> For the first generations, the tail end Silents and Baby Boomers, who had inherited experience with the unbroken millennia of expectations about how things are supposed to be,<p>This does not ring true, and makes me distrust the rest of the essay.<p>The Belle Époque also challenged expectations of how things are supposed to be, before the Silents were even born.<p>In the US this included (quoting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era</a> ) "Some activists demanded change, and questioned the old thinking regarding marriage and sexuality. They craved more sexual freedom following the sexually repressive and restrictive Victorian Era.", and Margaret Sanger's advocacy for birth control and sex education.<p>> this meant everything from orgies in the mud<p>And a century earlier there was the Free Love movement, including communes like the Oneida Community, with complex marriages and where any member was free to have sex with any other consenting member.<p>As a Heinlein fan, I well remember how Potty in "The Year of the Jackpot" (1952) comments:<p>> male-and-female dress customs were arbitrary, but they had seemed to be deeply rooted in the culture. When did the breakdown start? With Marlene Dietrich's tailored suits? By the late forties there was no male article of clothing that a woman could not wear in public but when had men started to slip over the line? Should he count the psychological cripples who had made the word "drag" a byword in Greenwich Village and Hollywood long before this outbreak?<p>"Tail end Silents" means 1938 or so, so they were only 14 when Heinlein wrote this. They did not inherit an "unbroken millennia of expectations" but were part of a world with changing expectations.<p>And of course Heinlein, born in 1907, promoted sexual liberation and free love.<p>Or for non-fiction, the Kinsey Reports from 1948 and 1953, before the Boomers had reached puberty showed the differences between the popular portrayal of expectations vs. the actual experiences.