Old news is old?<p>The author laments that couples behave as if the public is their motel room - yet this is merely a continuation of a pattern that has been there for ages. It used to be that making out in public is scandalous and lewd; it also used to be that baring your ankles in public is similarly scandalous and lewd.<p>This is nothing new - we've been becoming "less embarrassed" (to put in the author's terminology) for years and years, well before the social media/reality show craze, and it will continue well after social media and reality shows have gone.<p>Social acceptability changes by geography and time - the author mentions the coworker who mentioned that he's shaved his whole body in preparation for a bicycling event... as a relatively young member of society, I see nothing wrong with this information. He has hair on his body that he had to remove - using means you're no doubt familiar with also - get over it?
This touches on why I have grown to think that the institution of marriage is doomed. The best excuse for its continued existence that I have heard is that family, friends, and community gather to "witness" the commitment - presumably lending it some sort of strength.<p>But most of the above evaporate at the other end of the relationship: everybody wants to come to the wedding; nobody wants to come to the divorce. When it dissolves, "these things happen", "water under the bridge", yadda yadda yadda.<p>The community that witnesses a wedding has no teeth during the relationship either. It's no longer possible to shame people into keeping their vows. The population is too dense, and it's too easy to dispose of one set of friends who may disapprove of your behavior and reinvent yourself without necessarily even needing to move to another town. One of the underlying principles of Game (as in 'pickup artistry') is that there's no reason to feel fear or embarassment on approach because you'll likely never encounter the 'target' again.<p>And speaking of Game, Roissy has a 2x2 matrix of shame in a post he wrote about the Tiger Woods scandal. Worth reading if the death of shame is interesting to you.<p><a href="http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/the-medicalization-of-maleness/" rel="nofollow">http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/the-medicalization-of...</a>
> I wondered who would be confident or crazy enough to get a cosmetic dental procedure performed in public.<p>Not a <i>dental procedure</i>! Oh NO! Have these people no shame?<p>>"Your slip is showing" used to be the most embarrassing sartorial faux pas a lady could commit.<p>The idea that a lady would have been ashamed to <i>accidentally</i> show their underwear is plain dumb. Good riddance of such social customs. I get that part of the message is that it's going beyond the accidental situation, but I honestly don't care. I'm sick of older people whining about their values. I can't be sure, but I'll speculate that the whiners wish they could have had done those things - or feel that they were severely punished for doing such things and feel unfair that these people are "getting away". The fact is that what they are whining about don't exist anymore. They need to learn to deal with it.
Interesting that this is also on the HN frontpage: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323164" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323164</a> (Surviving the Age of Humiliation)
I’m tempted to see a decline in embarrassment as little more than an indication that the traditional, conservative worldview is losing ground. See: "On Truth and the Tyranny of Illusion", at <a href="http://www.freedomainradio.com/Books/OnTruthTheTyrannyofIllusion.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.freedomainradio.com/Books/OnTruthTheTyrannyofIllu...</a> (click Online to read it for free).
I would be interested in anybody over 40 who thinks things are much the same as they were before, and anybody under 20 who thinks the guy is on to something.<p>Lots of generational bias in the comments so far.<p>I know I've seen the drift, and I strongly suspect that shame, guilt, and embarrassment serve a greater societal function than we give them credit for. The discussion is very reminiscent to me of the free love movement back in the 1960s. Everybody wondered why you just couldn't turn on, tune in, drop out, and have all the sex you wanted. Love one another. Sounded great. Then the societal bill came due, and it wasn't pretty -- STDs, junkies, crime, rapes, lost lives, the me generation. Looked great on paper. Didn't work so well in reality. My feeling is that this TMI stuff is going to turn out the same way. But I'm as biased as the next guy.