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Notes -
Celebrities?
I mean I know what you mean. African American culture’s poor treatment of women is, for wealthy white women, trivial to avoid. But Mike Tyson and Chris Brown never have presented themselves as progressive Allies, and they don’t have any intention of starting. Sean Connery also admits to being a woman beater unashamedly, did you know that? Most don’t. Woody Allen is a progressive heretic, that’s why he’s in such contempt, same for Harvey Weinstein, and Brett kavanaugh had an obvious culture war dimension.
Now, obviously, avoiding the depredations of Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein is also very doable. Your mother could tell you how to avoid a casting couch.
So why the fixation on those men- the progressives- when non-outspoken progressives get ignored unless it helps politically? Because it’s the horror of falsifying the progressive project- that adopting a particular ideology can protect young women from the depredations of men in power, without those women needing to listen to their parents. There’s a sense in which this shows the failure of consent based sexual morality- when consent is the only variable, it undermines the traditional ways to protect the ability of women to consent.
Ross Douthat once ended an editorial by saying that modern progressives need an alternative to traditional sexual mores, and they do not have this alternative figured out. I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is, and the obsession with abolishing traditional structures which both limit the sexual options available and protect against depredation in an attempt to privatize sexual decision making cannot develop a meaningful alternative to sexual norms, no matter how well developed the idea of consent becomes.
The Christine Blasey Ford thing came up again and all I could think was "if the entire nation is going to have to relitigate decades-old teenage parties filled with drunk kids maybe people should keep a tighter handle on them, cries of tyranny or no". Because clearly it can't help but be everyone's business.
That is a particularly extreme example but still.
How about "cries of anarcho-tyranny or no"? Judging by the decline in sex zoomers seem to be having, society is keeping a tighter handle on drunk teenage parties - just through self-policing rather than the panopticon of the elders.
The elders do however have a much more comprehensive panopticon these days, through the electronic leash.
Do they? How many parents really know what their kid is up to on Discord?
Many more than read their kids’ IM chats in 2005. And it doesn’t stop there; gps tracking, for example.
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Many of them know much more about what their kids do on Friday afternoons after school than they did in the 70s or even 90s, though.
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Maybe not through Discord, but through text messages and physical proximity.
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