When the people who generated mass media advertising campaigns turned in that era to explicit and subliminal sexual themes to induce us to buy, they added at least a thin veil of sentimentality and kindness. Models looked at each other, and smiled. In the current era, lust is undisguised, and we find shrinking use for love. People talk openly, indeed proudly, about topics once taboo. We have supplanted admonitions about reserving sex for those with whom we intend to make a life with threats of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
College students list money at the top of their career goals and public service far down the list.
High schoolers are more likely to carry guns and knives than love beads and pictures of love-preaching gurus. And advertising is stripped of any pretense to vulnerability. Models glower and sneer off the page at us. Ours are lives of individualism and competition, where a very large proportion of what we do is devoted to exchanges of various kinds. To compete more effectively, we ask recognition and credit for even our very beings, downplaying the many accidents, both genetic and cultural, which account for so much of who we are.