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Thus, now is a good time to reflect upon the similarities and differences between the sexual liberation and feminism of the 1960's and the protest campaigns that flourish today, from LGBT+ to #MeToo.
In the aftermath of '68, the French "progressive" press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of paedophilia, claiming that in this way the artificial and oppressive culturally-constricted frontier that separated children from adults could be abolished and the right to freely use one's body be extended also to children. They claimed that only dark forces of "reaction" and "oppression" could oppose this measure and among the signatories were iconic cultural figures such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Guattari, Deleuze and Lyotard.
Comment: Žižek, who is one of the more cogent leftist intellectuals in Europe, 'gets it' to some extent - that the increasingly narcissistic culture of victimhood and identity politics has led us to a truly hellish world - but he still seems to be caught up in the liberal feminist ethos of 'women as victims'.
While it may seem to be a tangle of "the free subject who believes themselves ultimately responsible for their own fate and the subject who bases their argument on their status as a victim of circumstances beyond their own control," in reality this is trying to have it both ways by trying to maintain one's status as an individual yet using an ideology for one's own benefit.
No amount of wondering where the sexual revolution of the mid-20th century 'went wrong' is going to shed light on what is going on today. The fact THAT a 'sexual revolution' took place is what went wrong!
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