For many boomers, the #MeToo movement calls up ghosts of McCarthyite intolerance and fears of returning to 1950s-style sexual authoritarianism. But a large chunk of the laters have not grown up in a moment of universal love and freedom. Instead, they grew up in a landscape of harrowing job insecurity, exploitive mass culture and the election of a grabber-in-chief, making our current moment a welcome uprising against outdated attitudes that left them anything but free.

While conservative boomers like political commentator Andrew Sullivan, 54, reacted to #MeToo as a dangerous conspiracy of “left-feminists” aiming “to burn it all down,” some older-generation liberals, like essayist Daphne Merkin, 63, have been similarly suspicious of “witch-hunts.” In the opposite camp, voices like actress Lupita Nyong’o, 34, call for an end to a “conspiracy of silence” surrounding men like Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein himself expresses boomer befuddlement: “I came of age in the 60s and 70s,” he lamented, “when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.”

The rules are now under review.

The dustup over comedian Aziz Ansari earlier in January — a woman accused Ansari of badgering her into sex acts during a date — shows how one generation’s cris de coeur can sound like garbled frequencies from a different planet to another. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti tweeted, “what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us.” But such feelings seem alien to boomers like Caitlin Flanagan, who complained that “by the time you reach 50, intimate accounts of commonplace sexual events of the young seem like science fiction.”

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A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction. But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers "normal" sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful. — Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 14, 2018

One boomer rallying cry has been an open letter signed by 100 French women, most prominently the 74-year-old film icon Catherine Deneuve — who has since apologized for some of its content.

This letter denounced #MeToo and seemed to champion the freedom of men “to bother” — to seduce, to badger, even to masturbate on women’s bodies in the subway with impunity. Sexuality is a volatile field of mixed signals and clumsy approaches that leaves women disempowered only if they puritanically reject norms in which “stealing a kiss” (i.e. forcing it) is just part of excitement. To emphasize consent strips sexuality of its charm. #MetToo is anti-sex, the letter argued, turning women into victims or man-hating witch-hunters.

Others retort that the game is clearly rigged: who may freely express themselves sexually is determined by power. Exhibit A is boomer Donald Trump’s recorded boasting of his license to grab women’s genitals. In Trump’s starkly precise formulation, sexuality is not a mutual game of seduction, flirtation and gauging interest, but rather the freedom of one person to dominate another at will.

Revisiting the 1960s, as Danny Goldberg does in his new book, “In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea,” exposes part of why those dreams of a sexually liberated society never materialized. Women who joined the protests and movements shaping the culture were all too often marginalized or worse. Civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael, for example, famously joked, “the position of women in SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] is prone.” The Diggers, a radical community-action group of the period, issued a statement “rape is as common as bullshit on Haight street.”