Saturday, January 08, 2011

Past and Present. Here and there

Shame is not an unchanging feeling within the historical flow of time and it is absolutely diversely perceived from a country to another, from a society to another, from a religion to another and certainly a lot of other criteriums.

Put some of the above, put in a shaker, move it and the result will be different for any location and time.

Take "the books" (ie the bible (old and new), the koran or any other religious basic texts), they list without a blink in their contents almost all of the taboos of our time. I will not list them here as I'll be accused to promote perversions strictly condemned by moral (the actual and local one of course), and by law (depending what and the country of course).

To lay down a moral on the whole world is part of the destruction of people's freedom.

Let's talk of the innocuous "intimate depilation" example (Innocuous but not so innocent for me IMHO).

If a no hair intimate area was not welcome (an understatement) in the Occident for the last 20 centuries, The same hairy area was also taboo at the same level. The former was perversion, the later was indecence. With the rise of media and advertising, with the progress of body image, of fashion, of freedom, of increasing appearance of specialized cosmetics, Depilation became a fashion in our European/North American countries.

(I do not speak here of any societies polluted by any monotheist religions in Africa or Latin America)

On the Far East side when I was there, pubic hair had been outlawed by american infuence, almost strictly enforced by the puritan moralists and winners of the General McArthur high command in Japan, then In Korea.
Results:
1/ Artists of all types were censored if the smallest hair was appearing
2/ As those blackened or blured areas were (the less to say) very un-aesthetic, models in magazines (1970's-80's) started to shave not to show (with a big help from the yakuza also)
Consequence: a shaved cunt indicated a whore (or a near one) in the general thinking.

There starts one of my plays...

Their shame!

My pleasure!

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