Sexual Containment
THAT got your attention.
A girl walked into my local café this morning (no, this isn't a joke) with a sizeable portion of her lower buttocks protruding from a pair of skimpy dungarees and it set me thinking about the nature of sexualisation and contemporary society. Either I'm getting old, or I'm just not your typical male voyeur.
In the so-called 'Swinging Sixties', when free love and sexual licentiousness was apparently all the rage, we were told that young people were more 'liberated'. It then occurred to me, however, that fifty years on you would expect people to be copulating in the streets or walking around stark naked, but that simply isn't the case. Or at least it hasn't been legalised. The cultural and behavioural attitudes that characterised the Sixties, therefore, were - on the whole - little more than a fictitious product of the mass media and the result of a few virginal hippies taking far too much LSD and then returning to their senses to discover that they had lost far more than their minds. That which mainstream historians regard as Western society's most formative decade may have marked a radical alteration in human affairs, but the same thing still goes on at festivals today and Tracy Emin's "The Tent" - one of the trashier examples of Modern Art - is hardly unique in that respect at all. If the 'liberated' attitudes of the past have yet to (d)evolve into an orgiastic free-for-all, then what could possibly be the reason for this seemingly inexplicable stasis? Music and advertising, for example, have never been so utterly sexualised, even to the extent that it is making young girls feel insecure about their bodies and producing children that have been hand-reared on a diet of hardcore porn and who become pregnant before they have even begun to think about attending secondary school.
The disparity between the increasing sexualisation of the young and the rigid legal parameters of contemporary society, it seems, indicates that whilst there is much profit to be made from exploiting and manipulating the most base and instinctual desires of the herd, including those of its disturbingly precocious offspring, society itself cannot be permitted to descend into a whirlpool of total depravity lest the consequences interfere with the smooth day-to-day running of the capitalist economy. After all, if it became commonplace to see topless women standing at a production line or road-sweepers hanging around the gutter in nothing but their birthday suits, it might well result in serious injury and more people taking the afternoon off or (cough, cough!) popping outside for a cigarette.
It all sounds rather alarmist, but I do believe that what we perceive to be stubborn 'morality' ultimately has a material objective. Rather like people stepping off the laborious treadmill at weekends, often to drink to excess or fornicate to their heart's content (in private, of course), before turning up for work on Monday morning as fresh as a pliable daisy. Fluctuating bikini-lines and varying quantities of cleavage might well change with the times, I grant you, but society never quite discards that bourgeois veneer of comparative normality.