"He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit."
Robert A. Heinlein - Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
My recent mention of 2005's Corpse Bride reminded me the central musical number, Remains of the Day, featured not just skeleton versions of Bo(n)ejangles and Ray Charles, but title-dropped a book from 1989 and acknowledged its debt to a quite famous Disney cartoon from 1929, The Skeleton Dance. While dancing cartoon skeletons were new at that time because animation was new, musical morbidity had run in parallel via pieces like Camille Saint-Saëns' 1875 Danse Macabre, which I assume Heinlein's all-American boy next door was whistling while fighting space-Nazis on the moon just after WWII. Some of these dates are from my own youth or childhood, others from my grandparents' or from their grandparents in turn. The theme persists, art continues. But of corse that dude Cammie did not invent rib-cage xylophones either, but was inspired by the centuries-long tradition of the death dance throughout Europe, and look what I ran across at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples:
It does help knowing which cycles, which artifacts you're actually observing, and how far they stretch. If you told me Remains of the Day's a song about two love triangles, black musicians and the jazz age, you'd be less than half right. There are older and more pervasive influences at work.
On a completely unrelated topic, it's well established that many signs of physical attractiveness are actually stand-ins for a mate's viability. Clear skin or fresh breath for instance pretty obviously indicate your intended's resistance to disease, and such environmental threats are always changing. As Richard Dawkins summarized in The Blind Watchmaker:
"If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes,
their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the
future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be
no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The
reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a
never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn
means that the 'best' genes in any one generation of birds are not the
same as the best genes in future generations. What it takes to beat the
current generation of parasites is no good against the next generation
of evolving parasites. [...] The only general criteria that successive
generations of females can use are the indicators that any vet might use
-- bright eyes, glossy plumage, and so on."
Such divination also implies the criteria themselves are mutable, can be faked or cheated and can outweigh the animal's actual fitness due to the importance placed on them by instinct, valid or not. My old point that intra-tribal status symbolism can be considered such a runaway adaptation for humans would get me laughed out of any biology department (for one, it's entirely too wide a category) but I maintain there's something to it. Sapience threw a kink into selection. As females grew able to actively interpret new stimuli as markers of status and males able to establish new means of competition, that cyclical arms race melded into fad worship, with every new fashion or badge of moral superiority a new peacock tail in its own right. And women's own pecking order proceeded, to a lesser extent, in parallel but with the same caveat: status trumps the means by which it's acquired. Corsets, bustles, crinolines, men in pantyhose, war-steeds or sports cars, piety or patriotism, all that matters is that if you have one, you're better than those without.
That trend, that theme, that unending parade of self-important, self-righteous glory hogs, divas, powermongers, fops, pulpit-pounders, attention whores, etc. etc. etc., has shaped and colored the entirety of human history, globally. In fact, you can make this prediction for the future with unerring accuracy: that no matter how destitute or aristocratically bloated a human society, no matter how backward or advanced technologically, every new generation's primitive instincts will lead it to jump on new fads where available and inflate them as holier-than-thou badges of superiority.
Now, remember, the adaptation can easily outstrip its original, practical meaning so long as it's reinforced via status.
So take a phenomenon like the rise in LGBTQOMGWTFBBQ "minorities" (along with pervasive media pandering) during the 2010s, especially as the most glaring example, transsexualism. You might see two obvious explanations:
1) This was always the real proportion, even though it has never shown up anywhere in human history to such proportions (even the ancient Greeks in all their gaiety still mostly fantasized about knights charging to the rescue of fair damsels) and was just being repressed until now. This is not entirely without merit, especially in a chronically and comically sexually repressed society like Puritan America. But it's not exactly supported by historical and social context.
2) You made it a fad, made it a badge of social superiority, and youth jumped at the chance to join the ranks of the new nobility, of those who cannot be criticized, must only be portrayed as unimpeachably angelic and favored in all social interactions by mass consensus. And for fad worship, for narcissism and self-promotion, we have endless examples, globally and multimillennially! It's a thread and trend far more reliable than the danse macabre.
Chopping your tits or balls off is certainly counterproductive from a sexual fitness angle, but for a species whose status obsession trumps all else it still feeds into the race for legitimacy driven by an instinct far older than any culture war. If the gender Lysenkoism of the 2010s were valid, if explanation 1) more reliable, then when the restrictions on gender identity were supposedly lifted*, you should have seen a tidal wave of long-suffering gender-counterfeiting old or middle-aged individuals coming out of various closets. Instead it's been attention-seeking adolescents overwhelmingly driving the shift.
So what do you think will happen once fascism becomes the new genderqueer? The danse macabre has an endpoint.
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* They were in fact enforced to fit a new postmodernist cultural grand narrative.
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alternate title: Dead White Shemales
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edit: The cult of Cybele in ancient Rome, whose followers would occasionally castrate themselves in offering to the goddess, is strongly reminiscent of the past decades' glorification of transsexualism in the wake of feminism's takeover of pop culture.
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