A reminder that popular music getting really about teenage sexuality in the 1960s was not confined to rock & roll. Neil Diamond’s 1967 “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” is maybe the best remembered but not remotely the only period ballad on a “let me draw attention to how you’re not yet a grown adult while I seduce you” theme. And thats remembered from radio play as a single, lounge singers’ natural habitat was lounges.

“A dance floor with a DJ” was not a norm for nightclubs until the “discotheque” of the 1970s, and much as many big rap, goth, and electronic “club hits” never saw on-air promotion, “what people were listening to in the 1960s” was not just a matter of radio airplay

Sex With Teenagers: The Next Generation

Okay, I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn of the culture will involve a revalorization of 70s-esque intergenerational sex with teenagers. And you’ve been like “konty, but how? we’ve so strongly stigmatized that!” and I just shrugged

Well, as time passes it becomes clear that is the mechanism, that we’ve encoded it with such stigma that people who came by after those 70s find it irresistible to appropriate for their own ends, try to pull too much weight with it, and have it all fall through.

Like, at this point in almost-2023, what is your first impression if I tell you someone is going off about pedophiles and groomers? Is it of “antis” saying something dumb and philistine, or is it of rightists saying something incredibly dumb intended to license violence in service of making society worse? Or just straight QAnon?

As that keeps up the reaction by anyone sensible will be to tune that out and take it as a mark of foul idiocy, which will come to include concern with things even 1998 might accept as constituting pedophilia or grooming.

When I get anons like this I just roll my eyes these days,

“Nice go-to smear. Would be a shame if someone were to… encode it with low-status valences”

So.

Oh I tried it. I remember first thinking it would be nice and trying to bihack myself starting in 7th grade. In LA I followed a girl/boy couple home from a bar once and played fucking what, spin the bottle? strip poker? after her girlfriend came over and we ended up as parallel gay hookup pairs (I didn’t fucking pick up on the original girl’s signals and I had horrible luck at the game). Him sucking my dick didn’t do anything for me a golf ball washer wouldn’t and in reverse I remember thinking “this is like giving someone a massage with your mouth while they choke you”.

So I was like “welp guess I’m straight”. Though I haven’t sucked any dick since the personality change I can see the erotic appeal enough to jerk off to it in fantasies, not even gay porn (which I also could never stay hard for)

So I don’t think that’s it!

Since the personality change and bisexuality I have noticed that teenage boys don’t really have any particular charge for me like girls did, I think it’s that when I was a horny adolescent first developing any sense of sexual taste, I was only into girls and in school fellow adolescents were the ones around to impress on, so to the extent I picked up tastes they were the ones it was of.

I assume that’s fairly typical and a big reason why teenage girls were a central focus of postwar popular culture through the rise of secondary schooling!

In contrast when I first developed interest in men I was not only not around schoolboys (I was mostly alone in my room during the pandemic unable to stably stand!) but didn’t have that horny urgency to seek sexual experience out, which is why I’m still not sure I have tastes in men past like, “men”.

Also, fuck you too, buddy!

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.

It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.

It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads

(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)

and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic

That and seeing this one ad for a summer “Rock Camp For Girls” that had testimonies to how hot chick rockers were – I don’t think it was for parents wanting hot daughters to fuck, but it was the ad’s guileless assumption that enabling your daughter’s sexual appeal was something a caring parent would do for them that struck me

And to bring it back to SFF short stories, Omelas – you know, the chill city full of farmer’s markets with the smell of marijuana on the air where everything being so chill is based on a horrifically abused child that most everyone comes to accept and not really think about – was clearly based on Ursula Le Guin’s hometown of Portland, the name comes from reversing a road sign for “Salem, OR”

It’s how when I stopped down in Roseburg I could tell the local elite had been keeping up appearances by filling downtown space with nonprofits and how one downtown building was just ~the place where the police take kids when they arrest their parents for fucking them~ and it wasn’t even that small

It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.

It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.

It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads

(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)

and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic

So like, Oregon was settled for lumberjackiing, like a very physical male working class pursuit out in the woods where the work band is the basic unit of society and that backwoods experience really resonates with 60s hippies

And coming from elsewhere you really notice what a thick culture Oregon has, and you notice all these little weirdnesses, and you can’t help but notice how they would all make sense if you posited that one of Oregon’s values was Sexual Access To Our Daughters, either like “the village maidens” or “your literal offspring, in your household”

I think about pon farr-originator Theodore Sturgeon’s (then in Northern California, to die in Oregon) Dangerous Visions story, If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?, sometimes, about how there’s this perfect planet out there on the fringes of known space, which actually produces a big share of scientific and cultural advances but is kept quiet cause people just can’t handle how they’ve totally normalized incest

I think about it a lot

Friendly reminder that seeing what AI images can do now it’s ultimately a political policy product that you’ve never seen “naked thirteen-year-old girl spreading her legs”

micro-usb-deactivated20230625:

micro-usb-deactivated20230625:

On what other website would you ever get an interaction like this?

