Comment by satisfice
6 hours ago
Have you ever stopped to realize that, from the Victorian’s point of view, they have been proven completely right about what would happen if ladies started showing their ankles?
6 hours ago
Have you ever stopped to realize that, from the Victorian’s point of view, they have been proven completely right about what would happen if ladies started showing their ankles?
They were right. We have largely had 200 years of socially and legally enforced morality being eroded with the conservatives saying "If you remove X then Y and Z will happen!". The liberals saying "Why do you care anyways? That's a slippery slope it won't happen!". The the conservatives immediately being proven right, but no one is willing to walk back on liberalization of moral issues since too many like hedonism.
What do you mean, "proven right"? Could you give three examples?
...sorry, I'm dense apparently, what did they predict vs what happened?
The Victorians were accidentally right about ankles, which is funny in hindsight. Once one arbitrary rule breaks, people start noticing the rest are kind of fake too, and it turns out "modesty" was load-bearing for a whole governance model.
Ankles -> knees -> jazz -> voting -> rock -> no-fault divorce -> Tinder -> polyamory discourse on airplanes. it's a joke, but also sort of how cultural change actually propagates. The collapse did happen, just not of morals. Of enforcement. After that, everything is just people discovering the rules were optional all along. Including money.
Well, I wasn't speaking of a formal prediction by leading Victorian moral researchers... I was referring to our collective common knowledge of Victorian hangups.
Nevertheless, here is an example of Victorian anxiety regarding showing ankles: https://archive.org/details/amanualpolitene00pubgoog/page/n2...
It's easy to say "oh they were silly to worry about such things." But that's only because we see it from our own point of view.
Alternatively, imagine describing roads, highways, traffic congestion and endless poles strung with electrical wire all over the place to someone from the 11th century. This would sound like utter ruination of the land to them. But you and I are used to it, so it just seems normal.