“Sex Box is an intriguing and original concept from a top production partner and we’re very excited about its potential, which has already been clearly demonstrated overseas — where it’s a hit,” said WE tv president Marc Juris.
You can read more here but there's really not much reason to: it's a TV show where couples "have sex" in a soundproof box and then discuss their "relationship."
(For the reference in my title, see here, last paragraph.)
Like Dostoevsky said, we’re living in a henhouse having convinced ourselves it’s the Crystal Palace.
Increasingly not even a decently maintained henhouse.
Ugh. The culture needs the last rites. Or to be euthanased. 
That raises an interesting moral question. Is it permissible to put a dying culture out of its misery? And if so, how do you do it? I saw a headline earlier that seemed to be saying Lady Gaga’s latest stage stunt is to have someone vomit on her.
What I find the saddest in all this is that there are people who actually think it’s a good thing that they’re having sex in a box and then talking about it before an audience of potentially millions. But then maybe it’s just a matter of degree that separates them from the folks who volunteered to have sex for Kinsey or Masters and Johnson.
Maybe what bothers me more is that we’re not vociferously shaming the hucksters who produce this stuff. Like the moderator/presenter of Sex Box, Mariella Frostrup, who when asked whether her husband would be watching the show says: “I’m not sure.”
Yes, I was wondering that even as I was typing it, Maclin. 🙂
“What I find the saddest in all this is that there are people who actually think it’s a good thing thing…”
Many years ago–in the late ’70s or so–I was talking to a friend about the idea of reincarnation, and a related notion I’d read somewhere that there was only so much soul-stuff, and that with the increasing population and reincarnation, it was getting very thinly spread. I said that almost sounded plausible, and that it did seem that people were becoming somehow less substantial. And my friend replied “Yeah, and when there’s nothing left at all they put you on TV.”
Re Ms. Frostrup: “Perhaps we haven’t moved on from the Fifties.” Oh, come on. Invoking the Horribly Repressed ’50s like that is a good way to convince me you’re a birdbrain.
maybe it’s just a matter of degree that separates them from the folks who volunteered to have sex for Kinsey or Masters and Johnson
I can’t really see a difference at all.
Years ago I was zapping between programmes on daytime television. On one channel (a sort of audience-participant talkshow) they were interviewing a well-known Anglican vicar, who was saying one of the reasons for founding The Samaritans (a charity providing anonymous emergency counselling by telephone to those at risk of suicide, very well known in the UK) was so that people could talk about sexual matters without embarrassment because so many young people were driven to suicide by not being to talk about such things. He talked about one teenage girl who committed suicide when she started menstruating, not knowing what it was and not daring to talk to her parents about it. That was back in the 1950s, I think.
A second later, on another channel, on another audience-participant talkshow (this one about teen suicide) I heard that statistics for teen suicide had been steadily rising for decades. Presumably this was in spite of “sex talk” becoming ubiquitous, but it was only by chance I was presented with the two facts virtually simultaneously.
If the fifties were so bad, why were my mother and her siblings so happy? Why were my grandparents, great aunts and uncles so happy? I think all of them agreed that apart from the summertime threat of polio, life was pretty good then. And I assume that if some of these people were not talking about sex they were at least enjoying it, since my mother has many cousins etc 🙂
I’d say that both the left and the right overstate their cases w/r/t the 50s. It was neither the oppressive patriarchal period that the left paints it as, nor was it the conservative idyll that some on the right seem to think it was. The relaxation of social mores that came to full fruition in the 60s began in the immediate post WWII era and continued (albeit somewhat “underground”) through the 50s.
Having said that however, I’d much rather have a society that looks like “Mayfield” than one that resembles “Springfield.”
Exactly, Rob. I’m actually old enough to remember the 1950s, as well as the early-to-mid ’60s which weren’t that different, the divisible-by-ten years being a pretty arbitrary marker, and can give an eyewitness report.
It simply isn’t true that, to mention only Louise’s point, that women by and large were miserable. Yes, their lives were restricted in many ways that they currently are not, but if anything about the past 40 or 50 years has made clear it’s that freedom does not equal happiness. As Paul’s instance also illustrates.
