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I swear this is like the 50th time you’ve brought this up on this site since it started, because you’re eager to bring it up whenever the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution are discussed. Ok, I get it, or at least I think I do – you’re a feminist woman after all, and that entire cultural hellscape in question just disgusts you to the core. But let’s look at this objectively.
Based on what accounts are available on the ‘baby groupie’ phenomenon, it appears it was pretty much confined to the Sunset Strip area, and 99% of all the attention it ever got was due to two of these groupies being willing to give interviews about their activities in order to get their 15 minutes of fame. And according to the Wikipedia articles on them, even these accounts are contradictory, which raises the obvious question of how far these girls were actually willing to go sexually, and just how much they lied and embellished. Either way, I’d be very surprised if the number of these baby groupies ever exceeded 100 in the entire US, in other words, it was completely negligible. (‘baby’ is an important qualifier here obviously)
On the other hand, if I want to play sociologist and give a reasonable explanation as to why all this even happened, I’d say this: there were numerous veterans returning from World War Two and the Korean and Vietnam Wars suffering from PTSD, which, combined with the overall decrease in parental supervision in general due to social upheaval, drove many teenagers to run away from dysfunctional and traumatizing households, permanently or intermittently. Also, pop music turned into a huge and commercialized cultural phenomenon, plus rebellious behavior and drug use was socially normalized in the ‘60s. It was also much easier to have a transient lifestyle before the digital age. But again, none of this is directly related to the Sexual Revolution.
I think the teenage groupie phenomenon is overstated for sure, but it's an interesting slice of history.
There was an incredibly brief period of history (basically the 1970s) when premarital sex was destigmatized but upper-middle class children still had freedom from helicopter parents.
I agree, but I doubt these baby groupies came from upper-middle class families.
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I’m so non-feminist I believe that women shouldn’t have the franchise and their college attendance should be capped at some low percentage of the total, and ‘13 year old groupies getting passed around as communal toys’ is disgusting and enraging to me. So throw out the accusation if you’d like.
I agree that one definitely not need be a feminist or a woman in order to reject such forms of degeneracy. However, feminists and non-feminists in my view tend to have, as demonstrated by your comment here as well, rather different ideas as to what the degradation, exploitation and ruin of women entail as a phenomenon in a sexually permissive society. It occurred to me that 2rafa's arguments about this issue are distinctly feminist in character.
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