AdamCollings wrote:I think I'm also starting to get old, because I'm noticing that most TV shows are about people in their 20s. When I was in my thirties, I used to say that I felt like I was still in my 20s. Now that I'm in my 40s, I look and realise how very different current 20-somethings are from me, and I'm like, yeah, I think for the first time in my life I actually feel my own age.
LOL I made this exact same observation the other day!!
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When it comes to "progressive sexuality", the current generation of sci-fi creators has nothing on their forbears - they may even be tame in comparison.
I Will Fear No Evil, Robert Heinlein, 1970Johann Smith has his brain transplanted into the body of his recently deceased secretary, and proceeds to seduce everyone except the secretary's widower. Smith eventually marries and moves both spouse and lovers onto a yacht in the middle of the ocean. The culture of the the setting recognized seven separate gender identities.
Riverworld, Philip Jose Farmer, 1971-1983Earth's dead are resurrected into new, immortal bodies on a paradise planet where death only results in further resurrection. They proceed to bone everything even vaguely humanoid. This includes primitive humanoids, aliens, and non-consenting partners (depending on the local culture, only one partner needs to consent) in both pairs and groups. Gender identity is considered a relic of life on Earth.
Ursula K. Le Guin explores radically alternative forms of sexuality in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and again in "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995), which imagine the sexuality of an alien "human" species in which individuals are neither "male" nor "female," but undergo a monthly sexual cycle in which they randomly experience the activation of either male or female sexual organs and reproductive abilities.
Theodore Sturgeon wrote many stories that emphasised the importance of love regardless of the current social norms, such as "The World Well Lost" (1953), a classic tale involving alien homosexuality, and the novel Venus Plus X (1960), in which a contemporary man awakens in a futuristic place where the people are hermaphrodites.
In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), natural reproduction has been abolished, with human embryos being raised artificially in "hatcheries and conditioning centres." Recreational sex is promoted, often as a group activity, and marriage, pregnancy, natural birth, and parenthood are considered too vulgar to be mentioned in polite conversation.
Early works that showed sexually open characters to be morally impure include the first lesbian vampire story
"Carmilla" (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu (collected in In a Glass Darkly).
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Most of these summaries are taken from Wikipedia.
My primary takeaway is that human society runs in cycles of promiscuity and prudity. In each case, whichever thought is ascendant at the moment seeks to justify itself as the only proper way of thinking. In 10 years or less, I think this current obsession with gender identity will fade from popularity. We'll see it reappear 20 years or so after that.