Mass culture has absorbed the erotic outsiders who once provided irregular bliss

Evidence

Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. It could not be said of any of the sexy women in contemporary literature what Balzac says of the whore Esther: that hers was the tenderness which blossoms only in infinity. This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 340 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Although totalitarian or authoritarian regimes may all try to ban psychoanalysis and declare that personal emotional conflicts have no place for citizens loyally integrated into the community, eroticism is an experience where individuality always prevails over generality. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pornography merged with mainstream influencer culture in the counter-counterculture. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 822; Mass culture structures itself as allowed, forbidden, and deflected gratifications; Even liberated sexuality is absorbed into the system of exploitation — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 340 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Even liberated sexuality is absorbed into the system of exploitation #corroborates (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 340
• Mass culture structures itself as allowed, forbidden, and deflected gratifications #expands (0.82)
• Eroticism resists integration into any social or state community #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147
• Pornography merged with mainstream influencer culture in the counter-counterculture. #expands (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 822
• Public art absorbed taboo content in a successive widening of transgressions through the sixties #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 642