So… I hope everyone is willing to acknowledge that sex positivity is in a gradual decline and based on historical observations, this seems to be a re-occurring issue. Every time a society undergoes a sexual revolution in opposition to conservative values, conservative values will inevitably catch up to the sexual revolution, adapt to its strategies and stomp it out.
The modern decline in sex-positivity we are currently witnessing is rather unique as instead of sexual conservatism simply fight against and destroying sex positivity, it has instead merged with it, creating this Lovecraftian horror of a social anomaly in which the sex-positive values historically promoted by the LGBT movement are now becoming increasingly puritanical.
In response to all this, I have developed a rather depressing theory that the only way humankind can experience a permanent sexual revolution is by undergoing an era of extreme sexual repression the likes of which have never been seen before. I think this is the only thing that will make humanity conscious about its need for sexual freedom due to the notion of ‘‘you don’t know how good something is until you lose it’’
My view is that sex is locked into a conservative struggle to have perceived social order defeat perceived social chaos – a struggle in which sex, as a perceived self-indulgence, is perceived as an enemy of order. To the Trumpian view, aliens are pouring over the border, and exotic sexual and gender jack-in-the-boxes are popping out all over as if someone had made a special horror movie just to terrify people who count on (and this is the important part) social uniformity. This uniformity is hoped by conservatives to promote mutual identification among people (conservatives strongly moot that people have to be similar to one another to bond as cooperators) and hence social order. It’s all about cutting and trimming those fundamental social building blocks that conservative religious people always talk about.
So the long-term alternative remedy for rescuing sex positivity, other than having it swing in a 20-year social pendulum with horrified suppression, is to try to disinvest it from its cultural associations with weakness and self-indulgence. Step one in that is just to talk about this association as I have now done. Silencing such analysis is one of the ways that conservatives use to keep sex in the mystical realm where it can function as a foil (technically, an antiplacebo) for power. You’re probably aware of the old superstitions that held that athletes shouldn’t have sex or masturbate before major events as that would gut their power. Teenagers were not supposed to masturbate at all, in the social prescriptions of about 1850 to 1965, since that indulgent practice would corrupt their developing ability to bring order and discipline to their lives. This association is 99.9% pure symbolism and need not exist, but at the moment, it’s deeply rooted in the culture, changing form slightly when certain aspects (like tying children up in bed so that they can’t reach their genitals, a late 19th century practice) become so embarrassing that they can’t be advocated any more.
Conservatives who want to work the political fields of ploughing sexual diversity back under in order to rebuild apple-pie social order mostly know that they no longer have lesbians and gays as easy foils (Trans are another matter). Therefore there’s an intense desire to find pedophilia breaking out everywhere: every politician who someone doesn’t like instantly becomes a pedophile, and all sorts of practices that have nothing to do with pedophilia, like a 22 year old dating an 18 year old, become bandied around as signs of lurking pedophilia. Every sex positive motivation is put under suspicion as eventually leading to permission for child sexual exploitation. Giving an adult permission to be openly kinky is a crack in the pavement of social control and CSE will worm its way through that crack, because weakness leads to more weakness in this social rot metaphor. (The phrase ‘moral fibre’ was popularized in the 19th century and is still often used, and one thing about fibre as it was known in 1860 is that it is easily rotted - - think of it as the social jute metaphor).
Academics, influencers, and so on need to brainstorm about how to get our regular consenting adult sex lives, which are no more a weakness aspect than eating breakfast, out of the grip of this power vs. weakness/chaos/heterodoxy metaphor system.
