« Previous | Main Page | Next »

Sexual liberation comes, appropriately enough, at social mood peaks. At such times, there’s a sudden realization that, in the words of Dr. Sarah Brewer of the Amora Academy, "Sex shouldn't be embarrassing.” As she also notes, “It's a very important part of human nature and if you get embarrassed about it, you can't explore and enjoy it properly." In this way, the road  to maximum sexual pleasure clears exactly where we should expect it to, at the end of the biggest rallies.

Of course, it is only a short distance from exploration and joy to exploitation and debasement. As the bear market progresses, the August 2003 issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast points out that “promiscuity and the raunchiness of sexual imagery rises.” Bear markets bring an increase in the “the frequency and dosage of overtly sexual messages.” Back in 2003, for instance, when the first leg of the bear market was completing, there was a wave of headline-grabbing sexual content like a new show called  Skin and the Los Angeles Times announced that erotica had gone “mainstream.” As EWFF also noted in 2003, the TV show Sex in the City, premiered in 1998, at the front edge of a long-term topping process. By 2003, it had become one of the most critically acclaimed shows on TV. But as stocks bottomed and turned higher, a backlash against the early 2000s sexual revolution kicked in. The TV show Skin bombed. In January 2004 after the Dow Industrial bounced back above 10,000, Janet Jackson came under attack and ridicule for exposing her breast (reputedly due to a wardrobe malfunction) during the Superbowl halftime show. A rash of fines and censorings followed against “sexually explicit” songs, acts and shows, some of which had been on the air for years. The final episode of Sex in the City was also filmed in 2004. The fact that this remains a rally within a bear market rather than a full-fledged bull market is probably captured by the toned-down versions of the show, which continue to play on various non-cable networks.

The Amora Academy is just one attraction, but a sex theme park represents an extremely blatant bull market effort to mine what’s normally a very elusive component of a peak bull market mood. So, it may well herald a return to the Sex in the City era, which itself echoes the sentiments of the free-love fest that took place in the late 1960s, the end of an even more powerful bull market rise from 1942. The transition from “clean sex” to something more sordid should follow when stocks tank. The Elliott Wave Theorist’s original study on popular culture (“Pop Culture and The Stock Market,”1985) and The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior (see quote above) observed that sexuality tends to change from binding society together as social mood advances to breaking it apart in a bear. The switch probably occurs as the role of sexuality in society changes from facilitating love, and thus procreation and growth of the species, to promoting promiscuity and sex for its own sake, which tends to be more fractious.