of late and en passant

How long it has been I am not sure, but there have been a variety of cultural shifts in the last year or two ... mostly minor stuff, yet telling from where I sit.

The word "fucking" has entered TV movie lingua franca. Women's breasts are now more or less routinely displayed in TV movies where once they were locked up and hidden. Even an occasional vagina muff can be seen. I have seen, though briefly as yet, male genitalia. No one quite dares to say the word "nigger," which is, instead, "the N word." But "fuck" is another matter.

It may be my age, but all of this has seemed to clump and drop into reality simultaneously ... not as a dripdripdrip but rather as a moist and succulent PLOP. Nothing is any longer "dirty" somehow.

I kind of like the full-frontal getting-naked thing because it calls into question the meaning of the word "sexy." Clothes provide provocation. A lack of clothes is ... well, what the hell, we're all naked beneath the cover-ups and naked is not all that interesting.

I do miss the naughty of it all. When I was growing up, males said "fuck," but not in mixed company. Women seldom -- I mean really rarely  -- did. Don't we need a space in which to be naughty?

Telling a dirty joke that relies on cuss words is harder these days. Comedians who rely on cuss words for comedic fodder are really not terribly funny or daring any more. They're more prosaic and lack invention or humor. What was once brazen or even pornographic is now becoming pedestrian.

Simultaneously with all this, the plunging female neckline seems to have reversed course and women are wearing higher-necked (and therefore more provocative) clothing. Prurience, if I had to guess, is making a comeback: What other choice is there?

And of course the crassness and coarse merchandizing of Donald Trump greases all these wheels.