Who knew?!

[caitri]

Tonight I was told that "clearly [I] had never been to the South!" After hysterical laughing and pointing on my part, I replied I was from fuckin' Toccoa, Georgia, and it's harder to get more backassards than that!

So, open up for discussion: What does "Southern" mean to you?

Comments

[100wordspermin.livejournal.com]

Um, you've never been to the South? Quite a feat, going to UGA without being in the South.

I get told I don't sound Southern very frequently. I think it's got to do with growing up in the Atlanta suburbs around the time the city's population started exponential expansion. Most of my coworkers at my last job are yankee transplants, and some of them thought I was too.

It's weird, because it a way, I feel like I'm in the gap between the old (my grandparents in Birmingham, who grew up during the Depression) and the new. I feel like a bad Southerner--I grew up so privileged, and so many of my family haven't. My grandparents still tell stories of what it was like during the Depression.

I still love the red dirt, and the sweet tea, and the weird literature, and I can still be polite to people up to the point of wanting to kill them...I'm just not really part of that world. Sort of Scarlett-esque, I'll never be a lady. And the "traditional" South is affiliated so strongly (at least in the popular mind) with things that hurt so much, like the KKK and keeping women in their (our) place, and crushing, relentless poverty with no relief, ever.

[/ramble]

[caitri.livejournal.com]

Well, there's the idea of the South and there's the reality. E.g. The "idea" is female gentility, often referenced to Scarlet O'Hara by people who have never read the book (hee--if only people knew she shot a guy in the face in that book!) and the "reality" that Southern women are some of the roughest, toughest, meanest goddamn folk on the planet (well, they are; you put up a fight between an Al-Qaeda operative and a trailerpark she-hick and the she-hick will beat the shit out of him AND have more guns). I think you can really see this in the early parts of Tom Wolfe's Charlotte Simmons novel, as he is just someone who deals with an idea rather than reality, and then Wikiality-like, people read it and believe it's true without ever just looking at things.

I bet if people did a demographic study they would find that women have been the primary providers for the past fifty years and probably more, due to the general lower life-expectancy of rural males (lots of factory accidents, high rates of cancer due to tobacco products, etc.). Seriously, ever notice how there's lots more lil ol' church ladies than there are lil ol' church men?

Okay, /ramble.