Low arousal threshold types in the past didn’t need to invent skydiving, real life was tough enough. Today however….

See also lottery winners, who are happier once they have blown it all…..

I kind of suspect that any post-scarcity economy is going to be fleeting and fast-gone. We do not seem to be suited for such idyllic conditions, and absent the need to strive, I strongly suspect that the ennui we see taking over the various socialist economies of the world will no doubt come to the fore, and result in the Eloi dying out relatively quickly–Probably within generations.

Humans don’t seem to do well under conditions of prosperity, which is why I think that the current age seems to be hell-bent at going off the rails as quickly as the inmates can manage.

This goes some way to explain why a lot of pedophiles are former victims, and that their victims are of the same approximate age they were abused at.

Also goes to possibly explain things like shoe fetishes. Imagine an 11 or 12 year old, alone in the house, parents out, bored and exploring, and comes across his parents’ copy of the Joy of Sex, or his dad’s porn stache in their closet. He reads it and is aroused by it, and now is in the midst of a “formative sexual experience”, sitting amoungst the sight and (particularly), smell of his mother’s shoes.

Not sure if this theory holds any water or not (can’t even remember where I read it), but it makes some sense to me.

I know someone who inadvertantly ended up in the porn industry. He and some friends (computer geeks all), started up a one-stop e-commerce shop. The idea being to provided ISP, website, billing, and a customer service phone line for hobby level entrepeneurs who lacked the skillset to do their own IT. The idea was someone who made repro car parts or cosplay costumes or something as a hobby, now discover there is a market, and turn it into a job.

Turned out pretty much all their customers ended up being what we now call cam-girls, or straight up home-made porn. His describing the content some of his clients produced was quite eye opening. I had heard of Furries and rubber fetish people and cross dressing and so on, but never knew such things as pony play, and baloon animal sex (yes, there is such a thing), existed.

I suspect that the internet, social media and technology might be increasing the visibility of these things, rather than the actual rate. Before, if you weren’t into it yourself, you wouldn’t know it existed, and now you do.

Is the actual incidence of pony play people higher, or are they just more visible? Supplimentary question, if say, your boss is into said pony play, but you are not aware of it, does it really matter?

I also think there may be a bit of Mazlow happening here too. Today we have the means and money to indulge some of this stuff. In the past you couldn’t because of lack of a means to find a willing partner, and/or the money to travel to a furry convention.

Kind of like how the suicide rate went down during the London Blitz, when real existential danger replaces existential angst, perhaps we have the reverse. If you don’t have existential worries, perhaps indulging in some “sexual self-actualization” becomes a higher priority than in the paet. Much like “wokeness”, something you can indulge in since you haven’t got anything more important, like surviving, to fill your time….

It’s exactly this uncertainty about the prevalence in days of old that leaves me more than a little ambivalent. Were my grandparents guilty of painting a pretty picture, deluded about the reality of things, or what? Without having been there, how the hell are you to tell what is or is not actually sign of a degenerate age?

You read the background on Kinsey’s bullshit studies, and you rather have to wonder at whether he helped make our modern morality, or if he just brought it out into the open? Which was it?

I tend to think that there are only certain small percentages of the population that are sex-obsessed, but without being able to get ground truth out of people, who the hell knows? And, just what the hell triggers the behaviors that we all take as “deviant and degenerate”, if we bother to label such things?

Hell, when you get down to it, someone please explain attraction to me. I don’t quite “get” how it is we have certain tastes, or how they develop. Where the hell do things like foot fetishes come from? At some point along the curve, where the dial is labeled “contrived beyond belief”, why do some people turn the dial to eleven? I get “feather”, but what I can’t bend my understanding around is “whole chicken”. How is it the people who get so deeply lost into that crap don’t look up into the mirrored ceiling over their rack and go “Man, I think I may have taken this a bit too far…”?

I dunno. The extremes of observed sexual behavior in my fellow apes has always been something of a neck-bending thing of wonder to me. I guess I’m just mired in the plain vanilla of it all.

“….I suppose the question I still have is this: Are we living in an age of depravity, or are we just more open about letting the news get out, and then being willing to discuss the unmentionable?…”

I think it is exactly this.

Back in the day, there were euphemisms for such things, such as “One of natures bachelors”, so we always knew “it” (pick a deviancy), existed.

What I, like you, am not sure about, is to what extent our willingness to recognize and accept (or confront), reality, rather than retreat into hypocrisy, is a good or bad thing.

I have come across some rather interesting stuff about 19th century British criminal trials and executions of “mollies”. What is essentially a 20th century gay “bathhouse” culture existed underground in 19th century London.

All the vices we think of as modern, particularly drug use, is actually far older, such as the Weimar Berlin you cite.

Like you, I had a bit of a revelation, though mine came in high-school, not after. It turned out that one of my grade 8 teachers was a homosexual pedophile. A kid who was a bully and an irritant to me, till I fought and beat him, turned out to be one of his victims. Once I found out, it explained much of his behavior, and I was rather startled to learn this.

We all “knew” there was something odd about Mr. Franklin, but if you weren’t his “type”, (which I wasn’t), (not troubled, from a broken home etc.), he wasn’t really a threat, and there were only vague rumours which nobody really took seriously…..

