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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I've already written a bit about the totalizing nature of progressive sex norms (all fucking within the party, no fucking outside the party, no fucking against the party). But this is an especially good example of how it's done in practice.
Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.

And most notably that support isn't just contingent on following the ever-changing rules about sex; it can be withdrawn for insufficient zeal in other matters. Remember all the stories threatening naming and shaming valley sex party enjoyers when the media was pressuring them over insufficient anti-fascist censorship?
The rich, high status libertine techbros thought they had a deal that enabled them to have casual sex within the emerging leftist monoculture. Then the deal changed. I suspect that incident quietly did more to turn them against leftism than the rocks thrown at their employees.

Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.

The actual life path followed by Blue Tribe elites is to fool around a bit in your twenties, then to get married (to someone of your own social class, naturally) and stay married. The idea that polyamory and swinging are standard for married couples in prog circles is absurd if you have spent time with them - this is the whole point behind Charles Murrays "the elite should preach what they practice" thesis in Coming Apart. Even though the official prog position is that there is nothing wrong with swinging if everyone is consenting, it has always been the case that a male public figure who did this kind of thing and got caught was liable to be hauled over the coals by feminists for bullying his wife into it.

Blue Tribe opinion-formers promote sexual deviance because promoting deviance of all kinds feels like rebellion against oppressive authority. But the actual rules enforced by Blue Tribe morality police have included things like "don't engage in drug-addled casual sex" since the feminist backlash against 60's libertinism. And banging women of a significantly lower social class than your own (including whores) has always been mildly low-status behaviour for elite men, even though it is common. If the libertine techbros had thought that drug-fueled orgies were normal for Blue Tribe elites then they were making the classic mistake of believing what the NYT says and not watching what the sort of person who gets published in the NYT does.