Listening to "Summer Nights" from Grease, I was struck not by its innocence but by its anthropological clarity. The song is a perfect fossil of a pre-contraceptive sexual economy.
The humour and tension derive from a biological reality that held throughout human history: the high stakes of female sexuality, where a single encounter could produce a life-altering pregnancy. The boys' braggadocio and the shaming of Sandy functioned as social enforcement mechanisms for that ancient order.
The reliable contraception that emerged shortly after the era the musical depicts shattered that anthropological economy. It decoupled sex from procreation for women, enabling a profound social revolution. The modern discomfort with the song's double standard is not merely moral progress or contemporary exceptionalism triumphing over a benighted past. It reflects the sensibility of generations shaped by technological liberation. The old jokes no longer land because the underlying terror that gave them force has been medically and socially mitigated.
Which makes the deliberate project to revoke that liberation all the more chilling. In theocratic states like Iran, in Catholic-dominated Poland and parts of Latin America, and in the exceptionalist, antediluvian patriarchy of the United States where religious fundamentalists have captured the judiciary, movements led largely by reactionary men wielding religious and traditionalist doctrine are using state power to make contraception and abortion unreliable or inaccessible once more. This is not preservation of tradition - it is conscious re-imposition of biological coercion.
In the main, the reactionary men are so because they were born, or shaped by, the period where 'Grease' is set - they are stuck in a time-warp, unable to comprehend the anthropological tsunami the humanity is reeling from, that is leading to, inter alia, depopulation.
The world is experiencing a demographic transformation of enormous scale, with consequences (like depopulation) that challenge received assumptions about social organisation, but the response to this needs to be a carefully thought through adaptation to reality, not a knee-jerk attempt to put the genie back into the bottle, to regain the, unpleasant, status quo ante.
Whether framed through theocratic decree, confessional politics, or the quasi-religious nationalism that cloaks corporate oligarchy, the mechanism is identical: using law to re-anchor female lives to compulsory biology. It represents forced regression, condemning a generation raised with the promise of bodily autonomy to the high-stakes world of "Summer Nights" - not by historical accident, but by political design.
The song, in this light, is no longer merely a period piece. It has become a blueprint of the social logic that reactionary movements across the globe are actively working to resurrect. A deeply offensive, orchestrated attack on the dignity and human rights of the young, particularly young women.