That story about the suicide due to menstruation is pretty strange. I suppose it’s a true story, but it certainly does not represent the general state of knowledge at the time. I don’t remember learning about it but I don’t remember not knowing about it, either, past my early teens or so. I remember seeing ads for things like Tampax in magazines and being sort of puzzled by them. I very much doubt that many pubescent girls were as entirely ignorant as this one. But of course this is the way propaganda is done: you find one incident like this, and hold it up as the typical or emblematic case.
You could say that during the “1950s” (as defined above), I was too young to have an idea of what adults were really thinking. But looking further, to, say, the early ’70s, when I was an adult (chronologically), I can only see two women of my parents’ generation who were plainly unhappy, and of those only one bought into the feminist thing. One was an alcoholic, therefore unhappy, and the other was embittered, not altogether unreasonably, by certain developments in her life (e.g. chronic painful illness) which really had nothing to do with her situation as a woman, though she turned her anger toward that.
Youth suicide rates in the United States ca. 1955 were lower than was the case 30 years later. I do not think general suicide rates vary much over time, but one odd feature of that era was the changing age distribution of suicides and a pronounced shift in the balance of suicides from the old to the young.
I grew up in an extended family where a subjective sense of personal distress is regrettably common. If I were to look at my grandparents contemporaries, the main sources of feminine distress would appear to be:
1. Alcoholism.
2. Alcoholism of the husband or other 1st degree relative.
3. Manic depression on the part of 1st degree relatives.
4. Sociopathy on the part of 1st degree relatives.
5. Intense parental Calvinism.
What’s encoded in the term ‘feminism’ does not address any of the foregoing. Liberal divorce law and more participation in the labor force by bourgeois women would have allowed some of these women to get away from problem husbands. The trouble is, liberal divorce law also allows people to dissolve marriages in response to the generalized discontent which is just a part of the human condition. The second effect dominates by a long shot and has unfortunate feedback effects on the quality and durability of marriages generally.
I have never considered the 50’s as some kind of golden age, but since my mother was an adolescent through that decade and the family all speak pretty highly of that period in their lives, so I could never think of it as a bad time.
I think one of the down sides to the 50’s was that the idea of the two-child-no-mess family came into being, or was promoted more.
Belloc says that a relaxation of social customs etc had already begun by 1930. Perhaps it started after the first world war. Maybe it began earlier still?
Art, I’m so sorry to hear that about your family. Such things are very distressing. I certainly agree with what you say about liberal divorce law.
Every family has its troubles but it sounds like yours had more than its share, at least in that generation, Art.
Good summary of the effects of liberal divorce laws. So often it’s the case that changes which really do make it possible for people to escape or avoid bad situations have far-ranging undesirable social effects.
There is a long-standing and very plausible view that the Great War did indeed knock the western world off its moorings. Though even there you can see things developing well in advance. I was very surprised, when I first encountered Chesterton in the late ’70s, to find him decrying (and analysing very accurately), well before the war, tendencies which I thought had not appeared till considerably later.
Okay, this is weird. I was looking at some old What’s My Line videos and I ran across one where the guest was a guy who ran a skirt-blowing machine in the fun house at an amusement park. This was a gizmo that would blow ladies’ skirts up when they walked over a certain spot. There was some bleachers set up for people to watch. There was one at Coney Island until the early 1960s. According to Wikipedia, they started in 1897. I’m amazed that such things were culturally okay even that early.
There were other links to info about them, but I didn’t really want to click on them.
I guess in 1897 no more than a glimpse of ankle was at stake, but still, it is surprising. I’m not so very surprised that it would have existed in the 1950s, though I doubt it would have been acceptable in every part of the country. Playboy started publishing in 1952, I think, or maybe 1954.
I think one of the down sides to the 50’s was that the idea of the two-child-no-mess family came into being, or was promoted more.
