Athleisure and the End of Civilization

I can't keep this insight to myself any longer

As you may or may not know, Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud is all about the difficulty of living in a world with other people, in a society organized around the collective renunciation of our worst instincts. Freud is wondering aloud about why people hate civilization.

Clothing and fashion are civilizational innovations. Clothing adorns and protects the body. Liberated women have learned to cast off the constraints of the past to wear clothing that allow them to be seductive, comfortable and fashionable. Seduction happens with a dialectic of revealing and concealing. Thus has it been for millenia. Freud also said that weaving might have been the first technology, derived from an impulse to braid pubic hair. I’m not making this up. Clothing covers up our shame, but also provides a space on which to project our fantasies.

We have reached a point when all forms of sublimation are moot because seduction has been fully automated.