tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post2814472162863980534..comments2024-03-28T21:56:51.675-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Adultery as a part of status competition and inequalityagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-52120533768369510652013-12-07T12:10:43.554-05:002013-12-07T12:10:43.554-05:00I finally got around to reading Pinker's Bette...I finally got around to reading Pinker's <i>Better Angels</i>. The descriptions of how widespread and commonplace violence was in the 'popular culture' of the medieval and middle ages make for fun reading, but I wonder (because I don't know) how representative said popular culture was of the larger societies it existed in at the time.<br /><br />I bring this up because that doesn't appear to be the case today--if anything, the inverse seems to be true. You've indefatigably documented a whole host of things related to this in your long-running analyses of cultural differences between rising (and high) crime eras and declining (and low) crime eras. Recall comic books from the low crime mid-20th century, for example. Video games, a sort of contemporary successor to comic books, have become far more graphically violent and intentionally realistic in their depictions of said violence (having previously opted for stylized depictions of violence and a predilection for surreality) over the last few decades as actual rates of violent crime have steadily dropped.<br /><br />As real life in the West has become increasingly more peaceful over the last twenty years, football has clearly surpassed baseball as America's pass time and MMA has left boxing behind. In many ways, as we've become less violent, our popular culture has become more so. Moving outside the US, the exceptionally pacifistic Japanese are into some extremely gruesome and disgusting stuff.<br /><br />More generally, Quentin Tarantino is a successful director and producer, but if aliens were to try and surmise what life on earth is like for its human inhabitants by viewing Kill Bill and Django Unchained, their conceptions would be wildly off base. Western popular culture is way more violent than life in the Occident actually is.<br /><br />My pop culture knowledge is limited and really spotty though, so I could easily be cherry picking without intentionally trying to. Audacious Epigonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07495507254628580077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-71092285784585909492013-12-01T12:21:57.459-05:002013-12-01T12:21:57.459-05:00What about spinsterhood? What about spinsterhood? asnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-56934751525772949152013-12-01T05:56:32.336-05:002013-12-01T05:56:32.336-05:00Maybe marrieds are less likely to be newlyweds the...Maybe marrieds are less likely to be newlyweds these days, since marriage rates among youth are not too high and the population is aging.<br /><br />For men, promiscuity falls with age with testosterone, and is not much offset with boredom with a spouse, while for women boredom increases over time.<br /><br />Be easy to check this with age controls anyway.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com