Social Liberalism as Class Warfare
Fortunately enough (for them), most inhabitants of the overclass seem to know intuitively that these freewheeling scripts don’t bear that much relationship to the way that successful, upwardly-mobile people actually live and mate and marry. (The movies make college life seem like nonstop beer-soaked dissipation, for instance, but actually “individuals attending four year colleges and universities report some of the lowest levels of casual sex regardless of how casual sex is measured …”) So again, if you were inclined to view all of this suspiciously, you might look at the culture industry — networks and production companies, magazines and music labels — and note that the messages it sends about sex are a kind of win-win for the class of people running it. They get to profit off various forms of exploitation directly, because sex sells and shock value attracts eyeballs. And then they also reap benefits indirectly – because the teaching they’re offering to the masses, the vision of the good life, is one that tends to ratify existing class hierarchies, by encouraging precisely the behaviors and choices that in the real world make it hard to rise and thrive. In this sense, one might suspect our cultural elites of being a little bit like the Silicon Valley parents who send their kids to computer-free schools: They don’t mind pushing the moral envelope in the shows they greenlight and the songs they produce, because they’re confident that their own kids have the sophistication required to regard Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus as amusements rather than role models, the social capital required to keep the culture’s messages at arm’s length.