I HAVE BEEN DYING TO KNOW WHAT THE TEMPLE THINKS

In my studies i find people who think as i do. One in particular is C S Lewis. Besides his Narnian adventures i highly recommend his other novels. This is from The Screwtape Letters...
Backround... A chief of the devil is writing to his understudy...
He writes...
"...it is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual 'taste'. Yhis they do by working thru a small circle of artist, dressmakers, actresses , and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritual helpful happy and fertile marriages are most likely. We have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male such as the beard disagreeable to nearly all of the females and theres more in that then you might suppose.As regard to the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque an aristocratic type of beauty mixing mens vanity with the desires and encourage in the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. The age of jazz has succeeded at the age of waltz and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from boys.....It is all fake of course the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish the nature allows a full grown woman to be. YET at the same time this modern world is taught to believe that it is being frank and healthy and getting back to nature. As a result we are directing the desires of man to something that does not exist making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast... "
This was written in 1943...
WHAT SAY YOU JEDI?

I'm a little confused, are you asking whether we agree with the 'devil's assessment? I'm not sure in the past marriage had very much to do with sexual taste in the opposite sex.

Sexual taste is only recently a factor in what makes for a marriage. Or even just a "couple". Marriage, as it were, was a socio-economic contract that was to create an administrative unit smaller than the village. It was arranged by the family and occasioned by the Church. If the couple - usually an older boy, 27 years average, whose family had the time and certainly the good fortune to accumulate the dowry, and a young girl, 13 - 15. What the husband and wife actually thought about one another was a less than secondary concern. It was their duty to produce surviving children, which until only recently required usually several un-surviving attempts. Often the girl died in childbirth. The young man only had a life expectancy of 35 - 40 years anyway.

During the Industrial Revolution, we gained a little ground in terms of comfort and lost quite a bit of freedom with the advent of "choice". It was most remarkable in the middle classes of the early nineteenth century, for whom the idea of courtly love was resurrected from the troubadours (notably Aquitaine et Poitou) of the twelfth century. Now we were not only trying to choose who we married wisely, but also hoping that this would also be the person with whom we fall in Love.

That is still idealised, even today. We want to make "ideal" choices - revolving around our own "ideals", including sexual taste - and we desperately hope that this is the person we will fall in Love with as well. These are already NOT the same phenomena going on. What complicates matters is that it has to happen for the two people at once. Sometimes it does ... but only very rarely.

We may have it a little backwards. There is sexual attractiveness, but have you ever noticed how when you fall in Love with someone, their "flaws" sort of disappear ? Perhaps that person is not really centre-fold material but s/he is still "perfect" : sexy, insightful, interesting, funny ... How all the songs on the radio sing about him/her ? Even stupid shit like the ingredients on a cereal box make you think of him/her ... ?

The thing is, that feeling doesn't last. We can feel it, from time to time, through time but not always 'in' or 'on' time. And during and since the socio-politico-economic earthquake we've been living from the era of the Second World War 'til now, post-industrial and over-informatised, we've turned even these beautiful things in to "instant" consumables.

So, why now is everyone so un-happy ? We live to 100 years in our Matrix-mousetrap, slaves to our salaries and our Liberty ... Perhaps a shorter life-span was more meaningful, considering the meanings made for us, by us and between us ?

:dry:

I say I have no idea what this man is talking about and if I were to guess I'd reckon that neither does he. I could go line by line and illustrate how nothing in this excerpt makes any sense whatsoever, but I don't have to. I'm two sentences in and already Mr. Lewis displays his utter ignorance of basic economics, or at least that of his book's characters in that passage. Another sentence and it is all an evil conspiracy. And on he goes, displaying his complete misunderstanding of all things natural and sexual selection, all things human anatomy, all things history and fashion history and I frankly can't wait to see a feminist chime in to all of this!

