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Declaring one's own aesthetic preferences to be moral precepts was supposed to be a conservative failing, not one of old-school commies.
"Proper business attire" wasn't handed down from the Gods, it didn't even become that until the earliest 20th century.
C.S. Lewis answered that one:
Should be expected from a communist. His error here is he's taking "crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types" as the mode. No, these people have always been with us. They're flashy but not the norm. Some of them hit it big, most of them fail. The idea of "going to college, getting a good job, working hard, and slowly building wealth for retirement." has rarely been more valorized.
Two words: Elvis Presley. Nothing's changed much here recently.
1990s? Certainly it goes back at least to the 1960s. And as with the "crypto bros", most everyone DID sell out, usually sooner rather than later. Most of those who didn't had nothing to sell. Note the complaint here is rather in conflict with the complaint about insufficient valorization of ordinary lives and work.
If you look at videos of Elvis performing in his prime, I think most of the people going hysterical and literally fainting were teenage girls. I think that's largely Freddie's point: that certain behaviour which is acceptable in teenagers is very unbecoming in adults who ought to know better. Which includes many Swifties. I absolutely think the phenomenon of unmarried childless thirty-plus women spending small fortunes in order to go see a teenybopper on tour is a new one, actually.
But C.S. Lewis did have varied and challenging artistic tastes! There's nothing wrong with a person in their thirties reading YA fiction in addition to reading books intended for adults. It's when YA fiction, fantasy, sci-fi etc. is all that you read that it becomes a sign of immaturity.
Elvis's rabid teenage fans grew up to be his rabid thirty-plus female fans (and his remaining rabid 80+ female fans who sustain SirusXM's Elvis channel). Same goes for Swift; she's not a teenybopper anymore; she was famously born in 1989 making her 35 years old.
But that's actually my question - in the 1970s, were there actually any unmarried childless women in their thirties showing up to Elvis gigs and literally fainting with excitement?
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
In a word, yes.
I mean, do you have any evidence to support this claim?
Do you have any reason to doubt? I couldn't, without significant effort, produce specific evidence of this. And my experience with "citation needed" is no citation will be accepted anyway. But here's something in the ballpark.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Elvis/comments/xhef68/on_december_31st_1975_elvis_performed_the_largest/
That was needlessly rude. "There's no point providing evidence for my factual claims, because even if I do you people won't believe me anyway" seems profoundly out of keeping with the ethos of this space.
Maybe, but that doesn't make it false.
My claim was that celebrity mania in adults was nothing new. You responded with the very specific and hard to verify claim that no over-30, unmarried, childless women were fainting at Elvis Presley concerts in the 1970s. Having been around in the 1970s, I'm fairly certain that's not true; I know for certain that many of Presley's earlier, older, fans were still going to those concerts, but I can't verify that they included unmarried childless women nor that any of the latter fainted. Probably a search of newspapers at the time would either verify this or fail to do so, but that would be considerable work. But if I found such a report, I feel the chances are good the goalposts would move again.
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