69 The Super Bowl is a cultural phenomenon that has as much to do with the extravaganza as it does with football. Major corporations unveil new advertising campaigns during the broadcast, international pop stars perform in choreographed halftime shows, and the U.S. Air Force stages a high-profile flyover just before kick-off each year. Watching the Super Bowl has become an annual ritual for millions of Americans—even those who don’t necessarily like football very much. CORE CONCEPTS CHALLENGE Put yourself in the shoes of someone from a different culture who watches a football game in the United States for the first time. What would that person make of the game? Might it seem violent, for example? Now, think of how you might react if you were to watch a game you are unfamiliar with, like cricket, a wildly popular sport in much of the rest of the world. unheard of in other parts of the world. Similarly, men’s shaving their faces (but not their underarms or legs) is the norm in much of contemporary U.S. society but was much less common before the twentieth century. Even sexual practices—perhaps the most intimate of all human activity—vary signifi cantly from culture to culture. Cultures differ in their attitudes toward masturbation, premarital sex, homosexuality and bisexuality, prostitution, and other forms of sexual behavior. Even feeling discomfort, awkwardness, or titillation at reading about topics like body hair and sexual practices refl ects a culture-laden response. Although advertisers routinely appeal to cultural norms about hair removal to sell products, and sexual imagery permeates the popular media, most people in the United States rarely engage in frank discussion about such topics. values, beliefs, and norms, and real culture, what they actually do, which may or may not refl ect the ideal. For example, gender equality is an increasingly professed cultural value in American society, but in most two-career households, women do more housework than men (Hook 2010). Although culture is a social phenomenon, it also permeates the most private and intimate parts of our lives. Take the case of body hair. Do you shave your legs? Your underarms? Your pubic hair? Your head? Your face? In most cases, your answers to those questions are infl uenced heavily by cultural norms. Since World War I, for example, most women in the United States have shaved their legs and underarms, a behavior that seems “normal” to them. Yet this practice is less common in many European nations (where in some cases it is associated with prostitution), and it is The Elements of Culture
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