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Notes -
Thoughts on both your post and @gorge’s reply.
My parents were (and are) ex flower power hippies who fucked, drank and smoked their way through the late 70s before becoming respectable yuppies. They’re the parents from Easy A. The most they told their three children about sex was to use protection, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and have fun. If I had brought home an older boyfriend (or girlfriend) at 15, they’d have made him coffee in the morning and asked him if he wanted to come back for dinner the next day. My mother opposed ‘MeToo’ because she thought that new sexual harassment policies would ‘take the fun out of’ the workplace. My dad got stoned with my brother and I in our late teens and reminisced about doing business with a women he was 85% sure he’d hooked up with in a bar bathroom as a student, then asked us if kids these days still do that kind of thing or if the whole AIDS crisis really did ruin sex.
Both my siblings and myself are huge prudes. My younger sister was the only person who brought home a partner at high school, and that was her long term boyfriend when she was 17. There was some light experimentation with drugs, and I got (not very) drunk a few times in high school, but that was it. I don’t think any of us have ever been promiscuous by any modern colloquial standard.
At the same time, this is far from a perfect strategy, since I knew at least a few people with similarly small-l liberal parents who became complete degenerates (some still are). Likewise, there were children of more conservative families who stayed true to that belief system, and those who rejected, subverted and rebelled against it at every turn. My guess, though, is some part of us saw casual sex and hedonism as inherently uncool because our parents were so open about it (and were, and are, openly flirty with each other, which on balance is a good thing). But I’m not really sure.
(I do think a big part of Gen Z’s alleged prudishness is the result of lib Gen X parents, though).
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