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Notes -
I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):
TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."
The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.
It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??
Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.
Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them). Which, speaking of political agitation and old-style repression, consider the following:
"There will be nothing but curiosity and enjoyment of the process of life. No competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always, do not forget this, Karen - never will be the intoxication of power, never increasing, but constantly growing more overt. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of elevating a friend who is worthy. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)
You'll recognize that "stare at my [metaphorical] goods, and be enriched simply by their existence" as the promise of liberalism. We don't tolerate expressions of that any more because we are no longer liberal; instead, the women who should be encouraging young men to develop properly by doing that are instead invested in [quite literally, in some cases] cutting that expression off right to the quick. It can't be permissible for people to give sex or commitment outside of what biology dictates because there's serious money to be made instead- the organism needs to exists as an instrument of alienated labor, not as a subject of self realization.
(Which is the steelman context for the above. There's literally zero benefit to older women [traditionally: extracts zero resources while not benefiting from looking pretty] matching with younger men [traditionally: provides zero sex appeal while not benefiting from being able to extract resources]; which means that if they do it and stick together, they do it for self-actualization: because they want to. And if you squint a little, you'll notice that "this is ultimately what I want you to have, here it is, I know you're not quite ready but your wanting to be is enough" is exactly how God operates. I'm sure that's a total coincidence though.)
KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system); and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated, disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?
Yes, but you have to distill the initial conditions and sociobiological incentives of the groups in conflict to figure that out because our language is insufficient to explain that. Much like how I use "straight", for that matter.
Right, I noted at the end that Marcuse's empirical description was not entirely correct today (especially if you're a straight white male).
This was a great anime by the way.
What? No it's not. It's dominated by adult men who have a lot of money.
No. My apologies, that was an attempt to interject humor into the OP. He wasn't right. He insisted that non-identical ideologies were actually identical. Our language was insufficient to justify his position because his position was incorrect.
Older men have only the authority vested into them in their ability to lead younger men: either in the personal level in tribal and medieval context, or in the ideological and abstract state apparatus in the current era. Young men are the currency of science, warfare, and economics. No vigorous movement has succeeded without them.
I disagree. The currency of economics is, ultimately, capital.
Sure, young men (and women) could band together and take over Somalia, and live without any older person telling them what to do.
However, most are wise enough to see that that this would be a terrible decision. Instead, they live in big cities paying high rents to older people, working in companies controlled by older people (at least indirectly), and voting for political parties controlled by older people.
You are mistaken: the currency of economics is homo economicus, the idealized man-laborer/manager in the shape of a spherical cow. It is human beings who are the primary agents of subjective value, who give meaning and purpose to capital and the commodities it produces.
You make the mistake of looking at the top of the pyramid: and seeing that they are all old, and conflating that with power. Experience and expertise count for much but the simple fact of biological death ensures that transition of power is inevitable. Institutions, by necessity, are constantly replacing their principal agents.
Which leads back to the original premise: any organization that fails to appeal to the young (and young men in particular) will be swiftly made irrelevant. Feminists are only successful insomuch as they are able to appeal to the resources of powerful men (in the suffragette era) or abstractly through the mechanisms of taxation and policy (now.) Old, infertile women have no power over young men and must sway their younger, more beautiful counterparts to have any political power at all.
As an analogy, someone might argue that the ultimate power in society lies with the ones who produce food, for everyone has to eat. However, this would ignore the fact that there is a competitive food market: plenty of food producers are willing to sell food for some marginal profit instead of requiring to be made lords of the realm.
With the work force it is just the same. Anyone with capital to spent on salaries and PR can reliably find young persons to work for them. Provide the correct incentives, and people will work for you just almost as reliable as water powering a hydroelectric plant. We generally assign little agency to that water, because while individual molecules move in a Brownian motion which seems random to us, in aggregate we can model what water will do very well. Humans are a bit harder to model, but the principle is the same.
For quite some generations, gaining money through paid work has been the best pathway to reproductive success available for most men. As long as the boundary conditions are correct, getting some of them to work for you is easy.
I also don't understand why you emphasize fertility differences between genders in old age. The power that old people wield is almost completely orthogonal to their reproductive capabilities. Nobody gives much of a damn if a male leader is impotent or not, and it has been that way for a long time. "Leader X has knocked up five women in the last year, so his family will be very big an influential in the future, while Leader Y has not given birth in a decade, so who cares what she has to say" is a thought pattern which is alien to most humans who have ever lived, and certainly is obsolete today.
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