The latest TikTok trend shows how historical periods, but also countries and even languages are gendered in popular culture, says this history professor.
Participants in the Romula Fest reenact Roman Empire era gladiator fights in the village of Resca, Romania, Saturday, Sep 3, 2022. KEELE, England: How often do you think about the Roman empire? This question, posed to men by their partners on social media app TikTok, has led to a storm of viral videos. Women are amused to discover the answer is often “every day”, or at least “several times a week”.
All this puts a distinct spin on the skit from the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life Of Brian which parodied a group of Jewish freedom fighters who had to ask: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
I never tried to run a class called “War and Rule from Rome to Washington DC”, but I know from experience that I just have to put the word “gender” in a course title to see the men evaporate. I once gave a seminar on this subject to a survey methods course at master’s level and was faced by a stony-faced group of men sitting at the back with their arms crossed defensively.
In my Georgian Britain class, despite that being the height of the male-run slave trade, images of ladies drinking cups of tea hugely outnumber men in uniform. That is certainly not the case when the topic is, say, Nazi Germany or the Battle of Britain.
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