This is how it happens. I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn involves a revalorization of inegalitarian sexuality, this is part of it coming together.
The ‘90s Clintonian Silver Age was about taking a pause to reenchant American normalcy by #including the 60s\u2026 and it took. Standing up for post-counterculture cultural norms is now authentic American conservatism.
At the same time, the '80s had intervened. You had the cultural backlash, “family values” reassertion of child-protectiveness, you saw the Supreme Court invent the idea of “child pornography” as a category their last decades didn’t leave constitutionally protected, also the “campus rape crisis”, Take Back The Night, the broader almost proto-2010s original “political correctness” culture and canon wars PCU riffed on.
And in reaction to that, as a threat environment to be navigated if not particularly a change of heart to be internalized, the '90s didn’t push the presumed-sexual-access-to-inferiors line. Maybe even postured against it, y'know, Ben Affleck in Mallrats, who’s trying to fuck the girlfriend in a very painful place that’s not the back seat of a Volkswagen, would-totally-fuck-high-schoolers bad guy of the first movie where Kevin Smith was working for Harvey Weinstein from jump\u2026
And yes, Weinstein and Hollywood, #MeToo, Epstein and the national elite, hell, Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky, remember that one?, it appears that if the Boomers with a shot gave up on trumpeting it they didn’t on doing it\u2026
How much of “nice guys”, “MRAs”, was about about guys noticing the gap here? “The world you are to inherit is in the rock-and-roll tradition of Woodstock thru '80s keg parties, the men who don’t go into domestic seclusion have a steady stream of satisfying partners, and all of this comes through a vernacular popularization of second-wave feminism!” Okay, but the last doesn’t really produce the prior.
(“Woodstock '99 was a rape fest!” well okay '94 seemed better, but by modern standards how much enthusiastic consent really was there in the mud of '69?)
Gone Girl I keep coming back to, but the book was really about the gap, about it collapsing on men in a way that was, if extreme in its particulars, rooted in the way it largely would in the 2010s.
But the thing is, “oh no these cads publicly mouthed feminist support while sexbezzling in private, now that that support has pumped feminism up enough they’re no longer safe!” has a parallel waiting, among the people who grew up with 90s culture. “Oh no feminism mouthed pro-sex Sixtiesism while building towards Puritanism in private! But now that we’ve been pumped up for counterculture sex-positivity\u2026 ::cracks knuckles::”
Like, what, they wouldn’t? Go read those responses OP referenced.
Add that to the way yammering about pedos and grooming marks you for avoiding by anyone worthwhile as a chud or at least anti now\u2026
Also add the back-to-the-city thing. '80s teens-and-malls “suburbs” were really like, the San Fernando Valley, or Long Island, or relatively close-in Chicagoland. Now, in the parent-chauffeured exurbs the few outside adults an adolescent might get involved with are like, “sports coach” and “youth pastor” so I’m not sure exactly how a return to unsupervised intergenerational mixing would affect things, but it’s a change.
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