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Yes, we’re going to keep milking this thing for what it’s worth. To follow up on my article on Sydney Sweeney’s breasts and their implications for the culture war, here I do some gender theory. The more I think about it, the more I realize that her not apologizing for coming from a family of MAGAs is probably a bigger sign of cultural change than her boobs themselves.

I begin by talking about the ways in which many of the things that divide the two sides of the culture war are implicit in social norms and rules of interpersonal relations. I also discuss the seeming paradox in which leftists are more likely to support pornography and prostitution while being horrified by the male gaze. In many ways, turning sex into a kind of market transaction makes it more predictable and rule bound. Pornos have scripts, while real life romance does not, which makes the former in many ways less disturbing to a movement that seeks to regulate practically all aspects of human existence in the names of safety and eliminating power disparities. If one takes a broad definition of consent, it is much easier to establish in market situations. For these reasons, leftists want the standard workplace to be completely sanitized of sex, while being more comfortable with sex as work itself.

I understand many women don’t want their sexuality to always be salient, so I won’t condemn everything about liberal spaces. Something I emphasize in The Origins of Woke is that one reason that the civil rights regime is so evil is that it makes how men and women relate to one another a matter of federal law, instead of letting market forces aggregate preferences. We should respect such differences, and clearly individuals have widely varying views regarding what kinds of private institutions they want to build and be a part of.