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Notes -
Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:
The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.
As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.
Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.
Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.
Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.
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