??? Not in this country. Fertility rates were at their nadir around about 1934. The dozen years after the war saw the most robust fertility registered by any living cohorts. Among my parents contemporaries, four children was a shade above the median and five was atypical but common. Small families were characteristic of the aftertaste of the Depression and the War. Post-war fertility was a manifestation of post-war prosperity.
That’s true. I think the mentality of control was certainly present, but a quick totally unscientific survey of the families I grew up with gives me the impression that the typical range was three to six children.
Mac (and Paul), I’m a little perturbed by using the term “propaganda” in this context – as Paul noted, the Samaritans are well-known where I come from, and famous for talking people out of killing themselves. The tragedy that led to their founding is reasonably well-known as a result. And in Britain, the problem that the vicar was referring to was a real one – aside from how many suicides there actually were (the good rev may have been lying through his teeth for all I know), a lot of British parents could be way too coy about the facts of life. “Propaganda” is a suitable word only to the degree that real tragedies are used not to propose a practical solution (“talk to young people about sex”) but to push an agenda which either exaggerates the solution or insists on making the solution a package deal with other things (“talk about sex a lot, and also sexual antinomianism is awesome.”) Judging the success of “talk about sex” by the results of “talk about sex and also let’s abandon previous standards of sexual morality” is not entirely fair.
My opinions on this are a bit coloured by the fact that my own parents, though generally awesome, shamelessly shirked their duties to inform me of the facts of life; thus leaving me to get information from school sex education classes (from the age of 13 on), which concentrated on biology and how to put on condoms, and left the aspect of relationships and family to the parents to discuss (or fail to). I figured those aspects out myself before too long (and later our church youth group talked about sex and sanctity, which was very helpful), though not before I’d innocently asked my (faithfully married) mother, when she’d just bought a pregnancy test, who the father was. I don’t extend my warm feelings to those who want sex education to be a vehicle for social engineering, but I’m grateful to Paul’s vicar and all his ilk who saw to it that we got sex ed at school, because the Great British Parent was not always forthcoming on this issue.
Well if it comes to that, when I was a young child in the seventies, very many families had 3 or 4 children and larger families were common enough. But I’m thinking of the ideal, not the reality. I remember a lot of children’s books, clearly written and illustrated in the 50’s or 60’s in which their are two children in the family who are perpetually clean (except perhaps if the story required them to be naughty). I think there was an ideal in those books and that ideal took until my generation (people now in our 40’s) started having children to be seen as a reality. The average number of children in Australia is now 1.8 per family (or woman, I forget). When I was a child it was 2.4. That’s a big drop.
godescalc, you make a very helpful distinction there. Sadly too many people have used “talk to young people about sex” as an excuse to “talk about sex a lot, and also sexual antinomianism is awesome.”
‘”Propaganda” is a suitable word only to the degree that real tragedies are used not to propose a practical solution (“talk to young people about sex”) but to push an agenda which either exaggerates the solution or insists on making the solution a package deal with other things…’
That’s exactly the kind of thing I meant. I didn’t mean to disparage the Samaritans–God bless any group that tries to prevent suicides–or for that matter the vicar, although “Anglican vicar” and “sexual antinomianism” are not the entirely discordant elements one would like for them to be. I only meant that it’s a standard technique for the liberationists to take an incident like that and use it rhetorically in this way: “If you oppose our program, you are in favor of young girls committing suicide upon their first menstruation.”
I honestly have no idea how I learned the Facts Of Life. It wasn’t from my parents. I don’t remember anything very detailed being discussed in school, and I know there was a period when I had the basic idea but was pretty confused about the actual mechanics. I think most parents are probably pretty derelict about this, because it’s unbelievably awkward.
Your mother’s reaction to that question must have been pretty striking.
I think most parents are probably pretty derelict about this, because it’s unbelievably awkward.
Or they’re just derelict about anything more esoteric than cooking, laundry, commuting, and shopping. Very common type in suburban neighborhoods where I grew up.
You can be on top of all those things and still freak out at the prospect of the sex talk.
Sex talk? No. Conscientious discipline, schooling, skill development, &c. all sloughed off or fobbed off on others – school officials, mostly, but also the mental health trade here and there.
Light On Dark Water 
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