Fashion grows less sexualized:
Modest dressing is a global cultural movement on the rise.
A search of the word modest on Instagram opens a treasure trove of evidence. Sensitive layering, long silhouettes, raised necklines — so far, over half a million people have hashtagged the term modest fashion below their photos, and multiple spin-offs (modest dressing, modesty movement, modest style) are widely in use.
At a glance, modest dressing appears to refer to a trend seen predominantly among young Muslims, though on closer inspection the movement includes women of many different faiths, and sometimes has nothing to do with religion at all.
There are a couple of factors at play. One, I suspect as amygdalae become exercised their taste for sexual stimuli is altered. Atrophied amygdalae will prefer sexual stimuli as a stimulant, similar to novelty seeking and risk taking. In such a case, skirts get shorter and necklines begin to plunge to turn on amygdalae that crave stimulation.
As amygdalae are more permanently stimulated and exercised they develop, and excess barrages of sexual stimuli begin to become uncomfortable, provoking an irritation. What we feel for transgenderism and homosexuality now will slide back and become what society will feel for excess sexual stimuli in public. That is why people were averse to it in periods like Victorian England, or even more recent periods like the 50’s. We can’t imagine it now, but that is how brain programming works. If you’re not programmed for it, it is difficult to visualize. But I will bet the Victorian English would have viewed the more revealing fashions today as repugnant and bothersome.
The second factor is probably the more interesting. Leftists crave anything representative of the outsider, so here they are embracing Muslim chasteness in style. You can literally make leftists adopt almost any ideal, if it is simply seen as foreign, and hostile to their own people. It will be even more likely to be adopted if it is seen as representative of a violent outgroup specifically.
Just as Sweden’s “feminist government” gladly donned hijabs as a sign of submission to their male Iranian hosts, leftists will gladly desexualize society, embrace wife beating, support genital mutilation, and probably support traditional conservative issues like gun ownership and religious freedom, if only they can be convinced that supporting such in some way betrays their own people in favor of a violent out-group who threatens everyone.
This has the air of an amygdala hijack in the making, because leftists have a drive to support out-group interests that could be rigged to be in opposition to their drive to oppose K-selected conservative values. Where those drives conflict in the mind, you get amygdala hijacking.
Do you oppose women being submissive to men? You’re an Islamophobe. Why should you have to serve gays, when Islam says gays are sinners? Transgenders in a bathroom with Muslim children? Leftists could be tied in knots, if conservatives just claimed to support Islam, and then demanded their rights based on helping Muslims create a better Islamic world. Either the leftist fights us and has the Muslims turned on them, or they fully and completely cede to the right. It is out-grouping, writ large – and obvious in the leftist mind.
The phenomenon of liberal ideological conflict produced by out-group sympathy is definitely worth exploration, as liberals reel from the epic amygdala stimulation of the Donald Trump Presidency.
Of course the alternate option is merely a conservative movement that grows as violent and unreasonable as the Muslims, when the Apocalypse goes down.
[…] Modest Fashion Rises […]
Yea — I’m finally in style!
Have you seen images of bathing suits from the turn of the century, AC? Even American MEN were mostly covered. When I look at images from each decade, starting around 1900, or so, I don’t see breaks or times of modesty, but a slow, smooth progression away from modesty toward revealing more and more body. If the old observation is correct, using skirt lengths as an example, then when investors lose their irrational exuberance and re-ground themselves in fundamentals, skirt lengths — and modesty writ large — go long. But you don’t see this in bathing suits, which, after all, represent Americans at play, at a time of maximum self-revelation.
Why the skirt lengths vary with social and economic optimism/mood, while bathing suits followed a smooth trajectory toward indecency, is something I don’t understand. Do you?
Interestingly bathing suits are used exclusively for pleasure, in warm delightful environments, while at play, by those who partake of such pleasures. All of that is r, so maybe bathing suits are clothing for a more r-subset of the population, and it will take a much harder kick of K-selection to move that needle back.
I do think amygdalae are much different today than they were back in the 1900’s, and among some they are probably almost unrecognizable compared to back then.