The sexual counterrevolution is coming | Hacker News Reader

The sexual counterrevolution is coming

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19 pointsthrowkeep26 comments

Did I misread this, or is there no real data presented whatsoever? There are a few anecdotes and that's it.

Slate used to have a series called "bogus trend stories," and this feels like a bogus trend story: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/bogus-trend-stor...

The goal isn't to inform us, it's to be an onramp for their movement.

Agree.

There are some valid points in this article, but I found it difficult to adopt them because there was so much bad faith conflation of causation and ignorance of the state of society before the sexual revolution.

The whole point about not kink -shaming is that it's OK to have kinks so long as it's between you and other consenting individuals. Nowhere is it suggested that it is OK to use this in order to perpetrate abuse onto other people. Everyone is expected to act with restraint, set clear boundaries and stop if their partner(s) ask them to.

'No hymen, no diamond' is, on so many levels, such a disgusting thing to say

It’s mind blowing the author chose to include that phrase given the rest of the article is pretty well written.

It's a thing this community actually says, not wordplay on the author's part.

I know, the whole essay is like a character study of the most repulsive people you can possibly imagine.

I guess if the article is against prostitution or paying for sex, it however encourages paying for the opposite, abstinence.

This reads much like the musings of some of the religious fundamentalists I grew up around in my town. They purport that their way is the mainstream or "coming/silent majority", then shame anyone who falls outside their sexist and dehumanizing beliefs. They seek to make those people feel small and outcasted, thereby fulfilling their false beliefs in their own eyes. It's sad that someone could write something as sexist as she has, and not have even a shred of self-awareness about the irony of it.

There's a difference between the upper strata of society rediscovering Puritanism and a counterrevolution. Revolutions require means to enforce norms. If we have seen one thing it is that there is no means any more by which elite can force a discourse on the population at large.

In the same sense how old fashioned aristocrats used to live by suffocating norms I guess we now get the techbro version of the same thing but ordinary people will not throw Tinder away because Ivy league graduates adopt the values of Victorian England.

Revolutions always require a certain amount of energy and momentum in society which we don't have. You can see it with the other sort of old-fashioned ruling class attitudes that even progressive, liberal, elites have rediscovered. Veganism, exercise, obsession with health etc, it hasn't really percolated down much.

Case in point, the author of the article who I happen to follow on twitter also just retweeted this:

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1395792792945844227?...

There are about a hundred different ways the elite can force a discourse. Control over regulation, cultural osmosis via mass media, financial influence, etc..

I think you might be impressed just how much cultural power there is that can be wielded.

We don't live in the age of mass media any more, that's the point. In our postmodern age where everyone lives in their own internet sphere regulation and 'mass anything' doesn't matter.

You can like or it dislike it, but there is no one single reality any more where an elite of educated gentlemen sits in a room and decides what society looks like. This is why there can be no revolution, or counter-revolution. That finance and polite society do not manage discourse any more should have become clear in 2016.

As Bruno Macaes pointed out in a great recent piece[1], the world we are in now resembles Westworld theme parks. The elite can go to the Victorian park, and everyone else goes to the saloon. But this is truly virtual, we're not actually rolling the sexual revolution back.

[1]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-com...

We definitely don't live in a world that transcended mass media.

We live in a world of mass recommender systems. That can be tweaked any way that those programming them want and lead to massive knock-on consequences on the rest of culture and encodes those choices in the minds of creators and consumers alike.

Trump was not that far from the elite status-quo. He had 50% of the political elite on his side, more or less, and didn't do much against finance and polite society itself. Not even a fraction of what could have been used to stop him actually was used to stop him.

The elites have been obsessed with race and the new religion of wokeism, which has certainly percolated down.

> Veganism, exercise, obsession with health etc, it hasn't really percolated down much.

They aren't pushing exercise and health, just the opposite. "Stay inside. Obesity is beautiful. Drink coca cola."

>The elites have been obsessed with race and the new religion of wokeism, which has certainly percolated down.

"Wokeism" isn't a religion, it isn't new and it "percolated" up from Black activism to white liberalism to the elites, not down.

Yea, but then it become a religion. It has all the features except for redemption.

"John McWhorter: The Neoracists": https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neorac...

"The New Religion Of Anti-Racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHUu9sAGKo

"Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle": https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/14/wokeness-old-religi...

The elites drink Kale Juice, are decidedly non-obese, and have personal trainers. That this behavior coexists with a message of body positivity proves the point, there is no one single culture.

'Wokeism' (or at least significant parts of it) is, contrary to popular opinion, not an elite project. The reason why it has actual pull in society is because it to a large degree comes out of fairly old-school, activist organizing.

Yes, they do one thing, and say another. They're not telling their own kids that being obese is beautiful and healthy. That message is for the poors.

> 'Wokeism' (or at least significant parts of it) is, contrary to popular opinion, not an elite project. The reason why it has actual pull in society is because it to a large degree comes out of fairly old-school, activist organizing.

I think it's both, and the activist aspect is why it's so effective and embraced by the Twitter slacktivist crowd.

Identity politics was pushed by the elite to divide the underclass into small pieces. After Occupy Wall Street, they shifted the national discussion and focus away from class to identity.

"percolated down"? Since when have the elites been interested in racial equity? By elites, we're talking about the 1% or even the .01%.

"Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition" -a popular meme

Sexual counter-revolutionaries targeting "commercial sexual exploitation" will fail. Just as the Meese Commission in the 1980s failed to combat the mainstreaming of content that deviated from "community standards". It just moved to VHS. And will further move to IPFS & privacy preserving crypto coins.

I see the prohibition of regulated sex work falling in a similar vein to cannabis & psychedelics. Expect to see large investments from Founders Fund or A16Z. Even a YC style incubator for sex tech coming soon.

Hippie concept of "free love" was taking us back to prehistorical times, when humans were just like animals: fucking, sleeping, eating, and not much else in between. It's a good thing that current generation is reverting to more sophisticated behaviors.

What? The reason for the historical death of "free love" is even more base, it's literally about resource conservation as populations pass what is feasible to support balanced against the need for field labour.

If anything, prehistorical attitudes about love are much, much, much more sophisticated than what came after.

The reason for the historical death of "free love" was mostly the rise of HIV/AIDS.

I got from the context they were talking about the prehistoric type of love.

> Charlotte and Narayan are not the uptight fundamentalists or ugly, embittered feminists of stereotype: they’re members of the Ivy-educated jeunesse dorée.

1) In what context would a focus on sexual monogamy and a traditional marriage have been a sign of an "embittered feminist"? Neither has been a focus of any of the major American feminist movements.

2) When have the Ivy-educated elite not been also the uptight fundamentalists of America, at least as it pertains to everyone else's choices?

It's all just the usual garbage of rich people trying to elevate some social signifier more accessible to them than others as a moral virtue.

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