The truth is, these ridiculous figures on the beach were much more likely to have a stable home life.
This might be true. A lot of things have changed since the 1900s’s.
I blame industrialization, which started before 1906 but was still happening at that time, for weakening family ties. A whole family working a farm is a lot more likely to act as a unit than a bunch of kids that spend most of their day at school, and a couple of adults that both work in separate jobs.
Why the heck are you blaming skimpy clothes when there’s an obvious cause-effect chain that already does a good job of explaining this? If skimpy clothes have anything to do with weakened family ties, it’s a symptom, not the cause.
They were more likely to have children.
This is almost certainly true, but is it a good thing? Why are you so concerned with making sure everyone has kids? We live in a time where fewer children die young than ever before. It makes sense to birth fewer kids.
They were less likely to face the existential crises women face today.
This is bullshit. I don’t know if it’s true or not, because I know that there’s not enough information to figure out if it’s true or not. The only existential crises from back then that you can possibly know about were the ones people wrote down. Literacy rates were lower back then, and it’s safe to assume that most people back then would keep their existential crises private, because that’s how people nowadays behave. So the only time you would have ever heard about an existential crisis would be if the person back then was an exhibitionist and was upper-class.
You don’t know how often the lower classes had existential crises back then, because they didn’t write it down.
You’re basically comparing modern life to Queen Victoria’s Instagram. Of course the modern era looks inadequate by comparison!
They lived in a more stable society with less crime.
This is probably false. In every realistic attempt to measure crime-over-time that I know of (not just someone’s anecdote, but actually counting the number of items stored in police records), they show that violent crime is either at an all-time historical low, or that there isn’t enough information to determine how common it was. It depends on how you define crime, how you try to measure it, and where you try to measure it. A mining town in Arizona is a very different place from New York City, even in 1906.
Political power and wealth were not so dangerously concentrated in the few.
If you just want to give a laundry list of bad-mouthing the present day… that’s an extremely one-sided view of things. There are so many ways that the USA is better now than in the 1900’s. Even if it’s true that political power and wealth are more dangerously concentrated in the few now then back in 1906, and I’m not sure that this is true given the many different ways you could try to measure “power,” it’s silly to tie this to swimsuit fashion.
Death in childbirth was at an all-time high in the early 20’th century. A major factor in fixing this is reducing the unjustified assumption of competence that was given to white men at the time.
Or how about those racially-segregated schools, and other Jim Crow laws? That was definitely a thing in the 1900’s. The Supreme Court ruling that found school segregation illegal was in 1954, and further reductions in racial segregation, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 all came later.
Not to say that the current era is entirely better than the 1900’s. That was actually before leaded gasoline. There was functional public transit, or at least walkable cities, because most people didn’t have cars. The incredibly inequal spread of wealth is not good either, and can easily be tied to hostile city layouts that make it unnecessarily difficult to find employment without already being employed. But I do think you’re giving a one-sided view of things.
The federal income tax didn’t even exist! Our economic system was not yet crushed by debt, reducing most of us to insidious and hidden financial enslavement.
Bla bla bla. There were still people alive in 1906 who had been actually enslaved. You belittle everyone’s intelligence by comparing it with paying taxes to a government you elected.
But to address your actual point, economic theories generally have very poor predictive power, not just the one you’re implicitly pushing, but also its opposites. I’m pretty sure you’re pushing the theory that the federal income tax is responsible for inflation. But maybe it’s actually leaving the gold standard that did it. Maybe there isn’t anything specially wrong about the current era, but it’s being compared to colonial America and post-war America, both of which were aberrations that fundamentally cannot last? Or maybe it’s primarily the fault of outsourcing, a combination of labor victories inside our borders with improved communication technology that allowed them to simply get bypassed.
Screw you for stating one tenuous theory out of many as if it was fact.
It’s no secret that powerful people want women unclothed and actively promote it. Civilization demands clothes. Tyranny demands nudity.
All these previous points you brought up to support the idea are kinda tenuous at best. You never really proved that swimsuit fashions were the cause of any of that stuff, and half of them weren’t even proved to be true at all no matter what the cause is.
So, no, I don’t think this conclusion is evident.
