I just came across this interesting piece from Mary Eberstadt in the Hoover Institution Policy Review. It basically asks "what happens, when for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the food and sex they want?" She begins to get at this question through examining this basic tenet: As consumers of both sex and food, today’s people in the advanced societies are freer to pursue and consume both than almost all the human beings who came before us; and our culture has evolved in interesting ways to exhibit both those trends.
In the end, Eberstadt explains that in the past (in the U.S.), sex was governed by moral laws, and food was governed by taste. She describes a fundamental shift - or reversal - that has occurred in today's society in which morality now guides or governs our food choices, while sex and sexuality has become a matter of taste. It's an interesting analysis with some surprising insight into the human condition in the contemporary United States.
really interesting angle.
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