By Jericho Slade, WPS News, Ad-Hoc Historian

It didn’t end with Playboy. It just moved online.

The trauma of the GI Generation — born in Depression breadlines, bloodied in WWII, silenced by shame — never healed. It morphed. It metastasized. The repression, control, and commodification of women that started in barracks, stag mags, and strip clubs got passed down like some cursed heirloom. Boomers didn’t reject it. They monetized it. Gen X didn’t rebel. They digitized it.

And now? We’re living in the full-blown sequel.

The MAGA movement, Trump’s brand, and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) are all built on a postwar American sexual fantasy: emotionally frozen men, compliant women, and a worldview where domination is mistaken for masculinity. It’s James Bond without the charm, Pussy Galore without the punchline, and Playboy without the jazz records.

Donald Trump wasn’t some aberration. He was the logical product of a culture that never confronted its original sin: that pleasure was a reward for power, and women were the prize. From his beauty pageants to his bragging about assault, Trump simply said the quiet part loud — and millions cheered (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

Elon Musk took it digital. X is what you get when libertarian tech bros resurrect the Playboy Mansion in cyberspace: no boundaries, no accountability, just “free speech” as a fig leaf for hate, harassment, and misogyny. Musk didn’t invent this — he just opened the floodgates and called it innovation (Nagle, 2017).

And the women of MAGA? Many play the roles handed to them by 1950s culture — beauty queens, sidekicks, “moms for liberty.” But under the slogans is the same old contract: support the patriarchy, get protection. Break rank, get destroyed.

None of this came out of nowhere. The postwar male fantasy of control — born from battlefield trauma and Cold War anxiety — was never dismantled. It just went wireless. The pain of our grandfathers became the content of our timelines. Centerfolds turned into OnlyFans. Stag parties became Reddit threads. Hustler got replaced by TikTok thirst traps and algorithmic exploitation.

This isn’t progress. It’s a slicker dystopia.

The sexual revolution wasn’t finished — it was stolen. And what we’re left with is a society where intimacy is transactional, power is pornified, and whole generations still chase the ghost of a fantasy that never made anyone whole.

Most of the men who lit the match have passed into shadow — the GIs, the editors, the dreamers in silk robes and aviator sunglasses. What they built in 1966 felt new, dangerous, and seductive, like biting into forbidden fruit in a world starved of feeling. But that fruit has long since rotted, commodified, repackaged, and streamed. The glossy pages faded, the clubs shut down, and the revolution they thought they sparked was co-opted, rerouted, and sold back to us as lifestyle porn and digital loneliness. What remains isn’t freedom — it’s a feedback loop of dominance, disconnection, and dopamine. And somewhere, deep beneath the noise, the ghosts of that generation still whisper: We never knew how to come home.

This image is provided for historical and cultural study purposes only, illustrating the digital evolution of postwar sexual politics. It is not intended as endorsement or exploitation.

References

Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.
Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. Zero Books.

Miss Maven, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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