First, some of the stuff like Roe v Wade I think is more the result of political strategy than public opinion. If the electoral college were eliminated, for example, and US political process were more representative, you'd see very different patterns over the last couple of decades. I'm not all that surprised to see studies showing that Americans misunderstand the opinions of their peers on many topics, because of a discrepancy between political representation and public opinion. Basically electoral college and senate politics, combined with gerrymandering, has distorted certain things somewhat.
Second, my sense is this is a bit of rose-colored glasses with regard to looking at the past. Anyone who looks back at the politics around the AIDS crisis, and remembers the congressional hearings around music lyrics (!) might be a little reluctant to characterize things like porn financing controversies as a norm regression. Onlyfans leveled porn distribution in a way that previous years didn't have to deal with, so to some extent this is just the same-old blocs responding to new technology. I also think to some extent this is more due to hard cold financial risk modeling than the article admits -- I don't think it's all of it, but some of it (the article implies, for instance, that all those chargebacks are due to regrets rather than, say, it being a common charge with stolen credit information; I'm sure it's a bit of both but the latter possibility isn't really acknowledged at all in the piece, even if to refute it).
Within sex work, where on the sliding scale of acceptability does enabling a "self employed cam model", vs facilitating a "trafficked cam model" fall, especially when a payment processor has no idea what is going on behind the scenes? Is the payment processor supposed to watch the stream and recognize a gang tattoo and conclude that one is trafficked while another is not?
I can see people on the political right in the US saying they shouldn't process payments for pornography at all, and people on the left saying "I can't believe that <company> facilitates trafficking or victimization". I'd see the payments processors saying "It's not worth it to process any payments for any pornography at all".
It's never been easier to sell your body and find an audience to applaud you for it. It's just not the majority.
In the 80s it was totally normal for (regular non-porn) Dutch movies to contain exposed boobs for example. No way that happens now without very restrictive ratings. And countries like Ireland have outlawed prostitution and Spain is thinking about it.
Of course the west has always been the most open in this kind of thing, probably because we're not as religious. In the Middle East there is almost no difference between government and religion whereas we try to separate them.
America has managed to reinstate sexual repression, and it's odd how there's no clear "source" for it beyond "habitual capitalism" or something like that.
What makes you say this? Roe was tossed aside by a largely reactionary Catholic bench[1]. State-level anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, and anything else dealing with sexuality is largely pushed by Evangelicals or other fundamentalist Christian politicians.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Co...
Point is, repression can still exist and manifest without it. See e.g. "thirst traps."
Also, because white identification from Latinos is skyrocketing.
"Sex" as fine as long as it's not too explicit and mostly not actually about sex, but about keeping you insecure to buy stuff.
- Oscar Wilde
[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/24106 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Michels
One consequence of this is that people with little sexual capital will try to recreate norms anyway they can. Therefore we end up with a hodgepodge of ideas, religious or not, that have as their only link to one another the desire to enforce sexual restrictions and quell anxiety surrounding sexual prowess as much as possible. The extreme form of this is the incel desire to legally enforce monogamy and erase women's rights, but the less ambitious equivalents take on the form of the counterrevolution you are describing here.
I've never seen this logical jump but it makes perfect sense. Thanks!