It's probably a class thing. I know that among the people I went to college with (kids who could afford private college in the aughts), sex positivity was basically a universally accepted position. I also know that a lot of my working-class comrades are a lot less comfortable with the culture of sexuality and sexualization than my classmates were. Some of that is a product of the commodification of sex, some of that is the unfortunate psychological specter of puritanism, and a lot of it is a product of alienation as sex, like everything else, can't actually fix any of the things about us which are broken.
All that being said, it's important to see Goldberg for what she's doing here: she's using a real social skepticism towards the commodified world of sex we live in as a broader attack on kink and sex-work while misrepresenting grey-ace/demisexual people as just old-fashioned romantics. The conflation of kink and abuse she barely even tries to paper over, the suggestion of horror that people might feel into harder kinks - that shit is fucked up. Practiced responsibly, kink is nothing of the sort, and people like Goldberg are actively making things worse by promoting the idea that kink and abuse are inextricable.
It's probably a class thing. I know that among the people I went to college with (kids who could afford private college in the aughts), sex positivity was basically a universally accepted position. I also know that a lot of my working-class comrades are a lot less comfortable with the culture of sexuality and sexualization than my classmates were. Some of that is a product of the commodification of sex, some of that is the unfortunate psychological specter of puritanism, and a lot of it is a product of alienation as sex, like everything else, can't actually fix any of the things about us which are broken.
All that being said, it's important to see Goldberg for what she's doing here: she's using a real social skepticism towards the commodified world of sex we live in as a broader attack on kink and sex-work while misrepresenting grey-ace/demisexual people as just old-fashioned romantics. The conflation of kink and abuse she barely even tries to paper over, the suggestion of horror that people might feel into harder kinks - that shit is fucked up. Practiced responsibly, kink is nothing of the sort, and people like Goldberg are actively making things worse by promoting the idea that kink and abuse are inextricable.