A columnist for The Times of London sees muscular arms on women as both an emblem and cause of societal collapse. Read on.

In the United States we have a saying that reflects an acceptance of social dynamism and what Thomas Sowell calls the "tragic" view of human nature: "three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves." The phrase is an observation of Andrew Carnegie, who meant that in well-to-do families (generally) the first generation starts poor and becomes wealthy, the second generation manages to maintain the wealth and status but contributes little to it, and the third generation lacks the ability to even maintain its position and goes back to the bottom.

I've noticed there's a similar process in socialist and communist states, except instead of being specific to families it affects the whole nation:

1. The first generation to adopt a collectivist/socialist system does so with hope and enthusiasm for a better tomorrow.
2. Members of the second generation are usually naive, having never known anything different and been subjected to propaganda for their entire lives. They earnestly strive to make the impossible work and are baffled at their inevitable failure to make further progress in their parents' project.
3. The third generation replaces naivete for hard-bitten, crushing realism, comprehends the flaws inherent in human nature and gives up on utopian aspirations.

I see this process at work in an article that appeared on Friday in the The Times of London, by Libby Purves. Purves is an aging lefty who can't seem to wrap her earnest little brain around the ongoing social collapse of Great Britain. Why is the murder rate climbing so rapidly? Why are young people behaving so poorly and British culture becoming so crude?

Her answer? Madonna's muscularity.

Seriously. It's some work to infer meaning from Purves' rambling essay, but I believe she's saying that young people (and especially young women) have abandoned individual powerlessness, and that this is a bad thing for British society. See, when individuals seek personal empowerment, then authority figures (teachers, cops, commissars, etc.) become relatively less powerful. A snippet:

But there is cultural change, visible within a generation. The idea of a “gentler” sex has ever-less currency in the entertainment we get and the heroines we are offered, whether it is musclebound Madonna looking as if she’s been training with the SAS, or Gail and Eileen brawling on the cobbles and Tracey braining her lover with a brass Madonna-and-child statuette down Coronation Street. Soap women always quarrelled, but in gentler times it was just hairnets at dawn and glaring over the back fence.

Libby Purves is a lifer at the UK's state-owned socialist propaganda organ, the BBC.

[Muscled Madonna is an icon for these chippy times - The Times]