Great Male Renunciation • Hacker News Board

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#61

Post by ben_w » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #52

shadowgovt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people couldn't afford to pay a staff of servants. ... But you can stay at a Holiday Inn tonight.

Well, having servants for one night only isn't really comparable to paying for them several decades. Also can't be stressed enough how large the servant staff could be. It often has a management hierarcy of sorts.

Tautologically most people can't afford human servants, because if we were all that rich it would include the servants who we then couldn't afford.

Quite a lot of us have robot vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, and all of us now have zero marginal cost (to ourselves) voice-controlled AI assistants free with our radio-video-telephone-dictaphone-gramophone-calendar-notepads.

Some of the aforementioned are also powerful enough to be able to locally, for an energy cost so small that it's less than the cost of the food calories you burned reading this sentence, create a new artwork in any arbitrary artistic style.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#62

Post by dehrmann » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

irusensei wrote: post #3

Bring it back. With all the frills and fabulous white wigs.

Seinfeld and the puffy shirt set that back at least 25 years.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#63

Post by ulizzle » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:52 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #37

Bright colors used to be a sign of quality, everything expensive had tons of colors. Industrial revolution changed that, now bright colors are associated with cheap toys instead because they are used to cover deficiencies in the production process. So it makes sense that people who care about quality moved away from colorful things.

No, It’s not about that. This was a cultural reaction to the excesses and cruelty of the French ruling classes.

And both men and women changed their styles, Im not sure why they don’t mention that. No one wanted to be mistaken by a jacobin and have a bomb thrown at your lap. Women stopped imitating Marie Antoinette way before she was beheaded in the pangs of birth of the reign of terror

The obvious historical parallels are obvious because what generally happens is that chaos can only build up so much until the people rebel and kill everyone in power. That’s why the Egyptians mentioned “maat” (order) all the time, but there are some very good movies on this time period even on netflix

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#64

Post by gumby » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

irusensei wrote: post #3

Bring it back. With all the frills and fabulous white wigs.

Nobody will stop you. You could be the trailblazer!

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#65

Post by zeristor » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #48

morkalork wrote: post #7

Just what % of the population actually wore those clothes back then? Are we comparing ourselves to what the 1% or 0.1% wore?

In at least some periods servants wore their masters’ cast-offs. Additionally, many natural dyes are not necessarily that expensive. I understand that many mediæval artworks depict commoners in colourful clothing.

Sumptuary Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#66

Post by huytersd » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:58 PM UTC

I’m thankful for the great renunciation.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#67

Post by huytersd » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

irusensei wrote: post #3

Bring it back. With all the frills and fabulous white wigs.

Screw that, what a waste of time and effort. I’d rather go back to just loincloths.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#68

Post by PeterisP » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #54

Somehow this relates to a political(?) bombing?! So I went to the Wikipedia article, and from there ended up at > The Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP) was a reform movement in interwar Britain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_Dress_Reform_Party which > saw [the everyday man's] clothes as "depressing"[2] and lacking in creativity and which was affiliated with the Sunlight Leage . But: > Then, in 1940, the Sunli…

The bombing likely was caused by a popular early-1940s London activity called 'the Blitz' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz), and while it certainly had political causes, I don't think that it was directly related to the political position of the Sunlight League or the Men's Dress Reform Party.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#69

Post by pavel_lishin » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

spandextwins wrote: post #17

This is typical of wikipedia. Everybody knows there's formal dress today vs. functional dress for both men and women. Same shit, different day.

Everybody knows what a horse is.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#70

Post by Jensson » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

ulizzle wrote: post #63

Jensson wrote: post #37

Bright colors used to be a sign of quality, everything expensive had tons of colors. Industrial revolution changed that, now bright colors are associated with cheap toys instead because they are used to cover deficiencies in the production process. So it makes sense that people who care about quality moved away from colorful things.

No, It’s not about that. This was a cultural reaction to the excesses and cruelty of the French ruling classes. And both men and women changed their styles, Im not sure why they don’t mention that. No one wanted to be mistaken by a jacobin and have a bomb thrown at your lap. Women stopped imitating Marie Antoinette way before she was beheaded in the pangs of birth of the reign of terror The obvious historical paralle…

Then this would be isolated to France and you would expect things to normalize as people forgot about the revolution. But things never "normalized", men still prefer to not wear bright colored clothes.

> And both men and women changed their styles

Maybe in France right after the revolution, but if I look at dresses today I see all that gaudiness in female dresses but not in male.