This topic could easily be very complex and far-flung, even if we limit ourselves to the 20th century. I’m not going to try some kind of encyclopedic survey nor some comprehensive analysis of it all, but rather will focus on one aspect, which struck me recently as a kind of epiphany.
I don’t know when the change occurred—and the change likely wasn’t overnight, but unfolded relatively gradually, even if we think of the 60s Cultural Revolution as a remarkable pivot in history—but it’s probably safe to say that the 1930s, 40s and 50s preceded the change. Consider then, the charming song “Two Sleepy People” written in 1938 by Hoagy Carmichael—but more importantly, the lyrics were by a Jew, Frank Loesser—and the attendant pop cultural framework wherein Bob Hope and Shirley Ross act it out in a popular movie at the time.
Here we are
Out of cigarettes
Holding hands and yawning
Look how late it gets
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say goodnight…
Here we are
In the cozy chair
Pickin' on a wishbone
From the Frigidaire
Two sleepy people with nothing to say
And too much in love to break away…
The quaint ambiance these lyrics evoke are further fleshed out by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, snuggled up together on a sofa, to be sure, but both fully dressed (he even with his tie knotted and jacket buttoned up). If we measure the distance of that picture with the way popular culture regarded sex in, say, the 1970s (even worse in subsequent decades up to our own some 50 years after), we realize a major seismic change occurred at some point. This change is perhaps fundamentally a devolution or deterioration, notwithstanding that it entails beneficent aspects (including fun). Indeed, it’s the inclusion of the beneficent aspects (including fun) that have made it so effective culturally. A later version—20 years later—was promoted apparently in the 1958 movie The Young Lions, in a scene with Dean Martin and Barbara Rush, and we can see the intimacy has become a shade more daring—they seem even more intertwined and, let us say, ‘positioned’ romantically (even if still fully dressed—Barbara is wearing a dress but in the angle of the only photo I can find, her dress has bare shoulders which along with her head is all we see), with two drinks pointedly visible in the background. Nevertheless, it remains very tame compared with Leftists in Netflix shows & movies in our century humping each other at the drop of a hat so explicitly they verge on hardcore xxx-rated porn.
At any rate, these considerations got me thinking. First of all, just because those old movies of yesteryear depicted a sanitized version of sex—so sanitized it was effectively non-existent except insofar as one could infer it ever so properly between the lines—this didn’t mean that celebrities and elites weren’t having lots of various types of sex ‘in real life’, including fornication and adulterous flings, enjoyed on a spectrum of casual encounters to relatively long-term affairs, not to mention even threesomes or orgies.
So my question is, what was it like, psychologically and culturally, to enjoy a sinful sex life within a culture that massively, all around one as reflected in movies, television, radio, popular literature, public speaking, interviews, etc.—you name it—pretended all sexual relations were sanitized out of existence, fostering a generalized Puritanical framework? I imagine it was tremendously more exciting. The legions of Useful Idiot Leftists (and virtue-signalling Centrists and Tepid Conservatives) have thus shot themselves in the foot by massively enabling a cultural situation that makes their sinful sex lives significantly less exciting. Perhaps this in turn has fostered a kind of envelope-pushing sexuality where various other activities are pursued to try to make sex more exciting—drugs, kinky experimentation, more and more daring (and depraved) sexual aberrations; etc.