The alleged progress in social life

“Here the progress implied is always a progress towards the shaking-off of a parental control or inherited religious compulsion; and in a tremendously wise, cool, insouciant, slangy and rather wicked state of ‘modern’ up-to-dateness, unashamed nakedness, sweet ‘scientific’ reasonableness, removing all veils, fig-leaves and fusty obstructions, a weakest-go-to-the-wall, healthy middle-class, animal Utopia is predicted. The modernist mother, with a perhaps ungraceful shoppiness, introduces her child of eight or ten to the chamber of horrors of sex with both pride and delight. The fact that she herself is the chamber of horrors out of which they have popped adds a piquancy to the demonstration.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 125.