Taking Down Kentucky Stereotypes (Or: Things Kingsman Got Wrong About Real Kentuckians)
Recently, I've discovered a serious problem. People seem to be very confused about the type of place Kentucky is. They don't understand the people, the cities where they live, or the climate. I've noticed this problem popping up more and more since I moved up north. Kentucky often gets lumped in with all southern states, or it gets stereotyped into unidentifiable oblivion. Two examples from the past two weeks come to mind:
1. Living up north involves a lot of Northerners trying to tell you what Kentucky is like based on presumptions they have about the entire South. I had a professor critique a short story I wrote by saying that it's never cold in Kentucky during the "fall." (She also claimed that you shouldn't call September fall in the South.)
2. I went to see Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Part of it is set in Louisville, Kentucky. Everyone had deep Southern accents, wore cowboy boots, cowboy hats, giant belt buckles, drank only whiskey, rode horses, and frequented a "saloon" that looked like it was in the middle of nowhere.
As someone who has lived both in the boondocks of Eastern Kentucky, the "country-ish" of Nicholasville, and the metropolitan area of Lexington (yes, Kentucky has metropolitan areas), I consider myself pretty well-rounded on Kentucky culture. Also, I will go ahead and assert that I am an expert on Kentucky weather because I have lived there my entire life. So I hope this is informational for anyone who thinks that Kentucky is Texas, that none of us wear shoes, that we don't get winter, or that we all have strong southern accents. Hollywood, you might want to take a couple of notes.
1. Kentucky gets all four seasons.
KENTUCKY IS NOT FLORIDA. IT IS NOT WARM ALL YEAR ROUND.
In fact, two winters ago, it was in the negatives with wind-chill. So yes, it does get cold in the fall, misguided professor.
Kentucky springs can start as late as April (this past Spring Break, it was below freezing when I flew back from Florida because winter lasted through the end of March). Kentucky summers are usually hot. By the time June hits, it's in the 80's and 90's every day.
Now, here is where it gets confusing: in Kentucky, school starts in August. You would not start school in the summer, right? So, August is fall. Sometimes in August, the weather is not very fall-like. Sometimes it stays in the 80's until September or October. But other times, it starts being prime fall weather by the end of August. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike up north, cooling down for fall means dropping from the 80's to 50's and 60's. This is when Kentuckians pull out their sweaters and jackets—unlike the students I've seen sporting shorts and t-shirts in the 50's up in Minnesota. In Kentucky, fall is perfection when it comes to weather.
Kentucky winters can be mild, or they can be harsh. While the Polar Vortex was hitting the north a few years ago, Kentucky was plunged into a week-long Snowpocolypse, where we were buried under more snow than I'd probably seen in any one winter in my lifetime. We are fairly frequently hit by ice storms, where the entire world is glazed in a solid inch of freezing rain. The temperatures fluctuate from year to year—sometimes it's in the 40's most of the winter, other times it's in the teens. However, we do get winter, and we do get snow.
From Snowpocolypse. We couldn't leave campus for a week!
2. We do not all have country accents.
Firstly, there's a difference between different states' southern accents. The further south you go, usually the stronger the accent. Kentucky is not that southern, so our accent isn't as strong as someone, say, from Alabama. We have what you call a "Southern Appalachia" accent in certain parts of the state, which is not the same as a Texan cowboy kind of accent.
Secondly, Kentucky has its own regional dialects. You can tell if someone is from Eastern Kentucky versus Lexington by their accent. This was one of my main problems with the accents in Kingsman: most metropolitan areas do not speak with the Southern Appalachia accent. Instead, a lot of Kentucky has the homogenized "Midland" accent. When you talk to someone like me, from Lexington, you can't tell where I'm from because I don't have much of an accent at all. Same goes for a lot of people from areas like Louisville, which is where the movie was set.
Even someone like my mom, who spent the formative years of her life as a child, teenager, and young adult in Eastern Kentucky, where they speak with the Southern Appalachia accent, now has a homogenized Midland accent after living in Lexington for the past fifteen years. Her accent will only come out if she is with family from Prestonsburg.
3. Not everyone dresses like they're going to a rodeo.
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly plenty of people who wear cowboy boots in Kentucky. I've seen my fair share of big belt buckles and cowboy hats. But the vast majority of people in Kentucky, especially in metropolitan areas, do not wear an outfit composed of all of these elements at once, if at all. In fact, even as someone who used to ride horses, I have never owned a pair of cowboy boots in my life. I wore riding pants, riding boots, and a helmet. The closest I've come to dressing like Hollywood depicts Kentuckians is a cowboy outfit for Halloween.
Here I am with my family and one of my childhood friends on my birthday (a long time ago), literally going horseback riding. Notice that no one is wearing anything resembling a cowboy hat, boots, or a giant belt buckle.
4. It isn't the Old West.
The only time I've ever seen an actual saloon, with the wooden swinging doors like an Old West movie, in Kentucky was in a strip mall. No, it wasn't in the middle of nowhere with tumbleweeds rolling past and a thousand pick-up trucks parked out front. People didn't ride their horses to it. It was nestled in between a tattoo shop and a car-rental place, and it was meant to be a cheesy replica of an Old West saloon.
So no, Kingsman, we Kentuckians do not saddle up our ponies to go to the local watering hole, where rough and tumble cowboys get into fights at the bar for no reason and try to start a shoot-out. We drive our sensible sedans to the bars downtown just like everyone else. And if you Google-mapped a bar and saw that "saloon" was in the name, it was probably just a place that plays really good country music.
5. It isn't just fields, horses, and farms.
If you look up the largest U.S. cities by population, you might be surprised to find that Louisville, Kentucky is listed not only in the top fifty, but at spot number 29. While Kentucky does have beautiful rolling horse farms and Daniel Boone National Forest and Red River Gorge, it also has booming metropolitan areas that offer a lot of activities. We don't just sit around on our porches eating KFC while kids run around butt-naked in the backyard. I personally love the balance of urban to rural in Kentucky, and I've found that living in a place like Nicholasville, which is about a thirty minute drive to downtown Lexington, let me have the best of both worlds.
Kingsman also gets bonus points for the editors being lazy enough to use a Google Maps image of Lexington instead of Louisville during one scene. I assure you, Hollywood-ians, they are not the same place.
Do you have any stories of being mis-stereotyped because of living in Kentucky? Comment down below! And don't forget to hit "like"!