Too much time spent with babies to have time for the beautician. Too much money spent on nappies to afford Nespresso. Once people started to watch and aspire to these ways of life, they quickly realized that they were incompatible with big family sizes. What made the birth rate fall was not the arrival of television itself but the arrival of soap operas which showed aspirational lifestyles – smart apartments, chic clothes and hairdos, fancy cars. In fact, closer analysis in Brazil showed that what really made a difference was the kind of television people were watching. The explanation does not really add up very little sex, fortuitously timed, can easily yield a large family. For a long time, the explanation was that “people have found something better to do with their evenings,” which betrays a rather bleak view of sex as nothing more than a way to spend a boring evening until something more interesting comes along. It has been observed that when a village or region gets access to television, its rate of child-bearing goes down.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |