Oh no, my prediction is that it’ll collapse gracefully, bend like the reed rather than break like the tree. That the coming cultural dispensation will be more favorable to sex with teenagers is a forgone conclusion.

Like what are the alternatives? Things keep going further, past the age gap discourse that’s already slipped the surly bonds of earth? They even stay the same? Like, have you noticed in the last 6 months the spread of disdain for youth “purity” culture? How no one even tries to justify or argue with them anymore, they just hold them up for an antagonist faction to knit itself together by mocking? Seriously, have you considered what happens if there’s no give and “don’t fuck adolescents” goes down in memory as a central issue of the discredited old order the next wave is defined against?

I talk about the turn-of-the-80s latchkey moment with Brooke Shields as a mass-market pubescent sex object to highlight how far we moved from there. The “family values” thing took! The concept of “child pornography” as something that lacked the constitutional protections of regular pornography was only invented in the 80s! But remember, we got there from The Fifties!

And we got to The Fifties from the Jazz Age! Observers at the time thought the class ring/fraternity pin/“going steady” thing, Marriage Junior, represented a conservative swing in youth culture from the flappers, pre-Code movies, “petting party” oat-sowing they grew up with! These things reflex, that you could think they only go in one direction is just evidence we’ve reached apex on one swing and our derivative’s about to go negative