🌈Kathryn Brightbill Profile picture
Sep 8, 2018 16 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
I have some thoughts about homeschooling and pop culture gaps, and also about people assuming that your pop culture gap has something to do with being homeschooled.
First, making a big deal about somebody's pop culture gaps just makes them feel more like an outsider, so don't do it. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, has pop culture gaps unless they're a Tarantinoesque encyclopedia of everything pop culture no matter how obscure.
The problem comes when your pop culture gaps are because your parents and your subculture kept you from experiencing the same pop culture and your peers and it was outside your control. That makes every pop culture reference you don't get a reminder of what you missed.
For example, I've got big pop culture gaps from when I was in college and could get 3 channels over rabbit ears with a tuner card in my computer. I don't care about that. I do care that I never really heard George Michael until karaoke in Vietnam.
kathrynbrightbill.com/2016/12/26/on-…
I missed that common 80s/90s kid experience of being a kid who didn't necessarily know they were queer but was drawn to certain artists, and it was because I grew up in an evangelical culture where Sunday school teachers loved to lecture us about secular music.
My evangelical and homeschool-related pop culture gaps are primarily musical. Pop culture gaps I have with TV are partly because my parents used to be really late tech adopters so no cable (I was in middle school before we got a microwave, mind you), and just not watching things.
I know nothing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example, entirely because I was a proto-hipster and deemed the show far too popular to watch. That might have been different if I'd have been part of playground discussions, but probably not.
On the other hand, I've got pop culture knowledge of shows like Murphy Brown, Golden Girls and Designing Women that I was probably too young for, but my parents liked them so they'd let me watch.
It bugs me when people assume that the fact I've seen, say, maybe 10 episodes of Friends ever, had something to do with being homeschooled. It didn't, I just don't like Friends. Not every pop culture gap a homeschool alumni has is because of homeschooling.
When I talk about how I wish I had more queer rep in the shows I watched as a kid, and that I wish I'd had shows like #Supergirl and #LegendsOfTomorrow, or well, all the @GBerlanti superhero shows, that's not a homeschool thing. It's a Hollywood thing.
I've been watching old school Dynasty and my takeaway has been that it's a good thing my parents didn't watch it because everything to do with Steven Carrington is a complete and total trainwreck of terrible messages.
Missing out on parts of pop culture is kind of a mixed blessing. I use Dynasty as one example, but my sister and I were talking a while back about streaming some of those shows we didn't watch in the 80s and realizing we missed out on a ton of racist pop culture messaging.
A lot of shows from the 80s and 90s have not aged well at all because of all the casual racism and sexism. Watching Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow was, in retrospect, the better option.
I lucked out because the TV shows that my parents actually liked when I was a kid were ones that are remembered by how progressive they were. Which is obviously not the experience of every homeschool kid, but it's important to remember that experiences aren't monolithic.
Homeschool alumni have a lot in common no matter what part of the country they were homeschooled in because of the way ideas percolated though conventions and homeschooling manuals, but just because you know one homeschool kid doesn't mean you know us all.
On a related "mixed blessings" front, I suspect that part of the reason I'm comfortable adapting to other cultures is because I learned to be really sensitive to cultural cues so I didn't come across as the "weird homeschooler" stereotype. It's helped me blend in places.

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More from @KEBrightbill

Oct 6, 2018
Oh Tumblr, where we're supposed to feel bad for wealthy white evangelical women campaigning to end abortion, as if bans ever stopped them from aborting. How about we stop feeling sorry for women who have chosen to embrace patriarchy because they want to screw over brown people?
The bottom line is that white evangelical women have decided that patriarchy controlled by white men is a small price to pay for maintaining the system of white supremacy that allows them to feel superior to black and brown people.
Let me remind you that Rick Santorum's wife had a late term abortion to save her life, they both claim that it doesn't count (even though it's the exact same circumstances that killed a woman in Ireland under their ban), and use that experience to argue *for* abortion bans.
Read 13 tweets
Sep 12, 2018
I always describe Covenant as the school you went to if your parents wanted you to go to a Christian college but you didn't want all the rules. This is the dark side of that reality:
I chose to go to a Xn college, and in many ways it was a positive experience, but I was also 18 and didn't know to look past the lack of dress code to fully know what I was getting myself into. I also had no clue I was gay or the baggage Covenant's homophobia would leave me with.
Not knowing I was gay while I was at Covenant meant I escaped the fear and turmoil of being queer at an anti-LGBT Christian school, but I didn't escape the memories of the debates over whether gay people should be stoned. Or not feeling safe to really say how appalled I was by it
Read 13 tweets
Aug 29, 2018
I have no doubt the Democratic Party in #Florida is going to unite behind Andrew Gillum now that he's got the nomination. He's the most exciting candidate the party has run in a while. I think a lot of people were hoping he'd pull it off even if they went with other candidates.
For what it's worth, I think that the pundits idea that the establishment wanted Graham is overstated. The establishment wanted Graham over Levine, yes, but every conversation I've had over the last year and a half has been people liking both Graham and Gillum.
Contrary to the pundits who seem to think Gillum will have a harder time peeling away Republican voters, I think he's got the potential to generate the kind of excitement that can get disgruntled, Never Trumpers on board. #Florida #FloridaPrimary
Read 10 tweets
Aug 22, 2018
The church should go down with it. The fact that you're more worried about damage control than the fact that the white American evangelicalism you're part of is morally bankrupt and are still both-sides-are-bad-ing it proves there's nothing redeemable. Burn it all down.
Maybe if there's a true cleansing fire, a chastened and repentant church will emerge from the ashes, but at this point worrying about the reputation of white American evangelicalism that's tied itself to the Republican party shows @ShaneClaiborne is part of that moral bankruptcy.
At this point, American evangelicalism deserves everything it gets. This is a faith that looks at the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, points sneering fingers while ignoring their own abuse, and has the gall to blame it all on The Homosexuals. There's nothing of Christ there.
Read 10 tweets
Jul 9, 2018
I want to be really delicate here, but I want to talk about how criticism of intentional weight loss as all being "diet culture" with a subtext of it being anti-feminist can be super ableist. People shouldn't have to apologize or feel guilty about taking steps to help their body.
I've spent the last year and a half with back pain so severe that I've struggled to function at times. I've missed marches, protests, meetings because trying to walk would send my back and hip muscles into an unbearably painful spasm.
I've spent much of that time working on losing weight, which started out because it hurt too much to walk from my bed to the kitchen to get snacks, and then became intentional in hopes that reducing the weight on my spine would minimize pain.
Read 17 tweets
Jun 19, 2018
That discussion about fictionalized history in sci-fi and fantasy got me thinking again about Firefly. That was Joss Whedon rewriting Civil War history in space and making the Confederates the good guys. That's not something without consequence.
And that's without going into how Firefly depicts a vision of the American West in space, where people speak Chinese but there's no actual Chinese people. It's more erasing the reality that Chinese immigrants built the American West.
It's not without consequence that a generation of young white male nerds idolized a space western where the Confederacy was the heroes and the American West is utterly devoid of Chinese people and has only one black person.
Read 12 tweets

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