Ask A Genius 371 – Future of Partnerships
July 22, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will be the future of partnerships?
Rick Rosner: What you see in terms of partnership choices in the future may reflect mating strategies. When you have today and for the past few decades, you have unusual mating arrangements, like people in a three-way mating arrangement or a four-way.
It’s sensational. It is something you’d see in an HBO like a sex documentary. It’s seen as fascinating or titillating. But in the future, differing mating arrangements other than two people closely bonded for a period of time will become more common.
Partially because there’s more support for alternate lifestyles due to increased information via the internet and social media. Increased tolerance. And to say increased tolerance, the gender fluidity was something that was largely unheard of a decade or two ago.
Those people could change their minds about who they are sexually. People didn’t know that that was a thing and to the extent that they did know it was a thing was like, “Oh, come on, how much more are we going to have to deal with new genders or gender orientations?”
As time goes on, people will grow to be more at home than just with tolerant attitudes. Expansive attitudes. But in terms of mate selection, alternate or non-traditional partners— the non-traditional joining of people may in itself be a sexual strategy.
Maybe, a sexual strategy that in relationships where a woman is in love with more than one guy or is in love with a woman and a guy. A guy is in love with two women. Those things may turn out to be, for some people, ways to have relationships, where perhaps one or more of the people in the relationship felt closed out of partnerships in the past.
Either due to personal preferences or due to just not being able to find a niche to be successful in, not being able to find a way to be sexually successful.
Jacobsen: What niches in the future will be exaggerated, as some niches are more exaggerated now?
Rosner: What roles will offer certain people chances of sexual success the way the job role offered people success for 100 years?
Jacobsen: Yes, also, the characteristics or factors that comprise them. For instance, the modern LA version of the big booty with the Kardashians, for example.
Rosner: Well, I can tell you with regard to fashion, which is not to say body styles. But if you look at the history of fashion, some new part of the body is always being revealed or emphasized. In the ‘80s, leg holes kept getting higher and higher.
Instead of going straight across, at the lower thigh, they kept creeping upward until eventually you had thongs, so more and more of the upper thigh and butt was revealed. In various times in history, we’ve had side boob eras.
So yeah, we right now are in an era that emphasizes the butt. So, we can assume that trends in what we reveal about what we focus on in the body will continue to change. There will be the parts of the body that we focus on that will continue to change.
There won’t always be the emphasis on a single body part that we have now. But there will always be novelty. It won’t signify much. Fashion exists to perpetuate itself via novelty. Sometimes, it reflects something maybe important about the culture.
The way that fashion has shifted to allow for heavier people; the way that body consciousness in fashion has shifted in America and the rest of the world over the past 20 years to accommodate people who are on average much heavier than they were in the ‘70s.
But, fashion is fashion. It shifts around to give people an excuse to buy new stuff. And I have read arguments that say that trends in fashion have been replaced by an ominousness in fashion where anything that worked in the past can now be seen as fashion now.
That somebody could dress as they dressed 20, 25 years ago, walk down the street without drawing any attention because we now live in an era of any thingness. It may be due to increased information.
That if you can see all of fashion, all of the history of fashion, laid out in front of you just by clicking around on the internet, then there’s less era wise or now wise enforcement of fashion rules, because people have more information.
Similarly, in terms of competing for mates, there may be more of an anything goes because people have more information. And more access to all sorts of different people via social media. So who is going to be successful in the future at attracting mates?
I don’t know if it’s new. But it certainly is more important now than in the past, is people who accept all body types. People don’t apply rigorous physical standards of sexual attractiveness of the past.
They will do well now and into the future in which we’re growing more accepting of people as they are now. When I was growing up, we might get in the weeds here but…
Jacobsen: We have two minutes.
Rosner: Okay. Throughout most of the 20th century, there were severe constraints on who was allowed to have sex. Married people were allowed to have sex. People who took themselves out of the realm of social approval, of course, could have sex, which meant like prostitutes.
There was a huge prostitution culture in the US in the first half of the 20th century. But beyond that, people weren’t supposed to have sex. I mean there were times when people had sex, like World War II, standards were—it wasn’t overt.
Standards weren’t overtly low. Sexual prohibitions weren’t overtly lowered, but people about to go off to maybe die, yeah. There was a lot of people hooking up before they went off to battle and such. There was still urgency.
But there were still huge prohibitions on sex outside of wedlock. Now, most of that is eroded. And eroding along with that are standards about who’s attractive. Rigid standards of sexual fitness. And people who are able to see the beauty in everyone are going to want to be offered greater opportunities.
That’s about it.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 2012-2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 