Some nerds were doing that thing where 40k fans are like "OH NO SEXZ IS HERESY!" when it's pretty definitively not and is basically one of the only things in 40k that isn't heretical (as long as you're not doing evil slannesh shit) and it got me thinking about repression of sex under "in bad country regimes".

And a whoooooooooooooooooooooooooole fucking thing in 1984 was how liberating and humanizing it was that the author's grungy middle aged self-insert was boning a 19 year old member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and, like... America has several thousand different Junior Anti-Sex League and I'm not sure if the USSR ever had any? Like, yeah, maybe they did, but under capitalism Americans have literally convinced themselves they'll go to hell if they see a tiddy and the English famously just hate joy. So what the fuck was Orwell trying to critique with his "Junior Anti-Sex League" in spoooooky Stalinist England?

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
    ·
    7 hours ago

    I know it's a boring answer that has already been given, but I really think it's just projection + making the book more marketable by putting a sex fantasy plot in it. I've never seen even a vague gesture at what the USSR would have had as an "Anti-Sex League", and the anglosphere is filled with them (and was even more so at the time), and it's objectifying Julia in a perfectly anglo fashion, i.e. a young maiden presses you, a middle-aged schlub, into cradle-robbing

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      6 hours ago

      The UKKK has had a long cultural history of sexual pathology percolating up from normalized sexual repression and I think 1984 is a part of that.

    • Angel [any]
      ·
      6 hours ago

      volcel-judge "I'm especially liking the sound of the USSR right now."