ABSTRACT
Women are even more captive to culturally conditioned styles in clothing and physical appearance than men—beginning with the greater expectations of beauty in women than in men. Our culturally conditioned assumptions perpetuate the premises of the economic system, frequently without consciousness or questioning. Propagandists, office seekers, advertisers, and other self-serving rhetoricians specialize in manipulating appeals to varieties of ethnocentrism like jingoism, religious dogmatism, boosterism, and racial, class, or sexual prejudice. Two words synonymous with ethnocentrism are parochialism and provincialism. Parochialism derives from parish, a small church district; so a parochial-minded or provincial person is one who literally never ventures outside a small, isolated area or who, by metaphoric extension, goes through life with a narrow-minded perspective. Gaining perspective on our own ethnocentrism enables us to view with amusement some of the hyperboles of parochialism.
