The French writer Houellebecq had a pretty compelling explanation for this. With religious norms ebbing away or being transformed (even among right-wingers), sexuality becomes another market parallel to the standard economic one. This was always the case, but the shifting norms speed up and formalize the process. All else being equal, in a scenario where sexuality exists but restrictive norms don't, the natural conclusion is that people with sexual capital will have a rich and varied sexual life whereas those without much appeal in that spectrum will only know lifelong frustration. This mirrors economic inequality in a surprisingly close fashion: desperate swiping through a dating app for an average person is starting to look a lot like copypasting resumes on a job site.
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.
>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.
I've never seen this logical jump but it makes perfect sense. Thanks!
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.