I think there is a middle position, just not sure what it is. A bit like libertarian-ism, the question is where do you draw the line.

Hypocrisy and repression are hypocritical and have negative consequences, however, as you point out, unlimited license and acceptance has its own set of negative consequences….

I’m not entirely certain about the role of open homosexuality in civilizational decay, just pointing out that the degree of it we have normalized is… Unusual. Symptom or cause? You tell me.

Part of the problem is that we simply don’t know what the hell the prevalence of this sort of thing was, in the past. I am, myself, apparently blind as a bat to what has gone on in my vicinity–Recently, I was informed by a classmate of mine that the New Hot Art Teacher we got in during my third year of high school was getting the ever-loving loved out of her by several of my classmates and that she continued to boink her way through her entire career as a teacher. Last time I saw her, some five-ten years ago, I’d assumed she was still the celibate nun type I’d taken her for back when. Multiple people have since confirmed that no, she was not. Emphatically not. She likes teenage boys of a certain sort… Which was not mine, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Disappointed? Probably; she was an item, back then.

Question is, how much of what we see with cases like Mary Kay Letourneau is “normal”? Is she (and, her obsession with her victim, Vili Fualaau…) an aberration or a sign of societal breakdown in norms and values? Just how much student-boinking was going on, back in the day, and is its prevalence today A Sign?

Certainly, in my grandmother’s day of repressed sexual behavior, they were not openly allowing such things to go on. I rather suspect that she and her fellow teachers would have been leading a lynch mob to string Ms. Letourneau up, had something of that nature happened in one of her schools. Certainly, her response to that situation would not have been what I heard from an eyewitness to the Letourneau debacle who was in the school at the time, which was basically “…we all knew something was going on, but nobody wanted to say anything about it… It wasn’t our business…”.

So, I suppose the question I still have is this: Are we living in an age of depravity, or are we just more open about letting the news get out, and then being willing to discuss the unmentionable? My mom describes “knowing” that one of the female teachers at her high school in the 1950s was “involved” with a couple of her female fellow students, but that it never rose to the point of “getting out”. She also can’t say for sure that “things were going on”, either… Just rumored to be, at class reunions and such, in latter days.

It’s damn hard to tease out the reality of it all: What was the real prevalence of these things, in the past? Are we living in an age of sexual licence or an age of openness about the issue?

And, then there’s the other question: Is sexual licence a good, bad, or indifferent thing? Is it something to worry about, or just something to note, with amusement, as the iceberg holes the ship?

Me, personally? I’m not sure how I feel. Is it better to live in Weimar Berlin, or some 1890s Midwestern Babbittown, far from the licence and “lack of sexual repression” noted in Weimar? Other than the lack of worry about the teachers boinking your pre-teen, that is, in the latter.

I do have a suspicion that licence goes along with social decay. No standards or loose standards, nobody seems to care about other things going on, when nobody cares about sexual licence and deviancy. You excuse nudity and public sex in the streets of San Francisco, how can you not excuse vagrants shitting in the streets…?

Like I said, I was responding to the specific, when you were giving a general example. I still think that homosexuality is the least destructive, given the tiny actual number.

Family breakdown, lack of at least replacement level breeding, general decline in effectiveness and integrity in our institutions, all far more important than one of many sexual deviations.

I don’t disagree in kind, just slightly in degree.

I’m not sure I’d class what’s been going on as “a decadence” so much as I’d say it has been an unnaturally forced “evolution” in social attitudes. And, one that I suspect is going to snap back with really nasty repercussions at some point in the near- to medium-term future.

There was nothing “natural” about the whole movement for tolerance and acceptance of deviant sexual behavior. That was all on the deviant community seizing control over the organs of cultural transmission in the media and the academic world, and deliberately forcing a change, very similar to how they took over the seminaries in the 1950s and 1960s. You see the results in the drastically increased rate of deviant behavior by the priesthoods, and in how much more “boinking the student bodies” we’re seeing of late with the “education professionals”. There has been a definite sea change in the nature of all this, and the eventual effect of it all? Hooh-boy… There will be metaphoric bills to be paid, and I lay you long odds that the bill-payers are going to be mostly in the deviant community.

Good, bad, or indifferent, I could care less how you get your rocks off. The problem is that a lot of the general public is going to see the source of the perversion infection as residing in the “out and proud” community, and they are going to take action against the most visible parts of it that they can get at. The real termites in the woodwork will still be there, but I suspect they’re going to be a little cowed seeing what happens to their fellow deviants when the denouement for all this comes down.

I remain ambivalent on the issue of divine retribution, however. I don’t think that any God who set this situation up is really going to care about how you scratch your itches, because if He did? He’d have already gone all Sodom and Gomorrah on a lot of places, not least the various administrative centers of the Catholic Church.

My point was (I think), (my comment was an observation that occurred without a lot of consideration), that open homosexuality is only one of many “decadences”. One could equally argue (like Augustus did), that bachelors are as bad for society in the long term.

On reflection, I think I misread your intention, thinking of it as a particular rather than representative example. Hence my comment on Turing being equally socially and historically valuable, had he indulged in a different “kink” than being homosexual.