nearly 1 million Americans.

    Alternatively what are some additional harms done by not having nuclear families? Americans in particular experience an epidemic of loneliness. Divorce rates are high and many children fall to drugs and alcohol or crime with unstable families at home. Just as you can easily conjure up a conjecture about nuclear families and the problems wrought by them, anyone (including myself) can easily conjure up a conjecture about how not having nuclear families causes all sorts of problems. Why wouldn’t nuclear families be more collectivist anyway? Individuals would be harder for the state to group together and control versus families.

    Also it's wild to be blaming or even associating COVID-19 mortality with families regardless of individuality.

  • by hobomatic on 2/18/22, 4:33 PM

    Similarly, the average American has fallen out of love with pop culture, since it isn't actually popular culture, it's the fringes of culture trying to drive the status quo.

    It can't actually succeed though, because it doesn't agree with itself. At best it can help humanize the fringes. At worst, it will do the opposite because it tells the status quo that out of all of the multitudes of valid ways there are to be, theirs is the least valid.