02-04-2021, 11:27 AM
(02-04-2021, 10:44 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(02-04-2021, 06:23 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(02-03-2021, 11:22 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: But the effect of the sexual revolution came a full turning earlier as it was on the 2T/3T cusp when the lure of sexual recklessness soured with the advent of the AIDS scare. To me that pretty much popped the balloon of the hedonistic culture.
Nope. The hedonism took different directions. Even the advice "use a f---ing condom when you f---" didn't require much of a compromise. At a certain point, most of the new AIDS cases came from IV drug use, which is not what most people consider fun. Go shopping. Take a cruise.
By 1987 a story which appeared in Esquire Magazine stated that by that time money had become the new sex, with Wall Street as whorehouse in chief. Used to like to say that the term Yuppie was used to describe the lifestyle which developed when the priorities of the Me Generation shifted from personal and sexual gratification to material and financial gratification. Was it AIDS alone that killed off the sexual revolution or were there other things? I keep hoping that someday at least some types of sex work will be legal throughout the US. When might the PTB realize that prohibition of this activity has been every bit the failure that it was with liquor a century ago?
Maybe this is an indelible part of the American way of life: people trying to improve society by making American more hostile to recreational sex. The effects are to either turn sex into a secretive activity that people do only with the stealth of crime, to make people crave it more and become obsessed with it, or to compel people to seek substitutes. Figuring that real wages started to fall in the 1980's, income and the indulgence that it allowed also became an object of mass craving. Those still doing well (Reaganomics made certain that the people who would endure the hardships of low wages and little career advancement necessary for keeping consumer costs low were young) would get to display wealth and high income as if a sexual signal to attract desirable spouses. If one was broke one might be able to seduce people nearly destitute... but because economic gain and indulgence had become the purpose of life, what good would that do? Remember that many poor people have problems other than poverty. One might get sex regularly, but little else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.