Prostitution needs to be legal
Also I don't think sex workers should have to deal with incels. Sex workers are people too, and they deserve to be shown a basic amount of respect by their clients, just like the rest of us.
But say it did: would it reduce their propensity to violence?
Drug legalization, sex work, perhaps gambling & sports betting, etc. However, I could see holdouts if some subsegment of the post-boomer generations continue to hold attitudes that "vice industries" are immoral, which is fair. I imagine that the later generations will just adopt an "I don't care, let people do what they want" attitude.
I understand that I made a pretty broad statement, but anecdotally, there are so many different instances of boomers denigrating choices of later generations across many different buckets of choices - social, technological, moral, cultural, political, psycho-sexual; and as I've lived my life, we've seen rapid chances in societal behaviors that just make me feel that as every successive generation comes into existence, you just get that bit-flip for that dimension of the 'collective consciousness' (not woo-woo collective consciousness, but just the aggregated set of behaviors and interactions manifested by the people that exist today, that came to pass based on the pre-existing cc from their parents and those that influenced them, etc).
Psychologically, it's funny, because there is this commonly cited concept of 'teenage/adolescent rebellion' where, despite the love and adoration you feel for your parents, there develops a kind of rift in response to the rules imposed vs. what you immediately want to do/desire to explore the world without the parental control structure that was imposed previously. Perhaps the generational shifts that are seen are a consequence of this - maybe not, I'm just thinking out loud here. But yeah it is an interesting topic.
Care to comment further on what gave you this impression? I'm intrigued.
Try again for 1960.
Society has changed in the 60 years for sure, but not always in the way you predict, or the way you want.
The only thing that marks boomers as different is the technological leverage available to them. Meaning each and every succeeding generation since the industrial revolution can do more good and vastly more harm, than the one that went before. WW1 was so much worse than the Napoleonic war as technological leverage brought industrial slaughter. Similar comments were heard in Dickens day, in pre-WW1 Edwardian era, and I have no doubt will continue to be heard in 30 when it'll be the ageing Millennials being denigrated, and 300 years, etc.
Just to put your "only divisive because boomers" issues into context, ALL of them were divisive in the eras they were restricted, except the pendulum was swinging the other way. There were moral panics and outrages over all these in Elizabethan, Victorian, Edwardian times and still today. So that's 400 years. You'll find similar going back to ancient Rome and Greece.
We are going through a pendulum swing of relaxing attitudes to all of these, and decline of regulation. Regulation declines due to the rise of the cargo cult of neoliberalism 1980 on, attitudes due to the rise of individual consumerism 1960 on. Give it fifty or a hundred years and there will be a "universal" clamour for greater restriction, perhaps with a new spin, perhaps in forms of regulation commonly tried across the millennia. Perhaps religion or abstinence will see a revival. Perhaps something completely new, whether environmentalism or something we can't yet conceive.
At some point in the swing to relaxed, low regulation, rebelling against parents will necessarily spawn a more community, collective, or restrictive reaction.
I guess that's possible, and in fact seems like it's accelerating. But then again, what constitutes a vice is also changing.
Take a different example. Surely climate change presents a significant social challenge, both immediate and downstream. Inasmuch as climate change is exacerbated by the vice of over-consumption, there's a great deal of social approbation in some circles against it and a number of proposals to regulate it.
One wonders, of course, if a successful campaign against over consumption won't result in a future sometime where people forget the dangers of over-consumption and argue for a more libertarian approach.
The idea that some vices aren't really immoral is not a new one; it's just that we have short memories and forget their very real dangers.
But this is not an alternative for affection. I do believe there is a big market for renting Affection. There is also a market for renting optimal friendships.
What they instead want is either companionship and affection (which they clearly don't have or they wouldn't be hanging around in incel forums) or having a woman as quasi-property to serve them and enhance their social standing (the status of most women in quite a lot of history).
There are reasons they can't get those things, of course. But rather than face them, they've built up a toxic shared ideology to explain why it is never their fault. They're not the only group that has done this, [1] but they're definitely one of the most dangerous.
[1] For a fascinating look at what abusive parents tell themselves when their children have finally had enough, I recommend this article series on "Estranged Parent" forums: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/index.html
This is why legalizing sex work and pornography is no solution and indeed may very well worsen the problem. Turning women into objects to be bought and/or rented, consumed, and owned doesn't help matters. (Of course sex work and pornography are not the only offenders in this regard: I don't suppose most of us would sanction religious ownership of women. It's a different face on the same problem.)