The belief in endless economic growth.
Also, some sports like boxing, and maybe even (American) football.
I probalby didn’t make myself very clear. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we’ll go back to a crunchy granola viewpoint towards our bodies; humans will always keep trying to improve them and look younger. But, I think the current techniques we use will be considered incredibly barbaric and the newer techniques will be so much easier and less invasive that future generation will have difficulty understanding how we could have ever resorted the out current techniques. Kinda like how we view some of the more horrible beauty tricks of the past like bound feet.
However, I don’t know if we’ll ever get sex changes down and make them as seemless as they are in Steel Beach. I think it’d be awesome but the crude methods we use today are really, really far away from that ideal. It just seems like it’s often more difficult to screw around with the human body than we know. I’m explaining a lot of these things badly and I’ve hesitated in the past to express these opinions but they seemed to fit with the thread.
It seems to me that your argument would be based on a revolution in surgery in general, not just cosmetic surgery. If we somehow develop a universal, non-invasive surgical technique, then of course, all invasive surgical techniques will come to be viewed as barbaric, wether it’s resectioning a bowel or increasing a bust. I would postulate instead that a more likely path of advancement will retain invasive surgery, but focus on faster and more effective healing processes, so that opening up someone’s abdomen to muck about with their insides could be done on a routine, out-patient basis. In that scenario, getting a facelift would be as common as getting a new hair style.
The methods will certainly change, but the basic idea of someone who has a penis getting rid of it in favor of having a vagina (or vice versa) will, I think, become more common and more easy, and therefore, more accepted.
I assume you meant to say female-to-male? Because this sentence doesn’t really make sense the way you wrote it. Assuming that’s what you meant, the reason that there are fewer ftm transexuals seeking sex change operations is largely due to the fact that there’s really no good surgical option for them.
The idea of spoken language as a primary means of communication. It will remain as part of music and probably as an early development tool for toddlers to transition into reading and writing.
The primitiveness of modern recreational drugs. Bonus points for huffing glue.
Current modes of entertainment. Games and movies only stimulate two senses; future ones will incorporate smell, taste, and touch. Imagine World of Warcraft XX, where the console generates the taste of blood in your mouth after having been smacked around a bit, the foul stench of murlocs assailing your nostrils, the wonderful, fuzzy embrace of that epic teddy bear you just looted.
Yeah, you’re correct, I mistyped. I’ve not seen conclusive research on why there are more mtf than ftm. I offered one opinion on why this could be so. There’s also conflicting research on the eventual happiness of the people who have sex change surgery (which I will admit could be due to the primitiveness of the surgery). Why does having a penis disgust transitioning ftms? I would offer that it has more to do with learned cultural beliefs of what a “real” woman is than an actual lump of flesh.
We could debate this forever and probably not reach a consensus. I gave an opinion. There are people miserably unhappy because they believe they’re the wrong gender. There are also people miserably unhappy because they aren’t missing a limb or because they’re not skinny and they often use the same language. Viewpoints change and I offered one opinion of how I think a viewpoint might change.
The idea that some people refer to an imaginary line on the ground, and say that people born on this side of it are Citizens, and people born on that side are not, and the Citizens can live here and work here and raise their families here, and if the other people try to do that, we despise them and throw them out, because they are criminals and we’re not.
>my children’s generation is amazed that their parents’ generation could have a problem with freely making multiple copies of any CD
I’m curious about this one. Do they have an alternative form of intellectual property in mind, or do they think inventors and authors and so forth should not be paid, or what? I’ve supported my family for years with a career in industry protected by intellectual property law, and it’s pretty likely you have one of my inventions in the computer you use, but nobody would have paid me to invent things if everybody else was just allowed to copy. Where would books and movies and inventions come from if nobody was able to charge for the intellectual property that made them desireable?
That porn was something you watched and heard but didn’t experience - I mean seriously, without a full immersion body suit what’s the point?
I really don’t think that this will be the case, ever, and likewise racism will always be with us. It’s natural and automatic to discriminate/distrust/and eventually hate those that aren’t like us or that are different, even if those differences are completely arbitrary.
Since the natural state of humanity is heterosexuality, homosexuality will always be seen as some sort of aberration and people will always react with a biological hostility to it, regardless of how mainstream is gets.
As for the OP, I think that our current socioeconomic system will be seen as the barbaric equivalent of the medieval feudal system.
I don’t know why there are more mtf transexuals than ftm, but I was responding to where you said there are fewer ftm transexuals who seek surgery, and on that point, there’s really not much debate: they don’t seek surgery because the surgery options available aren’t much of an improvement over what nature gave them.
You mean mtfs? 
