Anti-Cultural

I'm on an absolute media monge at the moment. The internet is holding out, so I'm catching up on world news :)

Came across THIS article in which two students dressed up as Borat in his mankini and had a wrestling match in Vietnam.

This led to them being suspended from college for a year and the college getting a £135 fine.

The thing that got me thinking was something a commenter said:

"I cannot understand how they could do such an anti-cultural thing," said Nguyen Dinh Van from Hanoi, adding: "I cannot accept it."

"Anti-cultural". That's an interesting concept.

Now, in my experience of living here I've challenged a number of things that are supposedly "cultural". Namely the notion that women aren't allowed to approach men to tell them that they like them. They have to wait in a state of unrequited love in the hopes the guy will notice them.

There are many examples of things which are called 'cultural' which are actually oppression, pure and simple. For instance, in Britain 100 years back it was 'cultural' for a woman to give a man all her money when she married. It was cultural for women not to work if they had a child, it was cultural for women to wear skirts, not trousers, and cultural for men to go to work and not stay home raising the children.

Quite literally, a 'culture of oppression'. Something to be proud of?

At what point should something actually be respected simply because it is cultural or traditional? Should being cultural or traditional be enough to make anything respectable? Sacrificing children - hell, it's only cultural, been doing it for years.

Certainly didn't work for that island where sexual abuse of young girls was the norm and no one thought much of it because it's 'part of our culture' - until they came to the attention if international press.

What place does Global Culture have to play in all this? Is there such a thing as 'global culture', or do we mean 'Western culture'? Is that a bad thing?

What would be anti-cultural for a Brit?

Or, by 'anti-cultural' as, I suspect, in the above case, do we not mean 'anti-generational'? Each generation has their own culture which pushes the boundaries and rebels against the one before. Is branding something 'anti-cultural' just a power game of asserting adult rule?

Answers on a postcard...