Are we more prudish in some ways now? When I read old books, people including men say stuff like "he is as serenely beautiful as Endymion" or "she has such pretty feet" but nowadays you'd seem weird if you did so, even in a piece of fiction - at the very least you wouldn't be able to say them innocently and without irony
The number of delicate feelings you can express without eliciting laughter has decreased. Like you have to self-consciously embrace an aesthetic of vulgar sexuality* or camp kitschiness in order to say these things, unless you want to seem autistic*by which I mean we don't accept aesthetic/erotic statements unless you say them as though the subject were intrinsically something low and base. even a gay man can't compliment another man's beauty sentimentally. he has to express it in the most carnal way possible if he doesn't want to be laughed at. and this isn't just because we're more "honest" and "plain spoken" now. you often have to distort your own feelings out of a sort of reverse-prudishness. you have to make them seem lower than they areprobably it began as a welcome reaction against the ridiculous, insincere hyper-expressiveness of the preceding centuries, but now it's just running off inertia. and it's a very depressing kind of conventionality. at least the old hypocrisy gave you license to experiment with massive epic forms of self-disclosure, was rich and expansive, would encourage you to fling your words at distant mental objects, to push the power of language to its limit, to venture out toward the most far-off constellations of sense-experience and down into the darkest, deepest, subtlest chambers of the soul. but even the most "flamboyant" people today are mostly identical, because they're only permitted to parade what is common to everyone - just in a more obnoxious way than other peopletotally mechanical existence
>>24749091yea absolutely
>>24749091yes. degeneracy is the mask of prudish conformity.https://www.bitchute.com/video/BqYqfKDzze6J
>>24749091DFW wrote about this in E Unibus Pluram
>>24750045That really is something I've noticed about a lot of young people, a lot of Zoomers: they're simultaneously degenerates and prudes. They'll have the wildest, most insane fetishes but they'll be totally squeamish about actual sex and genuine displays of intimacy. They'll also get really sensitive about actual romance; the whole "age gap" discourse feels like nothing more to me than an acceptable way to attack normal, heterosexual love. It's a bizarre dynamic and I actually find it a bit detestable.
>>24749091>weSpeak for yourself, zoomer.
>>24750186>normal heterosexual love is 40 year old guys dating 20 year old womenlol ok. in b4 any stupid evopsych babble. dudes who pursue relationships with women who are 15+ years younger than them are mentally stunted
>>24750224you are trans, and also this is a strawman.
>>24750224Kek, that anon really hit a nerve, didn't he?
>>24749126Underrated post
