The by many measures best mathematician in the world married one of his students.
Grace Tao gave her son and his wife, Laura, the book after they were married. “Because I’m a terrible cook,” says Laura, who was a student in one of Tao’s classes at UCLA in 2000 and went on to work at the solar system research and development group JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) after graduating as an electrical engineer.
He is therefore irretrievably and incontrovertibly evil.
Historically speaking, sexual panics and paranoias last 30-50 years. We’re about 20 years into this one — it started in about 1994 or so — so at best we have another 10 years and at worst another 30.
I hope it is not the latter.
That fact really didn’t stick out for me from that article.
Why do you figure 1994 is the start of some sexual panic we’re living in?
My schools were way more worried about drugs and drunk driving than heterosexual boinking. I got “don’t do it” in middle school but that was because I had a nun teaching us sex ed. I got “don’t do it” in high school but the teacher absolutely stressed that condoms were totally mandatory in perpetuity unless you wanted to have a baby and that you absolutely had to disclose all of your STDs. To drive home that being a teen mom was bad I had to carry around a sack of flour, but I skipped that because I didn’t see the point. In contrast I got DARE and a mandatory school assembly reenacting a fatal car crash.
I think there’s maybe about 10 years I can think of that people weren’t freaked out about sex, and all of those were when disco was popular, abortion was widely available along with the pill, and nobody was worried about AIDS.
People have always been freaked out about sex and probably always will be. What I am talking about mainly is the attempted re imposition via other avenues of the religious strictures that have largely been abandoned.
Not re-imposition by religion, but sitll at tools of social control.
Unfortunately there aren’t any surveys or such that I can point to, but attitudes and sexual revolutions and panics/prohibitions do seem to go in historical cycles.
Here’s a good book that goes into that a bit.