https://reason.com/2023/01/14/a-modern-history-of-groomer-politics/ Histories like this remind me of a self-coined aphorism. "Youth liberation" of the 1970s liberated "youth" as a symbolic totem and not actual young people. The retrenchments of the 1980s onward - higher drinking ages, smoking ages, higher ages of consent, curfew laws, etc. were all reminders that society was not willing to take young people seriously as people or to provide the material and sociocultural necessities of realizing anything approaching the sustainable realization of social equality. Little wonder that the likes of Reddit and Tumblr are preoccupied with the sexual "consent" of fictional adolescents in manga as some sort of exercise in progressive politics. The agency of young people - even their theoretical agency not respected as previously demonized groups gained theirs - has been so dismantled that it cannot even be imagined, let alone realized.
