I came across the following photo, which I have cropped in the name of decency – decency in the sense of wrapping a towel around yourself as you leave the shower. This is a respectable blog, after all. It seems to me it is the exact description of modern life and I cannot figure out how I am to feel about it, let alone you. That is my problem, and maybe ours.
Let us be blunt. It shows a middle aged woman of no great beauty giving oral sex at a glory hole in some commercial establishment. Behind her is a prominent sign saying “no smoking”. I have cropped the offending member, because my point is not the pornography of it, but the apparent normalcy of it.
So there you have modern life. You are free to give oral sex to strangers in the privacy of the cubicle, in some tawdry shop set up for anonymous sexual transactions, but you cannot smoke tobacco there. Your photo of the event will be available for all of eternity in the digitized inner universe of computers.
I feel a Theodore Dalrymple moment coming on. Is this the end of civilization as we have known it, is this the decline of all decency, or is this just how it is in 2013, and it is no big deal? You can give a blow job to strangers in a cubicle for free, but you cannot smoke there. My sense of irony meter is in the extreme red zone.