meridannight Wrote:...i also think it's great the younger generations growing up now feel safe and free to disclose their homosexuality so openly. it is a positive thing. but i have my reservations about the idea of posting these things online for complete strangers to look at.
There is so much about "human nature" I don't understand in general, mix into this "human nature" and culture and it gets even more complicated.
What am I talking about? Well, if we *assume* that "human nature" is largely a product of our historical development, we don't have to go back in the historical record to find *most* people growing up in a very, very small "world experience". That is to say, for most human beings for tens of thousands of years, one's "growing up" took place in the context of a small tribe or village -- a place where everyone pretty much knew everyone else and everyone else's business more or less. (I grew up in such a "small town" myself, so I know a bit about what that feels like.)
So, now, of course in modern times -- the last hundred years or so -- for people in 'developed' nations, this is no longer so much the case. We grow up in cities or suburbs where one may or may not know one's neighbor, let alone know almost everything about him including his clan and their personal histories as well.
Back in the 1960s we began talking about "
the global village" … that is, our experience of ourselves as human beings living inside a "village" bound together by the ability of electronic media to "broadcast the drum beat of information" on a global scale. The invention of the internet has only made that analogy even more accurate.
What I'm getting at here is how, on one hand, it seems a bit odd to me that people are comfortable sharing intimate details of their life with total strangers. (I've often remarked that had someone in the past told me how many men would, in the future,
willingly expose their naked bodies [NSFW] for the world to see, I wouldn't have believed them.) On the other hand, when you think about how humans 'evolved' (socially), in a way it makes sense. It wasn't *that* long ago that our ancestors lived nearly "communally". (They may not have shared resources equally but for sure "strangers" stood out like sore thumbs to everyone.)
Back in the '60s we talked a lot about a "sexual revolution" that was gong on -- the slow coming out of "gay" to society in general being apart of that. But it seems to me -- as someone who has now lived through several decades of social change -- that what we're experiencing now -- human sexuality now made public (a *huge* amount of amateur porn shared online) -- we're almost reverting back to a primordial state. That is, to a time before the idea of "privacy" had much of an existence -- a time when families, tribes, cohorts of people literally lived, slept, ate -- did pretty much *everything* together.
I don't know, I just like thinking about stuff like this.
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