I wonder how you square the idea that the contemporary left (while indeed seemingly quite permissive of all and sundry proclivities, e.g. “don’t yuck someone else’s yum”) is on a slippery slope toward endorsing pedophilia as a protected category, especially in light of the modern left’s scolding and censorious aspects -- how many left-liberals in academia are willing to even cautiously countenance sexual relationships between professors and graduate students? (The Avital Ronell saga seemed to quite clearly line up the older leftist Foucault-influenced against the millennial #MeToo brigades.) I guess part of my problem with believing that is that much of the anything-goes-with-consent philosophy is not actually or especially libertine. After all, if there’s no frisson or edginess, it’s not really bohemian. Cage-free BDSM, if you will. If anything, I think the “woke” left itself is probably driving its own sex-negativity bus, in contrast with Default Friend’s assertion that this will come from a new Right or at least a conservative-curious Gen Z cohort.
I agree with you that they're not libertine or bohemian or even "sexy" at all. But at the bottom of the slippery slope I'm imagining would something that doesn't look like "pedophilia" in the sense of Aschenbach chasing Tadzio through alleys but like revisions in the education, therapeutic, and management-of-human-resource processes, with ever-earlier and ever-more-ideological sex ed that will have similar disorienting and dissociating qualities as abuse. It's that kind of thing, in that kind of context, and not free-form extracurricular affairs between teacher and student or the like, that I'm imagining the left might champion, if only in polarization to the right.
I wonder how you square the idea that the contemporary left (while indeed seemingly quite permissive of all and sundry proclivities, e.g. “don’t yuck someone else’s yum”) is on a slippery slope toward endorsing pedophilia as a protected category, especially in light of the modern left’s scolding and censorious aspects -- how many left-liberals in academia are willing to even cautiously countenance sexual relationships between professors and graduate students? (The Avital Ronell saga seemed to quite clearly line up the older leftist Foucault-influenced against the millennial #MeToo brigades.) I guess part of my problem with believing that is that much of the anything-goes-with-consent philosophy is not actually or especially libertine. After all, if there’s no frisson or edginess, it’s not really bohemian. Cage-free BDSM, if you will. If anything, I think the “woke” left itself is probably driving its own sex-negativity bus, in contrast with Default Friend’s assertion that this will come from a new Right or at least a conservative-curious Gen Z cohort.
I agree with you that they're not libertine or bohemian or even "sexy" at all. But at the bottom of the slippery slope I'm imagining would something that doesn't look like "pedophilia" in the sense of Aschenbach chasing Tadzio through alleys but like revisions in the education, therapeutic, and management-of-human-resource processes, with ever-earlier and ever-more-ideological sex ed that will have similar disorienting and dissociating qualities as abuse. It's that kind of thing, in that kind of context, and not free-form extracurricular affairs between teacher and student or the like, that I'm imagining the left might champion, if only in polarization to the right.