if you're about to write a culture post and considering using the word "western" to describe said culture, consider if what you actually mean is "american", if it is, use that instead.
Does your case apply to France? Spain? Finland? Poland? If your answer is "I have no idea, I'm just writing about my culture (america)" then just say american, seriously
I really don't want to do a Tumblr-style "this goes out to all Americans" post, but if you're American, I desperately need you to realize you're part of the culture that's currently having near total cultural hegemony.
I'm Italian. When I go to the cinema, the vast majority of movies I can watch are American movies, with an audience that's being trained to expect American movies, because American movies are what can use the biggest budget to have the best visual effects and the best artists working in the business -- because American movies can sell all over the globe, while Italian movies can only sell to an extremely limited audience and, at most, hope for an American remake. I'm seeing the effect of English slowly morphing my language into something that's a mixture of the two -- linguistics nerd tangent, "to play a game" in Italian is expressed as "to play to a game" (giocare a un gioco), but it's losing the "to" and turning into a transitive verb because it's a transitive verb in English -- as the gaming space, in which I work, is pretty much adopting America as its core foundation.
Back when I worked in marketing, I had my superior tell me, with an incredibly serious approach, "I need you to write this for a global market. That means American."
When an American says "western", what they (often) mean is American, without even realizing that the actual meaning of that word is "the world we shaped to resemble America."
Edited to add: the irony I can only communicate with everyone in here in English isn't lost on me.
