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Great Male Renunciation

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131–140 of 156 posts

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#131

Post by rsynnott »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #51
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of it had to do with the rise in pollution due to coal dust and soot?

Mid to late 1700s was well before widespread industrialization.

It's before widespread use of _steam power_ (that was around 1800), but the First Industrial Revolution started in the mid-18th century, and you'd already be seeing dramatic expansion of population, the economy, iron smelting, etc. The air in London or Paris would definitely have been getting noticeably worse at that point.

(At some point, popular culture seems to have decided that the Industrial Revolution was personally invented by Queen Victoria or something, and it gets moved about 50 years later, but in reality by the late 18th century it was well underway).

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#132

Post by rsynnott »

huytersd wrote: post #67
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.

I mean, that's a fashion statement itself, and not a particularly practical one in most climates.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#133

Post by rsynnott »

mollerhoj wrote: post #121

In most species, males are more colorful than females - since they are the ones during the attraction. Our culture seem to have flipped this logic somehow

That's largely birds, and some fish; most mammals are less sexually dimorphic.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#134

Post by rsynnott »

barrysteve wrote: post #10

Gosh, I miss how organized and rich the Old World culture was. Today's culture, is broad and spiritually hollow by comparison.

... They barely _had_ culture by modern standards. They'd only just invented the novel in the period referred to.

This is a particularly severe case of "the grass is always greener", I think.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#135

Post by rsynnott »

locopati wrote: post #11
barrysteve wrote: post #10

Gosh, I miss how organized and rich the Old World culture was. Today's culture, is broad and spiritually hollow by comparison.

yes... great if you were rich

I mean, it really wasn't, either. Read Samuel Pepys' Diary. He's rich for most of the period covered (it starts at about the point that he starts becoming rich, largely through bribery), and it sounds... I mean, like not a lot of fun.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#136

Post by defrost »

rsynnott wrote: post #132
huytersd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, that's a fashion statement itself, and not a particularly practical one in most climates.

It's worth moving to the New Guinea highlands to sport a faux Koteka.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#137

Post by rsynnott »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #73
ben_w wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Berlin, we have a "pfand" (deposit) on various bottles. At a summer barbecue you sometimes get people asking to take your bottles away, so they can collect that deposit themselves. For the larger bottles, just four per day would equal the income of a pre-industrial farmhand.

..., ignoring inflation.

This is the thing, no. _Even adjusted for inflation_, the pre-industrial working class (and the early-to-mid-industrial working class, for that matter) was paid barely anything. This was recognised as a problem at the time, even; a lot of the push for the reform of the Corn Laws in Britain, say, came from capitalists, who were, rightly, concerned that the working class _couldn't actually afford to buy any of their products_ (this largely played out; once they were repealed, living costs fell, wages rose, and the consumer market expanded greatly).

Adjusting for inflation also gets messier the further you go back. After the repeal of the Corn Laws the average person's day to day obligatory expenses went down dramatically, but it's barely a blip on the inflation charts.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#138

Post by rsynnott »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #58
marginalia_nu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we though? I sure as heck can't afford to pay a staff of servants.

Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better, but you probably do own a lot of machines that take the place of many things servants would have done in the past. Laundry machine, dishwasher machine, mixing machine, fire tending machine, etc.

> Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better

... Eh? I mean, it is clearly better by any reasonable measure. Bear in mind that most people in the 18th century didn't have a staff of servants.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#139

Post by rsynnott »

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.

Most people, of course, didn't have servants at all, and the really big staffs were an _extreme_ outlier; in the period mentioned you're basically talking just high nobility. It did become _somewhat_ more common in the late 19th century (most of the really silly Downton Abbey type setups date from then), before collapsing entirely in the early 20th.

Re: Great Male Renunciation

#140

Post by kyorochan »

mock-possum wrote: post #117
tcgv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's describing a well known formal attire etiquette: https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/advice/a33367/how...

> The two-button jacket should never have both buttons fastened. Sorry, why put two buttons on the jacket then?

People (arguably) don't do it because it looks better, but to signal that they are in the know about fashion.
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