I mean but maybe that’s all just a frontier thing in general - California outside of the Bay Area was largely lightly settled frontier until the 1950s, more cognate to the modern Pacific Northwest than modern California.

LA used to be the whitest, most anglophone, most native-born city in America, did you know that? East LA (which is unincorporated county land) was Mexican yes, but in the same sense it had been since LA was part of Mexico. It wasn’t until the immigration wave of the ‘70s-‘80s - in living memory - that things changed, and movies like White Men Can’t Jump, Falling Down, and American History X were made by people who lived through the transition. Snow Crash is a projection of early ‘90s SoCal into the future, and the specter of the Raft is a reflection of that Asian boat people refugee/Mexican overland wave.

(Steve Sailer can mostly be accounted for by the fact he grew up in the Valley back before this)

And that’s a wild frontier thing - sexual morality not so constricting. I see some of you - looking at you, bloodandhedonism - sniffing about mainstreaming of the sexualization of children well let me say the modern day has *nothing* on the ‘70s, when the California Experiment first started taking over the culture.

Roman Polanski - not just his personal life, his 1968 Romeo & Juliet was very upfront about the fact that the leads were young teenagers who were sexual beings who, upon getting married, got naked and sensual with each other in bed.

Pop-Freudianism, the notion that obviously we totally wanted to bang, particularly our family members, and repressing this was a major source of pain in the world, which was always biggest on the coasts.

Yeah, Woody Allen (the things the Farrow family’s said about him would make a good movie. Maybe two.)

Hell, the career of Brooke Shields - nude photo spreads in a Playboy publication at ten, starring role as a child prostitute in Pretty Baby at 12, at 14 introducing Calvin Klein and designer jeans in general with ads the conceit of which was her sitting with her legs splayed and double-entendreing that she wasn’t wearing underwear, same age as she starred as a topless girl going through an incestuous sexual awakening in The Blue Lagoon (as I’ve mentioned, with Flowers In The Attic, “incestuous sexual awakening” had the same prominence in contemporary YA pulp romance as “supernatural boyfriend” did in the Twilight era).

Like, it was not in fact clear at the time that the Sexual Revolution wasn’t going to go all the way from acceptance of premarital to extramarital to homosexual to intergenerational sex. NAMBLA has the same legend of stab-in-the-back betrayal by incrementalist gay activists that transgender activists do.

It wasn’t until the ‘80s that a backlash backfooted things. For one the “satanic ritual abuse” thing, which was reactionary witch-hunting to the point that they were literally hunting witches, mating the fears about the twin declines of Christianity and parenthood as structural forces. The Moral Majority and the appearance of evangelicals in cultural politics and anti-pornography coalitions with second-wave radfems. After obscenity laws fell under the Warren Court, it wasn’t until 1982’s New York v. Ferber - which if you read the decision is pure handwaving - that it was established that it was even constitutional to criminalize child pornography and not allow “redeeming artistic value” as a defense. (It wasn’t until 1990’s Osborne v. Ohio that it was established that criminalizing mere possession was acceptable). And then AIDS siezed upon to co-opt sex education (which, you know, the Christianists weren’t wrong, was originally introduced as a means to inculcate students with sex-positivity) to teach youngsters that sex was deadly as a convenient idiom to reassert that sex was wrong.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.