A reminder that popular music getting really about teenage sexuality in the 1960s was not confined to rock & roll. Neil Diamond’s 1967 “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” is maybe the best remembered but not remotely the only period ballad on a “let me draw attention to how you’re not yet a grown adult while I seduce you” theme. And thats remembered from radio play as a single, lounge singers’ natural habitat was lounges.
“A dance floor with a DJ” was not a norm for nightclubs until the “discotheque” of the 1970s, and much as many big rap, goth, and electronic “club hits” never saw on-air promotion, “what people were listening to in the 1960s” was not just a matter of radio airplay
Okay, I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn of the culture will involve a revalorization of 70s-esque intergenerational sex with teenagers. And you’ve been like “konty, but how? we’ve so strongly stigmatized that!” and I just shrugged
Well, as time passes it becomes clear that is the mechanism, that we’ve encoded it with such stigma that people who came by after those 70s find it irresistible to appropriate for their own ends, try to pull too much weight with it, and have it all fall through.
Like, at this point in almost-2023, what is your first impression if I tell you someone is going off about pedophiles and groomers? Is it of “antis” saying something dumb and philistine, or is it of rightists saying something incredibly dumb intended to license violence in service of making society worse? Or just straight QAnon?
As that keeps up the reaction by anyone sensible will be to tune that out and take it as a mark of foul idiocy, which will come to include concern with things even 1998 might accept as constituting pedophilia or grooming.
When I get anons like this I just roll my eyes these days,
“Nice go-to smear. Would be a shame if someone were to… encode it with low-status valences”
Judging from some of your posts you were always bisexual, just nervous about actually trying it with men. Also in light of many of your posts I’m wondering if your lack of anxiety is related to wanting to shag barely-legal girls. You have no anxiety because the sexual partner you’re looking for is someone so naïve or desperate they’ll tolerate anyone. Every epehebophile I’ve read about is really bad at sex and using teenagers to compensate.
Oh I tried it. I remember first thinking it would be nice and trying to bihack myself starting in 7th grade. In LA I followed a girl/boy couple home from a bar once and played fucking what, spin the bottle? strip poker? after her girlfriend came over and we ended up as parallel gay hookup pairs (I didn’t fucking pick up on the original girl’s signals and I had horrible luck at the game). Him sucking my dick didn’t do anything for me a golf ball washer wouldn’t and in reverse I remember thinking “this is like giving someone a massage with your mouth while they choke you”.
So I was like “welp guess I’m straight”. Though I haven’t sucked any dick since the personality change I can see the erotic appeal enough to jerk off to it in fantasies, not even gay porn (which I also could never stay hard for)
So I don’t think that’s it!
Since the personality change and bisexuality I have noticed that teenage boys don’t really have any particular charge for me like girls did, I think it’s that when I was a horny adolescent first developing any sense of sexual taste, I was only into girls and in school fellow adolescents were the ones around to impress on, so to the extent I picked up tastes they were the ones it was of.
I assume that’s fairly typical and a big reason why teenage girls were a central focus of postwar popular culture through the rise of secondary schooling!
In contrast when I first developed interest in men I was not only not around schoolboys (I was mostly alone in my room during the pandemic unable to stably stand!) but didn’t have that horny urgency to seek sexual experience out, which is why I’m still not sure I have tastes in men past like, “men”.
Alternatively Oregon’s local culture actually isn’t fundamentally based on pedophilia and incest, and in fact your worldview is a function of your own most prurient sexual desires and plans to act on them. In other words, you’re an extreme pervert who’s projecting his desires onto others.
It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.
It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.
It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads
(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)
and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic
That and seeing this one ad for a summer “Rock Camp For Girls” that had testimonies to how hot chick rockers were – I don’t think it was for parents wanting hot daughters to fuck, but it was the ad’s guileless assumption that enabling your daughter’s sexual appeal was something a caring parent would do for them that struck me
And to bring it back to SFF short stories, Omelas – you know, the chill city full of farmer’s markets with the smell of marijuana on the air where everything being so chill is based on a horrifically abused child that most everyone comes to accept and not really think about – was clearly based on Ursula Le Guin’s hometown of Portland, the name comes from reversing a road sign for “Salem, OR”
It’s how when I stopped down in Roseburg I could tell the local elite had been keeping up appearances by filling downtown space with nonprofits and how one downtown building was just ~the place where the police take kids when they arrest their parents for fucking them~ and it wasn’t even that small
Alternatively Oregon’s local culture actually isn’t fundamentally based on pedophilia and incest, and in fact your worldview is a function of your own most prurient sexual desires and plans to act on them. In other words, you’re an extreme pervert who’s projecting his desires onto others.
It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.
It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.
It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads
(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)
and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic
So like, Oregon was settled for lumberjackiing, like a very physical male working class pursuit out in the woods where the work band is the basic unit of society and that backwoods experience really resonates with 60s hippies
And coming from elsewhere you really notice what a thick culture Oregon has, and you notice all these little weirdnesses, and you can’t help but notice how they would all make sense if you posited that one of Oregon’s values was Sexual Access To Our Daughters, either like “the village maidens” or “your literal offspring, in your household”
I think about pon farr-originator Theodore Sturgeon’s (then in Northern California, to die in Oregon) Dangerous Visions story, If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?, sometimes, about how there’s this perfect planet out there on the fringes of known space, which actually produces a big share of scientific and cultural advances but is kept quiet cause people just can’t handle how they’ve totally normalized incest
Friendly reminder that seeing what AI images can do now it’s ultimately a political policy product that you’ve never seen “naked thirteen-year-old girl spreading her legs”
Like you realize “libertarians care about age of consent laws” is the exact same thing as “libertarians care about drug criminalization”, which is really “folk libertarianism congealed in the 1980s resentful of attempts to roll back post-60s freedoms through criminal law”
Like it might explain some things that I remember being in elementary school in the early ‘90s, reading articles about how Title IX was changing scholastic athletics, and relaxing confident that by the time I got to college there would be chick athlete houses to get me drunk and take advantage of me
You know if there was a national protection for abortion in cases of rape that would probably lead to red states shredding their statutory rape laws.
I don’t think I appreciated that all the ‘90s worry about teen pregnancy, daytime talk shows, “kids having kids” and all was–
Well, for one it was about welfare, that with the collapse of midcentury industry Black America was just being maintained as a purposeless urban mass with no legal way to obtain more resources but by breeding more purposeless urban masses.
But that to the extent it was a white thing it was about how the 70s way of life had spread out into the rural country and was, fundamentally, 20somethings and older knocking up high schoolers.
Which was maybe the next step after rural America spent the '80s parsing that it was an issue that girls’ dads, or stepdads, or mom’s boyfriends could be knocking them up.
