"}one last ride
I am trying to imagine what it would be like to live through a period when sexual politics was not a hot topic in all circles.
I\u2019m thinking of a time not so long ago when people still talked about \u201chookups,\u201d and about a typical undergraduate\u2019s experience of \u201chow dating works,\u201d and it\u2019s so dizzying to me that it seems so unremarkable that those things are now viewed as so repugnant, so (as if in inverse) old-fashioned, so separate from the ethos of the present.
Words which I didn\u2019t always know how to use or appreciate fifty years ago, twenty, even 10 years ago are now part of my general vocabulary. Social norms about sexual behavior are now being discussed in mainstream publications of all persuasions, such as the Atlantic and the New York Times.
They aren\u2019t treated as novel political breakthroughs! The importance placed on \u201chookups\u201d and \u201cdating,\u201d the columns splashed with sensationalist \u201csexodus\u201d stories, the politicization of popular TV shows about dating like How I Met Your Mother and Castle, should be surprising only in retrospect.
It seems surreal that when an institution much older than I am \u2014 which arguably predates the 20th century in most European countries \u2014 should be so inimical to the new and the old, and yet so unremarkable to me as a member of a post-pipeline future.
One thing that stands out to me about the reaction of millennials to sexual politics discourse is its disjunction between (1) the social norms of our elders, and (2) how quintessentially modern sexual behavior seems to people today.
I\u2019ve described my own sense of age and familiarity numerous times on this blog already, but it bears repeating \u2014 and I\u2019m using \u201cus\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d in different ways, because by now I am mostly one person writing about a sense of something experienced by many people with the same basic experiences. People to whom I say I\u2019m in my twenties or thirties have very different ideas of my own identity from those of the people I describes. The way I talk on this blog seems very strange to people who have been informed by the media that, oh, Daniel Tammet is a lovable funnyman who wrote some hilarious posts on Tumblr about sex and dating who everyone just kinda ignored.
Or