Youth culture is—well, let's just say that I'm losing my grip on it. On DA, at least, the women are looking sluttier every day, but I know beyond a doubt that it's men who put up the images, and they seem to prefer slutty images.
A lot of the people I admire still dress beautifully, smartly, attractively; but a lot of the women seem to follow along with the crowd and the fashions, even when some of the elements of current fashion are in really bad taste. I wasn't watching the Golden Globes (has it been held yet? I don't even know), so I'm speaking from what I see on Facebook and so on. The biggest survival skill I must learn is: to focus on the things that are pleasing to me, and to ignore the rest. Someday, that will come easy to me, but at the moment, a lot of things make me cringe!
What people do in private doesn't bother me a great deal. There are 'stories' on DeviantArt that describe casual incest. I have written stories that have incest, but they are not in the least casual; in fact they cause a certain degree of trauma—ultimately to all the concerned parties. But we don't need to know everything that people do in private; that's the point. A little intimacy, to establish the progress of a relationship—that's not inappropriate. But an entire story based on sex, that borders on pornography. (Porn is creeping into commercial mainstream fiction as a genre. I guess that was inevitable.)
After the turmoil of the 80's and the 90's, I was hoping that fashions and styles of the two sexes would converge. That guys could wear skirts just as much as women could wear pants. But that did not suit the fashion designers; they would lose revenue, you see? A few brave guys—bless them—wore skirts. At first, just kilts. Then they went on to wrap skirts of all sorts. But the trends are changing; guys don't seem to feel welcome among the skirt-wearing population.
At first, I noticed that girls' fashions were growing more and more elaborate and fussy. Hair-styles were the fussiest of all; braids here, curls there, ornaments, back-combing ... Very few female portraits on DA showed a natural-looking girl. (And, of course, they were nude, or in their underwear. That's a time-hallowed tradition from when Art was produced by guys, for guys.) Things have to settle down sooner or later.
Another interesting phenomenon is that young people just love to dance! There's nothing wrong with dancing; it's just that I never got into dancing, and I find it hard to relate to it, while at the same time I really admire girls who can do a little dance, just to express themselves! A lot of what goes on in TikTok, I understand, is dancing. Girls who regularly dance like this must keep in shape. (Unfortunately, a lot of young people aspire to be influencers, which is a little like getting into politics, but with the explicit motive of making money.)
Kay Hemlock Brown
[Just making sure that all who read this blog know that how I have signed this post—Kay Hemlock Brown—is only a pen-name. 'Kay Brown' may or may not be distantly related to my true name, but 'Hemlock' is completely from out of left field. In fact, the inspiration for Hemlock came from the muppet Sherlock Hemlock, who was a character on Sesame Street! In fact, one of my favorites. —Kay]
No comments:
Post a Comment