Like, you all realize that consent culture already peaked, and the next thing coming, already starting to show up, is...
Like, you all realize that consent culture already peaked, and the next thing coming, already starting to show up, is “re-enchant heterosexuality with power gradients”
and you love that, don’t you.
I’m pretty conflicted about it! I set my sensibility in the part of the cycle where you were supposed to take a mate as an equal (but the subtext was that by just being willing to do this as a straight man, boy could you get a great equal), and in fact I kind of appreciated not taking the lead and hoped 90s egalitarianism would solve that!
But it didn’t, and looking back maybe some of that was holdover second-wave blank slateism! I had a friend who pushed Gone Girl the book on me and god damn if the “Cool Girl” sequence wasn’t a chilling foretaste of the next few years!
And I look back and realize that identifying as a girl in adolescence was kinda about identifying as non-dominant! And I see some of you who pursued that thread further and game recognize game! But it also recognizes diminishing returns and if you hit a dead end, may as well try something else