A friend posted a humorous advertisement from Columbia, where young women are advocating that ‘natural is better’. Someone asks why this kind of thing happens.
An exacerbated interest in youth and sex is a cyclical expression of human behavior that is usually caused by the intersection of:
(a) the ‘winter’ period of a civilization wherein the institutions that perpetuated the set of forgone opportunity costs we refer to as customs, myths, manners, ethics and morals are insufficient to coordinate status signals in the economy due to a combination of institutional calcification, and
(b) a substantial increase in population causing an over representation of single people of mating age, and
(c) a period of economic prosperity that enables the proletariat access to leisure — usually caused by an increase in technology or shift in trade routes. (Or a decline in the aged population as we saw after the plague as is demonstrated by 13th century french literature.)
The synthetic historians have all discussed this process in one way or another. (Toynbee, Quigley, Durant, Spengler and Braudel.) Strauss and Howe address this somewhat in their books on cyclicality such as ‘Generations’.