corinspired asked: You're confusing cultural exchange with cultural appropriation. Read: omgthatdress[.]tumblr[.]com/post/16691082965/cultural-exchange-and-cultural-appropriation
no, actually, i’m not. the article you cited — although an article published on tumblr doesn’t really qualify as a credible source, as it’s simply just another opinion — supports what i was talking about: “While it may have had mostly to do with the radical social changes that came after the First World War, Poiret certainly got the ball rolling. So, technically, not wearing a corset is cultural appropriation. This is why, sometimes, you can’t just weed out every single little fucking thing that may have at one point been appropriation. I’m sure as hell not putting on a corset just to leave my house anytime soon. When another culture has a good idea, sometimes you just have to go with it.”
as a catholic, i’ve watched with subjective disdain when people wear my sacred symbols as some kind of punk couture, but, objectively, i know that it’s beginning something i won’t see the end of. in 500 years, in a thousand years, my religion may not even still stand, and, besides, i’m not much of a practitioner anymore, myself. as a first nations person, i could be all up in arms about the use of navaho blankets to upholster furniture, but i’m not. maybe it’s because i’m not navaho. then again, if i any hear any cree naming poems used in rap, i’d probably just laugh. i think it’s all so silly. we are one tribe. nothing truly belongs to any one of us. those things that we treasure as “ours”: where did they come from? who first made them? we don’t know. their origins are lost in the past, and for all we know, they may have been appropriated from defeated enemies. *shrugs* it was a very common practice.
i can’t pretend to comprehend the motives of anyone else, because i’m not godlike. therefore, i must admit that i don’t understand why people get so upset about this. the “owning” of anything is transient, at best. we are all borrowers.
