Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style.

But while that male culture was “conservative” in its exploitative attitudes toward women, it was itself in rebellion against bourgeois norms and Middle-American Christianity. And if Hillary is a (partial, given her complicated marriage) avatar of Gloria Steinem-era feminism, her opponent is an heir of the male revolutionary in whose club Steinem once went undercover: Hugh Hefner…. Hefner passed from a phenomenon to a sideshow, while a more feminist vision of liberation became the official ideology of the liberal upper class.

But only gradually and partially. The men’s sexual revolution, in which freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill, is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News. From Hollywood and college campuses to rock concert backstages and Bill Clinton’s political operation, it has persisted as a pervasive but unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural liberalism and sexual equality.

This fundamentally rings true, close to what I was getting at in that Something for Everyone post.

Separating The Sixties into two is an interesting and possibly productive angle though. You have the Playboy Sixties (which started in the Fifties of course, the same time as campus unrest first flared up, this time against “in loco parentis” parietal rules that tried to keep the male students and the co-eds from fucking. My dad mentions being in near-riots at Cornell over this, in a narrative by which “panty raids” where men would en masse storm women’s dorms and steal their underwear were a blow for freedom.) The Swinging Sixties, what Austin Powers (who woken up assumed communism had won and condoms were for sailors) was riffing on. The Sinatra Sixties. The sixties where the popular New Face Of America was a charming young president with a picture-perfect wife and family and a steady stream of models and actresses piped in the back door.

And THEN, distinct from that, you have the minority-liberationist 60s, the feminist 60s. Which was not obviously or inevitably incompatible with the white man’s ‘60s. That the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s demanding membership in white society would eventually be eclipsed by a black nationalism asserting pride in distinct blackness was not obvious or inevitable. Betty Friedan’s original goal had been, taking heterosexual pairing as a given as the correct state of mature women, to make it work for both parties. And her warning of the “Lavender Menace” of lesbians coming to prominence in late-60s feminism came from a suspicion that given the chance, these women who were not drawn to men and were increasingly articulating theories of feminism based on complete life without men were unlikely to spend the feminist reputational capital she’d cultivated on Making Marriage Great Again.

And points to him for pointing out that the Playboy stuff and so much of that period’s masculinity wasn’t the last hurrah of a long stable maleness but a new-at-the-time innovation that was understood as counter to existing stability.

Like, do you remember that 1965 Playboy interview where Sean Connery, deputized as James Bond, agent of masculinity, extrapolated from his character to expound on the necessity of violence in maintaining correct male-female relations?

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about roughing up a woman, as Bond sometimes has to do?

CONNERY: I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman–although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified–if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it. I think a man has to be slightly advanced, ahead of the woman. I really do–by virtue of the way a man is built, if nothing else. But I wouldn’t call myself sadistic. I think one of the appeals that Bond has for women, however, is that he is decisive, cruel even. By their nature women aren’t decisive–“Shall I wear this? Shall I wear that?”–and along comes a man who is absolutely sure of everything and he’s a godsend. And, of course, Bond is never in love with a girl and that helps. He always does what he wants, and women like that. It explains why so many women are crazy about men who don’t give a rap for them.

That came more than 20 years after the publication of Generation of Vipers, a popular and influential 1942 nonfiction book on how baleful but widespread trends of women in positions of influence or control over men in the name of morals and propriety - “momism” were turning us into a cosseted, failed, unworthy nation.