100% real btw

Like you realize “libertarians care about age of consent laws” is the exact same thing as “libertarians care about drug criminalization”, which is really “folk libertarianism congealed in the 1980s resentful of attempts to roll back post-60s freedoms through criminal law”

Like it might explain some things that I remember being in elementary school in the early ‘90s, reading articles about how Title IX was changing scholastic athletics, and relaxing confident that by the time I got to college there would be chick athlete houses to get me drunk and take advantage of me

You know if there was a national protection for abortion in cases of rape that would probably lead to red states shredding their statutory rape laws.

I don’t think I appreciated that all the ‘90s worry about teen pregnancy, daytime talk shows, “kids having kids” and all was–

Well, for one it was about welfare, that with the collapse of midcentury industry Black America was just being maintained as a purposeless urban mass with no legal way to obtain more resources but by breeding more purposeless urban masses.

But that to the extent it was a white thing it was about how the 70s way of life had spread out into the rural country and was, fundamentally, 20somethings and older knocking up high schoolers.

Which was maybe the next step after rural America spent the '80s parsing that it was an issue that girls’ dads, or stepdads, or mom’s boyfriends could be knocking them up.

ALT

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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… 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…

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…

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… ::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…

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.

You know, I have no idea what the song of the white-winged dove sounds like

fruitchouli:

‘70s ads (this is '75) throw me cause of how women’s apparent ages and life stages line up. Like not even “ew, they’re sexualizing Brooke Shields pretty hard for a twelve-year-old”, but a sense that like, you could be married and settled by 18, and definitely would by 28, so the entire attraction and oat-sowing and courtship phases of life were backdated from that

kontextmaschine:

How San Francisco Became a Failed City

Heard the usual shit-talk of this on Twitter first, apparently the writer is a local heiress (This used to be a known SF type, all over Dashiell Hammett. Patty Hearst was a local heiress!) which is worth considering as you assess her interpretation of a rightward (if only from leftist to liberal) trend in the city I guess, but all the elements she builds it out of are there.

Interesting that she attributes some backlash to hangover from the electorate being too in their #Resistance cups last Trump-era election cycle and supporting trendy leftism they now realize they don’t actually like as governing philosophy; I really think, big picture, possibly the most significant role Trump played was tripping an assembling left order before it was complete and triggering it to shake itself apart

Also, notice how her example of the good ‘ol San Francisco liberalism we need to return to is the city enthusiastically enabling her to get away from her family and find mature scenes to explore her sexual interests with when she was a schoolgirl in braces? I’ve been telling you about this coming wave.

kontextmaschine:

I mean, they rub their stink over the concept of protecting children from the intergenerational transmission of sexual culture and ultimately discredit it in a way that’s basically the ‘80s run backwards yet again leaves them entering the subsequent decade as stereotypes of cranky obsolescence for the purpose of rejecting, there’s that

The trope of some father hiring his son a prostitute to lose his virginity with? That’s the intergenerational transmission of sexual culture, baybee!

I mean, they rub their stink over the concept of protecting children from the intergenerational transmission of sexual culture and ultimately discredit it in a way that’s basically the ‘80s run backwards yet again leaves them entering the subsequent decade as stereotypes of cranky obsolescence for the purpose of rejecting, there’s that

kamoi:

Most French album of all time

tanadrin:

“you’re wrong about” has a short series about the book written by an evangelical grifter in the 70s about his alleged time in a satanic cult. all the cultists talk like cartoon greasers, and he manages to make worshipping the dark prince in return for sorcerous powers sound like the most boring-ass middle management job in existence, and it’s great. it’s one of those things where somebody is so unable to imagine the world beyond their own narrow experience that they end up just projecting all the neurosis and flaws of their own ideology/organization onto an invented enemy, but somehow it’s also just weird and dumb.

anyway, the thought occurred to me that given the perennial willingness to attribute everything to satanists in the 80s and 90s and the way crying wolf all the time about secret cults has thoroughly exhausted the idea, you could actually probably get away with running an actual murderous satanic cult in the US for a while, because everybody who tried to expose you would just look ridiculous.

For a bit now I’ve been getting the sense that the next turn in American culture was going to revisit some of the themes of intergenerational sex-positivity from the 70s but I was like “but how would we even get there from here” but then like, the most uselessly irritating people in every field of society started rambling about “pedos” and problematic age gaps and “grooming” nonstop until that got coded as low-status nonsense to tune out, and I was like “oh”

Not terribly sure what that’s a data point regarding, but there it is.

Can’t help but think that teachers actually fucking their students are probably going to find an environment of “hollering weirdos are calling all teachers pedos and sex abusers all the time and granting them any quarter advances The Other Side’s agenda” more favorable than before