AHC: Free love survives

I frankly fail to see how "Free Love" stopped being part of the mainsteam. Casual Sex is easily obtainable, especially these days through the Internet. The institution of marriage is not as strong as it once was and has ben severly weakened. Homosexual practices are accepted.

If you mean communes, polyamory and the like then this can only ever happen on a minor scale and it will never become part of the mainsteam. There are sound reasons for that, you can't build a developped society on polyamory and communal lifestyles.
 
Maybe some small nuclear skirmish with 70 million+ dead in a few days would turn the world off of war forever.

WWII didn't do it, and it killed about that many people in six years when the world population was much smaller.

War isn't going away. To say this is unfortunate would be the understatement of all time, however that's the way it is.
 
Free love in America had several eras

"Free love" is associated most with the 1960's, but had been issues in the 1800's with the Oneida and other Fabian socialist communes espousing more or less equality between the sexes, the right of spouses to have other lovers if they choose, and so forth. Reactions to them included the Third Great Awakening in the mid 1800's to suppress unorthodox sects like the Mormons as well as the utopian communes.

The 1920's after WWI "free love" flourished because kids had far more mobility, experience with places outside their hometowns, and exposure to more relaxed attitudes about sexual matters in Europe during wartime, not to mention a little nihilism brought on by the horrors of combat to make one skeptical about the quaint prewar mores and social customs.

All that social disruption, feminist agitation, and so forth during the war shuffling millions of men about and employing women in war industries prompted the Prohibition effort to re-establish "decency" by banning what seemed to be the causative agent- alcohol- to the tide of "immorality".
It wasn't new, but the "flappers" managed to get everyone upset being gin-soaked party girls doing the Charleston and shagging in the backseat instead of demure lasses stringing along gentleman callers.

We're more familiar with the post-WWII period where the counterculture expanded from bohemian enclaves to a much more visible and widespread phenomenon and actually changing the social consensus toward female empowerment, the right to no-fault divorce, and de-stigmatizing premarital sex.

As to "free love" getting a longer lease on life, you have to defuse the conservative backlash by making previously outrageous increasingly ordinary to where the average individual sees it as progress worth continuing and willing to laugh anyone out of secular or religious office trying to stop it.
 
As to "free love" getting a longer lease on life, you have to defuse the conservative backlash by making previously outrageous increasingly ordinary to where the average individual sees it as progress worth continuing and willing to laugh anyone out of secular or religious office trying to stop it.

Honestly the biggest problem facing "free love" isn't conservative backlash (which in my opinion hasn't had any impact) but the economy, which has done the most damage.
 
How do you get a scenario where the US is significantly more socially liberal then OTL, perhaps to the point that the free love ethos of the 60s survives to the present?


Hi, the usa is the worlds largest consument and producer of porn... so what do you mean?

the hippies?
the drug orgies like Studio54?

could you give some more details?

oh, also the usa is the country with most 12year-old-girl-pregnancy, so free love seems to be happen quite often, right?
 
Hi, the usa is the worlds largest consument and producer of porn... so what do you mean?

the hippies?
the drug orgies like Studio54?

could you give some more details?

oh, also the usa is the country with most 12year-old-girl-pregnancy, so free love seems to be happen quite often, right?

He means not the conservatives's twisted view of it, but pĥilosophic free love, as some feminist, LBGT (Queer movement), anarchist, communist, etc ideologies push.
 
He means not the conservatives's twisted view of it, but pĥilosophic free love, as some feminist, LBGT (Queer movement), anarchist, communist, etc ideologies push.


oh... but the described groups are free... sure the conservatives would love to put em in camps, gas em etc... but this is a minority of idiots...

or do i misinterpret modern usa? i hope not!:eek:
 
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