That’s very possible, but I also think, seperate from the surgery issue. Even if it is a cultural artifact with which we’re eventually able to dispense, I still think you’ll have people who aren’t disgusted by their natural genitalia, but would still prefer something different down there.
The fact that they use the same language isn’t really any sort of an indicator that the problems these people face are more than superficially similar. The effectiveness of psychological treatment for a disorder is, I think, much more illuminating. There are effective treatments for eating disorders, for example, where there are very few effective psychological treatments for gender dysphoria.
No worries. I don’t think our views are really as far apart as all that. I think we’re both talking about arriving at largely the same endpoint, and are only disagreeing in how we’ll arrive there.
This is probably a good subject for a spinoff thread, so I’ll be brief. It blows your mind because you grew up with a different environment than those 200 or more years ago. What you grow up with seems natural, at least until carefully, rationally examined, because you grew up with it as normal.
If slavery was normal and all around you, it wouldn’t be likely to be questioned.
If you grow up as a Catholic, you aren’t likely to change your religion to Islam. Protestants begat more protestants.
It may seem odd today that Washington owned slaves, since we revere him in so many other ways. But it was common, normal and “natural” for him to do so in his time.
Most people continue what their ancestors and parents do without much thought. It’s the radicals that propose change.
And why were some practices like inequality for women so common long ago? Because, due to survival factors, medicine, lack of birth control, etc., the equality of sexes we enjoy today wasn’t “natural” back then. It is modern medicine and sanitation that allowed the basics to change, followed by the social conventions.
Along these lines that there was a time that people thought one-size fits all as far as medicine and dosage goes. The idea that your AI Doc doesn’t design the drug and dosage to your geno/pheno type.
That people died of amazing simple stuff - like people in the Industrial world today being surprised at our ancestor’s deaths (esp. childen) of things like diahrea, fever and strep.
That there was a time when people starved to death and other folks - enlightened in many ways (like Jefferson/Washington et al seem to us) - were more or less OK with that because the starving folks lived in other places
Seconded. This is one of the greatest madnesses still prevalent in society. A very large number of people, especially those who work in offices, don’t really need to go to the centralised place of work every day. Data can be pushed around in cyberspace, and meetings can be held in cyberspace too (everyone gets a free skype account and a cheap webcam, and you’re there). The ‘we all need to be physically present within the same four walls’ notion seems to be taking far longer to die than it should. Take away the ritual and tedium of commuting, and all the time-wasting and distraction of office life, and you’d find people can get all their allocated work done in about 3-4 productive hours every day.
And even if we want to persist with this out-moded nonsense of ‘going to the office’, you would think by now we would have evolved (in the social sense) to the level where we can see that the ‘crush hour’ at either end of the working day is just a bad, bad idea. At the very least, we should have things organised so that a third of the office drones start at 8, a third start at 12 and a third start at 4. These are all perfectly viable cycles and lifestyles. They only sound odd because we’re stuck in an old way of thinking.
I assume you mean this in a “someday” sense, as opposed to in the next, say, 100 years as stated in the OP. This may happen someday, but it would require a dramatic worldwide shift in an attitude that has prevailed throughout recorded history, and I would think it would take several centuries or more before the notion of national borders and us/them is eliminated in any meaningful way.
I think some of the responses in this thread are more statements of existing conditions that the posters currently view as primitive or barbaric, as opposed to conditions that are likely to be generally viewed that way in the near (100-year or so) future.
I wonder how much of this represents a failure of your imagination. In the context of the societies in which these beliefs were widespread, they probably made at least as much sense as the alternatives. What would have convinced you, given only what the average person would have known at that time, that they were wrong?
A lot of the responses to this thread seem to be of the sort: “Eventually, such and such a perspective [which the poster believes but many other people don’t] will be recognized to be The Truth.” And that scares me a little. Even though you may well be right, to assume that your own point of view must be The Clear and Rational One, so that anyone who thinks differently is blinded by their cultural assumptions (but you’re not), seems a little arrogant. Wouldn’t it be better to try to understand what makes different points of view seem reasonable to those who hold them?
Or maybe I’m taking this too seriously for an IMHO thread. 
Compare present-day society, with its payday loan businesses on every corner, with those in which lending money at interest (a.k.a. usury) was taboo. Is it one of our blind spots that anyone feels morally capable of profitting by other people’s financial problems?
Or, what s/he said.
Yeah, I was assuming this. That’s kind of my point.
It has long struck me as odd how stable and self-evident cultural practices in our own time are perceived to be. History suggests that many things that now seem natural to us (even those of us posting to this thread) will seem absurd, given time. But it seems to be human nature to be complacent or confident that the way WE do things is the inevitable way – that we’ve finally got all the bugs out, you could say.
