The Neo Victorian

Words tend to stay the same while the functional meanings of word often shift with the years. Take for example the word "pimp." In my youth I learned a definition for this word-symbol, it referred to the lowest form of humanoid life walking the planet, an abuser and a user, a heartless and cruel creature that preyed on destitute and desperate women compelled to sell sex to survive, a parasite robbing them of what they earned in the worlds oldest, and most damaging, profession. To the standards of my youth a pimp was well below human, vermin of the sort where the correct action was to puree its' innards with a large caliber round of hollow point and leave the carcass for the vultures. Now? Now the word has migrated in many places, particularly among the young, to mean anyone who sells things, simply a salesman, albeit a rather flashy one. Of course the word pimp is just a symbol, it has no morality beyond the definition people attach to it. My only objection to this change is that now there is no finite symbol to represent the vermin, they continue to operate, just as cruel and worthless as ever, behind the camouflage of the expanded meaning, at least until a new word is set to represent their evil excluding all other meanings.  Another place I've noticed such a migration here of late relates to two words currently in service among a growing counterculture, the various forms of the words "dominate" and "submit."

These words are dictionary defined in terms common to the work of tyranny, of slavery and subjugation. They are words relating to the deliberate degradation of human dignity, the willful destruction of personal freedom, the surrender of a defense of the same. They are words commonly found in the realms of the political, of one form or another, be it between large groups or in their more modern usage in the politics of the emotional found between individuals. As before, the working definitions have been enlarged, modified and migrated, now become vague and ill defined as have so many things become in recent years, some to the demands of the language evolving, and others to the work of deliberate deceptions.

I have been considering that particular counterculture a bit in these past days, thinking on what it is they represent. I've read a bit of their writings, looked at the images they enjoy, considered the symbolisms of their lifestyle they portray to the world as totems and talismans, the markers identifying they to themselves. In these preliminary investigations I've concluded they are indeed a bit misunderstood by those who look on from the outside.

Where the outer trappings of their lifestyle would seem more directly descended from the Marquis de Sade I will maintain the content of the lifestyle, the attitude I've seen portrayed in their art and their writings is actually descended from an entirely different chapter of history, an entire culture reprised rather than the actions of a single psychopath no matter how widely well known that psychopath might be, or how many fools might have attempted to emulate that form of insanity over the years to bolster a defective ego. No, those who embrace the current incarnation of the bdsm lifestyle, those who divide themselves out into the polarity of dominant and submissive, they are not really so very akin to the Marquis.

What they are is all but identical to the culture of Victorian England, where every cultural conflict and contradiction of that epoch is reprised in the symbolisms they maintain in a rote and ritualized code of personal interaction. That much I can perceive of them. But then, the veteran knows that defining the nature of an event is by far the easier part of understanding it compared to understanding the reasons for the event, the chains of causality leading up to the event. What I do not understand, yet, is why these individuals who do indeed seem to be fairly intelligent and a bit introspective would have chosen to reprise the qualities of a culture that in all fact was failing, dying, unable to muster the strength and flexibility to meet the needs of a changing world. I do not know if this was simply naiveté on the part of these youth, or if they were seduced with malice into a misplaced romance with a failed culture to serve some other entities purposes. That is where I will be looking next.