2 Notes
The New Yorker: Girls Will Be Girls
When people talk about the sexual “revolution,” they can make the changes in sexual mores seem more intentional than they were, more like a strategically planned uprising with a neat manifesto. In some ways, it was: the feminist movement did call for, and then achieve, greater sexual freedom for women, and access to birth control and abortion as rights. But unintended consequences, and particularly economic forces, have played perhaps an even bigger role in arranging the new sexual landscape: certain moral barriers drop, and then capitalism rushes in with, say, Internet porn, stoking old desires and creating new ones. Like the young women on “Girls,” most young women in the real world are surely grateful for their sexual freedom, but they didn’t necessarily want it shaped by sleazy entrepreneurs. To paraphrase Marx, women make their own circumstances, but not under circumstances of their own making.
One of the more interesting pieces I’ve read (possibly-over-)examining Girls, I think. Historical context!