People will come to see the rectiliear grid imposed by the British on the landforms of North America, and its utter repudiation of the form of the Earth as the basis for design, as the fundamental cause of the perversity of North American land-use planning.
Bother. I was going to mention this. I’ll expand a bit, though:
People will be shocked and amazed that people thought the best way to design cities was to physically separate all the functions, with no thought to the actual scale and capabilities of the human body. That there’s one place to sleep and relax, and one to shop, and one to work, and one to play, and one to learn, and one to be cared for in, and you may not sleep or relax in the work area or work in the learning area or learn in the sleep and relaxation area… and that these areas must be larger than convenient walking radius and separated by greater than convenient walking distance.
Of course, this will be viewed as being on a sliding scale, with one end being a complete mixture, and the other end being utter separation. People will acknowledge the need for separation of vulnerable individuals and hazardous processes, but the ideal will be cities designed as collections of villages, with shops and housing and small factories intermixed in each.
I think maybe I didn’t explain myself as clearly as I thought I had. What you’re saying is exactly what I mean: I can absolutely imagine being someone who thought slavery was justified, even while the prospect horrifies me. I’m trying to apply that same perspective – that decent people can believe some appalling things are perfectly OK – to myself and my own culture.
I hope we can do both: try to understand how decent people (of the past, of other cultures, etc.) can genuinely believe something we think is reprehensible, AND ponder what we currently accept as normal that probably shouldn’t be.
I wonder this too. Not to hijack my own thread, but it’s fascinating to me that bankers are seen as so respectable nowadays, given how very unacceptable usury was for so much of European (Christian) history.
That’s kinda my question, are there surveys which have polled ftm transsexuals who woudl possibly seek surgery and determined that this is the reason? And it would be still difficult to judge the results. Would the survey be asking about surgery equivalent to today’s mtf version which sorta works but isn’t great or some hypothetical easier and more natural transition?
:smack:
Yeah, if it was relatively easy, painless, and reversable, heck, I’d try it temporarily. I’d always wanted to be able to write my name in the snow. But I suspect it’s cultural preferences that drives people to the painful, imperfect, irreversable surgery available today. Some studies have shown that sex change recipients are not happier after their surgery and I suspect that it’s because new genitals don’t change nearly as much as they thought it would. Some things in life, you just have to live with: being too tall or too short, having bad skin, propensity for weight gain on the hips, strange birth defects, stretch marks, etc. The modern day “solutions” are imperfect and risky. I guess what I’m not seeing is why having the “wrong” genitals is so different from being unhappy with one’s appearance other than cultural influences that make it a big, important deal to conform to gender stereotypes.
Eh, the track record for treating Body Integrity Disorder (the wanna-be amputee syndrome) is pretty poor too, with patients often resorting to damaging their own limbs severely enough to require amputation. But I don’t think anyone can legitimately argue that desiring to be an amputee and chop off a healthy limb is a reasonable, sane lifestyle.
Yeah, I’d actually love to see more choices and options available to transsexuals that don’t involve irreversible surgery. I have no problem with hormone treatments, passing as women or men, etc. but I have issues with altering fundamentally healthy bodies irreversibly.
Which is part of my objections to invasive plastic surgery and why I’d hope for a change. (Thudlow Boink is right, I’m probably projecting my beliefs onto my prediction for the future) I see a future of more “natural” treatments, like breast augmentation methods that stimulate the growth of breast tissue instead of planting foreign objects in the body. (of course, in my idealized world of fluid gender roles, maybe having large breasts wouldn’t be the big deal it is today. It seems that many people view large breasts as the ultimate expression of feminity.) Obesity treatments that don’t involve removing parts of internal organs. Diet and exercize is too simplistic, a single pill treatment is probably unrealistic, but maybe huge changes in attitudes and available food will make a difference.
OK, I’ll stop hijacking the thread now.
Racism has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Most people are shocked to see open discrimination and racists are generally considered backwards ad embarrassing. You’re right that we’ll probably never see a complete end to homosexual bigotry but I think we’re already approaching the day when the majority will see discrimination against homosexuals as aboherrent. Heck, I think accepting homosexuality is even easier than accepting other races. There are homosexuals in all ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes so chances are the homosexuals you know were raised in the same environment and they look and dress just like you. The only difference is who they’re attracted to. As opposed to a different ethnic miniortiy who may have been raised in an unfamiliar culture and appear and sound different.
There was a good skit on I think it was *Saturday Night Live * years ago about this. Benjamin Franklin and some of the other Founding Fathers were transported to the present day and gave a press conference. They expected to be asked all about how they came up with this system of government and other weighty topics, but they were flabbergasted at the reporters wanting only to know about why they owned slaves and salacious details of their sex lives. They seemed absolutely astounded that slavery would get so much attention, especially their having sex with a slave.