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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.

Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."

If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.

Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.

This way predates even gay acceptance going mainstream- I remember Catholic discussion of how awesome NFP was before obergefell.

Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.

Speaking of Sweeney in particular, I encountered enthusiasm for her breasts by listening to the Critical Drinker's "Open Bar" stream while working. The open bar has some actual conservatives, but it seems to me that the core group is pretty clearly tits-and-beer liberals who have been left behind by the rapid advance of Social Justice ideology.

Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?

Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.

I think this is pretty accurate, and I think I see it in a lot of other ways too. A lot of the old conflicts between Christian denominations have gone away, now that the central example of a doctrinal dispute has shifted from "what hierarchy do we answer to" to "does sin exist". Many such cases, as they say. Polarization is very, very real.

Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?

Probably the center, but I think the right -- or, the people who have become "the right" since Trump -- have fewer intellectual obstacles in the way of embracing. Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply." They want to keep it in marriage, but if kids do not feel empowered to acknowledge the hormonal impulses that will lead them to marriage, it's a non-starter. I'm not sure the left has, at their essence, a procreative sexual ethos. They want to deconstruct all of the old natural impulses and replace them with new "enlightened" ones, which is the opposite of the innate physical urges.

Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply."

Let me posit an alternative explanation: The people who are temperamentally predisposed to becoming sexual scolds now do all their scolding under the woke umbrella by, say, complaining about the male gaze because video game characters look too pretty or whatever. Moralising busy-bodies who get off on telling other people what to do and think will seek out whatever ideological framework will let them do that most satisfyingly.

Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney

Was that a thing? I just remember a bunch of conservatives calling her mid on twitter.

I think it's that conservatives have discovered that there is something worse than the kids having sex: the kids not having sex. A whore can be reformed in the church more easily than an asexual. The former merely needs to be taught to control herself by two thousand years of christian teaching on the subject, the latter has no need for church teachings on the subject of sexual sin because she doesn't have sex. The former might give you grandchildren in the wrong shade of beige, the latter won't give you any.

Was that a thing? I just remember a bunch of conservatives calling her mid on twitter.

I saw her being celebrated as a hot young woman who not only embraced being a hot young woman but saw no shame in it nor in men enjoying her in that role.