Just a quick update on this second sexual revolution argument. I realized why I found the sales figures for Fifty Shades of Grey so convincing. It’s one thing if you think of it as indicating the preferences of a lot of women, 150 million worldwide by 2017. That’s just a statement about individual people, a lot of them to be sure, but still, just people. But I realize, in retrospect, that I was taking it as an index of cultural norms.
That’s very different. That’s a cultural revolution, when norms change. Similarly, that’s why the publication and success of Jane Juska’s Round-Heeled Woman is significant, it signals a shift if norms. The same with all those YouTube videos, especially the stories in The Mystery Box Show, out of Portland, Oregon. There aren't that many such stories. What is significant is the fact that they exist at all, and on YouTube.
Is this interpretation justified? I don’t know. It’s not something I arrived at by deductive reasoning. Heck, I didn’t even realize that I’d done that until a day ago, and then it just hit me, no reasoning involved. And I’ve still not done any reasoning about it. It’s just an intuitive judgement. Based on what? The whole gestalt. Gestalt of what? Good question.
Come to think of it, perhaps this is why the mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the story. This change in norms isn’t that visible. Playboy magazine, that was very visible, all those photos of nude women on ordinary newsstands. Ms. magazine, visible. Feminist demonstrations, visible. Conversations about sex between consenting adults, not at all visible.
I’ve got some thinking to do, but not here, not now.
More later.
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