Recently The New Yorker had a long feature on the German social experiment from the 1970’s to early 2000’s which placed homeless boys in foster care with pedophiles. The whole thing seems totally incomprehensible today. But, I always explain to adults who don’t remember the sexual environment of the 1970’s that pedophilia was a much more open question on the radical fringes then than today. I point out that Allen Ginsberg and Harry Hay were both pro-NAMBLA. Ginsberg is still a cultural figure, but Hay was a huge mover and shaker in the gay liberation movement of the 20th century. The basic radical theory is that children had sexual rights and feelings which were being repressed.
But this is an intellectual matter. What was happening “on the ground”? I decided to look back into the archives of The New York Times, and I stumbled upon the fact that in the late 1970’s New Jersey had reduced the age of consent to 13, before moving it back to 16 in 1979. The reasons for this are complicated and have to do with the implicit criminalization of sex between teens and Romeo and Juliet laws, but the way the legislation was written it seems it was legal for adults to have sex with 13-year-old teens in New Jersey for a time in the late 1970s.
Here is the article, Age of Consent in Jersey Expected to Revert to 16:
Leaders of the New Jersey Assembly, responding to widespread fears about a new criminal code that lowers the age of sexual consent to 13 years, said today they expected the Assembly to pass a stopgap measure tomorrow to restore 16 as the age of consent. The legislators hope to allay fears that the state is endorsing sexual activity by teen‐agers.
The reduced age of consent had been included in the criminal code, which takes effect Sept. 1, at the urging of the National Organization for Women. An official of the organization, Roberta Kaufman, said it had lobbied for making the age of consent 13 not to encourage sex among young teen‐agers, but to keep teen‐agers under 16 from becoming entangled in the law if they did engage in sex.
Reading the archives from that period a lot of things were on the table. Apparently, New Jersey was looking to legalize incest between adults over the age of 16 and necrophilia.
Perhaps the current radical cultural moment will pass too, and we’ll forget all about it?
Link to New yorker Article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles
I remember that a large format paperback book sized journal trumpeting the glories of NAMBLA was published by the New York State Arts Council in the early 1980s and was distributed at newsstands in Manhattan.
Wow, no wonder NJ is such a shithole!!!
Full disclosure: I’ve lived in NJ for the past 17 years. 🙂
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. God help us all.
Has happened (ignored), is happening and will happen…
Look up Tom Philpott’s “Boys for Sale.”
the Dutroux affair in Belgium
The Franklin Scandal (Decamp)
NGO human trafficking
Finders cult
Denny Hastert
Laura Silsby
That fella who did not kill himself
One question is I guess whether it’s more like a trend reversed, or it was more like a trend towards more hedonistic / libertine / open sexuality temporarily overran a trend towards female power, with which it was inherently in conflict, and these things then resolved themselves as the female power trend caught up while the sexual trend stalled. Then you could interpret it less as being pushed back, necessarily (the reversal of attitudes is really just an acceleration of feminism).
This might be inapplicable here, but often seems to be the case when people talk about the “new” “sexual puritanism” or such – it’s just an increase in radical feminism in academia, not actually a conservative return as such to older sexual morality. I think each interpretation has similar outcomes but one is much more pessimistic about the degree to which cultural elites respond to information to technocratically solve problems (for better or worse) against the degree to which they will simply one-up each other for the more left wing option of one strain or another over time, regardless of consequences.
@Matt
You make a good point: to survive, ideas which are at odds with other, increasingly dominant ideas need to fit themselves into the language and understanding of the dominant idea. It’s not hard to imagine a return to 70s attitudes regarding children’s sexuality, but this time lacking the emphasis on freedom, lack of barriers, right to pleasure, and opposition to repression that typified the language of the time, language that became increasingly at odds with the radical feminist movement’s emphasis on safety, particularly of women.
Instead, a revival of this particular 70s movement would likely be framed within the language of care and non-discrimination, that children need to be encouraged to explore their sexuality and gender performance from a very early age in order to make sure that they are not harmed by pressures of heteronormativity and cisnormativity or acculturated into old (read: bad and harmful) masculine, patriarchal practices of sexuality. This would be couched as a therapeutic project, rather than liberatory, and it wouldn’t be hard to see the medical establishment signing on this, as the majority of doctors are institutionalists and credentialists to their bones.
An old post, The rightward shift of American Jews shows up as a related post. I don’t know if this is chosen manually (i.e., by RK) or algorithmically, but I was curious how it could be related, so I bit and read it. It makes very odd reading now. Rather than Jews drifting to the GOP, esp. younger ones, as stated in that post, my impression (OK, I could look it up, but I expect to be corrected if I am wrong) is that young Jews remain at least as Democratic as their parents and grandparents and are less attached to Israel. The overall takeaway is, as Yogi Berra is said to have said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”.
@marcel
This is still the case. For a number of demographic reasons. First and foremost, secular Jews are dying out (marrying out and having few children), while Orthodox have huge families. The former are mostly D while the latter are R. Also, more recent immigrants (like me from the USSR) are much more right than American Jews (but we are a small %).