With all due respect, what I can say about Mr. Lewis is this:
For someone who is praised as so much of an intellectual, so much of a scholar, he does everything to hide all of the education he has had. For someone who is praised as the founder of modern apologetics, his thoughts on it are as empty and as poor as they come. For someone who said so much smart stuff about what makes a good narrative or an immersive world, his stories, impressively, have neither as far as I could tell. When earlier I used to think I was unfamiliar with his work and thus my judgement would likely be inappropriate, this quote only fortifies what I already suspected. If he did write a lot of interesting, deep or profound thoughts, I am surprised that it is only the mediocre ones that are ever being quoted anywhere...

same old people complaining about things they perceive to be new yet aren't. The marriage Alex discusses is that of the rich: a political or economical arrangement. The reality is we've had these types of unions for thousands of years and we still have them today. But for the vast majority it's always been about attraction, even the church for most of its existence was uninterested in peasant marriages.
yes there are fashions. there are eras where beards are cool and eras where they aren't. The romans had those too... And each culture has its sub cultures... There are guys today who like big hairy women, women who like big hairy guys...
It certainly never occurred to me that "firm and slender" looked boyish. Want to take a look at nature? animals evolved to impress the opposite sex, and they groom themselves. Flowers look pretty and smell nice in order to attract bees (and therefore reproduce).

The whole book was a (hilarious)joke and this passage is no different. A piece of the truth is there if you look for it.

Line from Princess Bride .."let me explain.. wait there is to much, let me sum up" Do you think that according to photo shop and all the naked booty showing with plastic surgery and makeup on the internet and tv and music videos that we as a generation as men and women are looking for something that is not really there as far as looks. I think that there is a huge "billboard" on the look of today and at the end of the day nothing is as it seems. I think we've been douped, led astray bamboozled hoodwinked...

Alexandre , you seem to be the certain type i would defiantly invite over for tea.

In the days you speak of times were different, true. Love was not the focus of most unions. Love in those days was a grown thing. Many men did not know their responsibilities as you will and for the first few years it was truly a duty to the union that kept the gears going. I have met many "old timers" who have said the same thing. To my surprise it was the same story, to find love was still the thought and how to do this was still on their minds. They took time to talk... plan... and generally win their already wed. They accepted all flaws partly due to the fact that they were presently and for futures sake all they had. They made their house. I hear my grandfathers voice mainly but i hear the old timers say "my house..it was what i made it" To have that thought today is beyond what is being shown and televised and advertised. I honestly think the reason for so much of the un foiled hearts is because of the simple face that we see the grass as greener on the other side and never realy take time to "make our house" what we want it to be, never take care of our own yard. We are to busy at looking at everything else...everyones else and what others have we fail to build our own life to what we want it to be. I leave you with this... "There is nothing more satisfying than making a fire with no lighters, nothing is more beautiful and warmer than that."
Carlos

Gisteron,
I would love to know what your thoughts are on the subject at hand. It was not in my intention to ask about the author himself. C S LEWIS is not for everybody my friend. Cambridge is thought of very highly in some circles and it is nether my intention nor my goal to down any author regardless of personal feelings. I am truly sorry for the confusion.
What the author is saying in my opinion is the fact that here nowadays there seems to be a lot (especially now) of false advertisement so to speak. Lots of photo shop. Spray make up and paint curtains and mirrors and smoke. the fact that the worls glamorizes ...fake drawn manufactured looks... this is what the question is. Do you think that what we have seen is false? do you thing that the women that have been placed in roles are not like the real women in the world? I am wonderin this and probly alot more. Feel free to pm me or post your thoughts.
CARLOS

I don't know about a galaxy far, far away or about Narnia, but over here on earth the attempt to control demand through supply failed every single time. If you make it your business to offer people what they don't want to have, you're not going to sell a lot. You're welcome to try, but that's just not how economy works.
Now, do the ideals we see actually match reality? Probably not in most cases, probably in only a few. Likely some are exaggerated. But they are not warped into what is unnatural or ought be undesirable. If they were, they wouldn't sell. I would estimate they are not even warped all too much to begin with. Nowadays this is also easy to test, but for some reason people who make the argument never actually present their research.

I don't think that the discussion of the subject matter is even granted. The idea that the market determines the demand (rather or statistically significantly more than the other way around) is backward in the first place. It is also an extraordinary claim, given the amounts of evidence to the contrary. That it flies in the face of common sense is also true but needs not even be stated at this point.