beginnings of our racial cultures that we cannot help but conform to them in spite of ourselves.
However, valuable as Dr. Ellis' commentary on American behavior patterns is, it is to be felt that he is at least partly in error in his assumption that the mass media comprising certain popular newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, radio and TV performances, must of necessity be faithful registers of the general Amedcan attitudes of sex, love and marriage.
As anyone knows who has ever submitted material to the >opular publications covered in Dr. Ellis' survey, any inclusion of subject matter treated with anything approaching an enlightened concept is frowned upon by editor, publisher and advertiser, who are really the purveyors of American attitudes and mores as reflected in the popular press. It is, in this reviewer's opinion at least, the advertiser in particular who is determined that the great American dream continue to be one of socio-economic innocence and propriety.
If, for instance, the American Bride and Groom (or heaven forbid, an unmarried couple, because where, then, would the immense wedding revenues come from?) embark upon life together embracing the ideal that class, money and family position are secondary to intellectual and cultural values, it would follow that the manufac– turers of pink refrigerators, maple diningroom sets and wall-to-wall carpeting would lose money. This, in predominately material culture like America, is un-
thinkable.
The best way to circumvent this loss of revenue, then, is to keep American women busy with kitchen, children and church; and the best way to do this is to see to it that she receives no enlightenment of a truly intellectual nature through popular communications levels. Therefore editors publish the same impossible pap year after year because the American woman is too spineless to insi st cn material less insulting to her intelligence.
The American writer, poor soul, if he is forced to sell articles or stories to the popular media because he likes
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