Every ad and every store display is designed to get us to act based on how we feel about an image. It doesn't matter if it's a restaurant chain, a car or truck, or even baby food, we are rarely asked to purchase something based on dispassionate and objective standards of quality and utility. If that were the case, nobody would buy fast food.
Often, these appeals to passion are associated with images of beautiful people having a wonderfully enjoyable time with each other, generally with the marketed item intimately involved. From beer to trucks to computers, there is an undercurrent of sensuality and even eroticism involved.
This sensuality and eroticism stops when we step out of our front doors. While store displays may offer continued imagery of partially naked people, there is a social standard for not discussing the naked human form, even when we are standing in front of one. Sometimes even when we are standing in front of a clothed attractive person.
The best example is when I am dealing with women I feel are attractive. They might be already married, too young or much older than me, but I would consider having sex and sleeping with them. I have no standard of physical beauty; I don't have a type. But it would be exceptionally crass of me, by our standards, to comment on a woman's attractive characteristics, except in certain defined circumstances.
It is obvious when men and women are going the extra step to appear attractive, but it's generally considered awkward at best, and harassment at worst, to actually mention how attractive he or she is.
It also considered bad form to obviously react to such attractions. Consider breasts.
As a man, I love breasts. I wish I could be surrounded by naked breasts all day. I also love cleavage, which requires some sort of garment to create. While I would love nothing more than to drink in the sight of deep cleavage, no doubt I would offend a number of women and their significant others if I did so, to say nothing of actually complimenting a woman on her cleavage.
And if I were acquainted with a woman who is critical of her breasts because she is judging them against the images she is shown all her life, I would be equally out of line to assure her that her breasts are lovely. I would either be considered inappropriate or only thinking of them sexually.
Of course I am! I am a heterosexual man!
Why exactly has it become inappropriate for me to tell any woman that I think she is beautiful?
Because of certain standards which have developed into words like "discretion," "propriety," or "politically correct." These contemporary substitutes for "sin" and "immoral" are still the flagellation of the weak handed down by New England Puritans.
There are, to be sure, a subset of the population that embraces the sensual and sexual as a lifestyle. While the 1960s gets the fame for "free love," it was the 1950s that established the cliche of the swinger. Think Mrs. Robinson, but a decade earlier.
These people, however, still act in accordance with mainstream society's mores. It requires something of a focused effort to find resources for such a lifestyle and its members do not advertise in their day-to-day life. It is called "discretion" and it is the very core of the hypocrisy of our world.
We are sensitized from an early age to hide parts of ourselves, even to the point of hiding aspects of ourselves from our most intimate partners. We do this because there may be other people in the world who do not agree with what we think, feel or do. We separate our professional lives from our personal lives.
That hypocritical splitting of hairs, that arbitrary distinction between private and the rest of the world is the kernel of unhappiness and isolation. From it grows only darkness.
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