There's a weird side effect of modern [pop?] culture that makes me raise my metaphorical eyebrow: despite being a species from class Mammalia, literally named by humans after the literal milk-producing breast which is a discriminative characteristic for this entire class of vertebrates, we get damn antsy about talking about breasts as a whole.
Why?
The sexualisation of [human] breasts cannot be the only reason---I suspect it is less about the sexualisation, and more about the implied obsession when a human body part primarily meant for feeding the young gets brought into [everyday ``polite''] conversation.
I mean, unless you are a parent, it is easy to see how ``breasts'' is not exactly on the top ten list of topics in casual conversation. Where the posterior probability of that being a legitimate conversationn gets higher, it is usually due to someone wearing some garment or posturing themselves in a way that draws attention to their breasts, and under those circumstances, modern ``sensibilities'' of ``morality'' kick in, and the conversation briefly veers into that direction, before snapping back to something that obviously diverts attention away from the breasts.
Me? I don't really care about the sexualisation as a whole. I'm more of an aesthete on such matters. It is less about the size and shape of the breasts alone, and more about the overall contribution to the beauty of the femme aesthetic. To me, big boobs, small boobs don't matter as much, so long that if someone is presenting as femme, their overall aesthetics should match that of a femme, and more importantly as a man, they ought to have some boobs that outsize my moob-less chest. Frankly, it is quite hard for me to claim that someone is femme-presenting if they are at best androgenous-looking, with non-existent secondary sex characteristics. I'm not saying that every part of the femme-presenting person needs to conform to stereotypical ``woman'' characteristics, but they need to at least match what they claim to be presenting for the most part, be it in appearance, or behaviour.
But that's a declaration of personal preference, not an assault on whatever identity anyone wants to have. That a person thinks they are femme-presenting while I disagree due to my own personal preference simultaneously is a world state that can exist, and as long as neither of us are forcing either of us to conform to the other person's perspective; I think we can agree to disagree and carry on with life.
After all, why should I care how someone presents themselves from a sexual/gender identity when that particular dimension isn't something that I usually give a damn about? I'm more interested in the way they carry themselves, and while looks are always among the first things that anyone sees from the get-go, the pre-frontal cortex learns to suppress all initial monkey-brain judgement until more evidence and information is obtained.
That said, boobs are still pretty, and seeing them on a nice (sensu behaviour, not necessarily just looks) lady is always a treat. I say this earnestly and without any other intent.
Honestly, I wasn't intending to talk about boobs today... but I suppose it is just an effect of seeing too many ``social media posts'' recently that triggered me into thinking more along these lines.
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What I really want to talk about is the idea of obsolescence. I think part of the bargain we strike in social contracts with a society of people at large is the idea that to be a part of the society, we must remain relevant. But what ``counts'' as being relevant within a society is not a well-defined property; in many ways, it is tautological: one is relevant in society if there is a societal need for you, sensu your skills, your existence, or your resources. The tautology comes because the dependence stipulated in in the ``need'' is defined relative to society: the need for your skills only if your skills are relevant to what society needs, the need for your existence if your existence is relevant to what society needs, the need for your resources if your resources are relevant to what society needs.
Under a much smaller unit of society, like a family, or even tribe/village, relevance is a mix of material and spiritual. Material contributions of the able-bodied are almost always considered relevant, while the wisdom and sometimes knowledge of the elders can be seen a spiritual relevance that gives the family/tribe/village its sense of identity and coherence, while the relevance of children can be a mix of both material (future material contributors after maturing), and spiritual (a representation of renewal of the family/tribe/village).
But what happens when one's society is conurbation-scaled? How can two million people demonstrate their relevance?
My answer is, they cannot, not least in a direct way. Modern society's demonstration of relevance is through the very business-oriented concept of demonstrating value, and that usually means converting whatever it is that one can provide into some kind of fungible currency, usually in the concept of ``dollars''. That is the case not because currency is truly fungible, but that modern societies are primarily economic wealth generators first, before they are social wealth ones.
In other words, ``GDP go up'' trumps ``people are excellent to each other''.
This is where obsolescence comes to play. I don't think that any person can be truly obsolete if we consider the relational nature between people. Can one really say that grandpa is obsolete as grandpa just because he got older? There may be a case to be made if dementia is taken into account, but that's only if we make a more narrow definition of how a ``person'' is not the meat-bag in front of you, but is just what that meat-bag remembers/thinks. Grandpa may not be fully ``here'' ``up there'' if he is demented, but at no time can any reasonable person truly claim that grandpa is obsolete as grandpa.
From a ``GDP go up'' perspective? Always possible. One can be the best damned vacuum tube transistor engineer of all time, but in 2026, if that is all you have going for you, you are deemed obsolete.
I think that there's a catch here though. Society may have a way of declaring that someone is obsolete primarily through the market mechanism, but the definition of the market itself is tautological---it is always possible to ``make'' your own damn market. Only a handful of die-hards had believed strongly in vinyl records ever since it was invented in the late nineteenth century and mass-produced throughout the twentieth century, with the said records declared obsolete once the compact disc was invented. And yet we see a new resurgence in this right now in the mid-2020s, and it is all due to market making.
Thus at some fundamental level, whether or not something is obsolete is not a fate that society alone can declare; there is a certain amount of individual free-will so to speak to usher in renewed uses/responses to what was said to be obsolete.
Combining this with my helical hypothesis of the world happenings (I'm not sure if I had talked about this here before, but for sure I have been expounding this in meat-space), I don't think that ``obsolescence'' is a permanent feature.
As long as we keep thinking, and acting on what we think, we'll never truly die.
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