Do not adjust the year on your electronic devices: religious right pressures Walmart to pull Cosmo from checkout aisle for the sake of “the children”.

Being a parent is no picnic. Between attacks on the social safety net, the rising cost of housing and education, and looming ecological crisis, it’s a wonder anyone brings children into this world at all any more. But America’s beleaguered moms and dads can relax just a little this week, for the biggest threat to their offspring’s safety has been vanquished. I’m speaking, of course, of Cosmopolitan magazine in the Walmart checkout aisle.

In a campaign straight out of the 1980s, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, or NCOSE (formerly known as Morality in Media) pressured the retail giant to pull the mag from checkout aisles in 5,000 stores across the country. It will still be available elsewhere in the store; presumably you’ll have to sidle up to some roped-off section, show two forms of ID, and carry it out in a brown paper bag. Walmart framed it as a “business decision”.

In a Facebook Live session on Tuesday, the NSCOSE – which has frequently allied with anti-LGBT hate group the Family Research Council in the past – took credit for the change. “You can go through and buy your groceries with your family knowing you don’t have to be exposed to this graphic and often degrading and offensive material,” said the NCOSE’s Haley Halverson.

A press release further elaborated that this “degrading” material includes articles that “promote pornography, sexting, BDSM, group sex, anal sex, and more, all while marketing toward young teens with Disney star cover models.” (As if young teens did not, themselves, invent sexting.)

Halverson tied the campaign to the #MeToo movement, saying, “This is one less drop of hyper-sexualized media that is going to be bombarding people in their everyday lives, which does make a difference, especially in this Me Too culture that we’re living in, where we really want a culture that will respect women and ensure their dignity is understood.”

This is a disingenuous hijacking, to say the least. As advocates have explained over the objections of certain vocal contrarians, the current movement against sexual violence, coercion and harassment is not about suppressing sexuality, but making sure sex is actively wanted by all parties involved.

This necessitates the acknowledgment of women’s sexual desires, and encourages everyone to figure out what their own desire looks like – through experimentation, erotica, or even a magazine like Cosmopolitan. Which, as the NCOSE notes with chagrin, has become increasingly inclusive of non-normative – if incredibly common – practices like BDSM, anal, and queer sex.

They’ve even got features on what it means to be gender non-binary. Given that Cosmo has been about sex since the 1960s, this rising inclusivity does not seem incidental to the resurgent campaign against it.

That this association seems ridiculous to most rational observers is evidence of how far the feminist movement has come since the 1970s and 1980s, when anti-porn feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin teamed up with the religious right to wage legal battles against pornography, prostitution, and other forms of sexuality deemed “immoral”.

Even more mainstream feminists like Gloria Steinem drew the line between “good” and “bad” kinds of sexuality, and that line often had nothing to do with consent. But while they were once a marginalized minority within the movement, sex-positive advocates like Annie Sprinkle have since taken over in setting the tone for what most American feminists believe. The mere existence of artifacts like Sex and the City and, yes, Cosmo, in mainstream culture are proof that the Sprinkles of the world have won the war of ideas. (Granted, it helps that the broad liberal value of “sexual freedom” does not necessitate an opposition to capitalism. But that’s an issue for another day.)

Given that the right has long lost this battle, then, why is it starting up again now? This isn’t the only example; from a New York Times op-ed calling to “ban porn” to disingenuous attacks on sex workers’ rights, the war on sex been making a comeback. It’s hard to say for sure, but when the right is winning politically, it tends to use culture wars to stoke the misplaced aggrievement on which it runs. And what better target than a magazine that’s literally called Cosmopolitan?

It could also simply be that the overlapping groups of LGBT people, kinksters, sex workers, and women who unabashedly enjoy sex are gaining a power and visibility we have not enjoyed in the past, inspiring a corresponding backlash. No matter the reason (and they’re not mutually exclusive), I’ve got some bad news for the progeny of Phyllis Schlafly: we’re not going anywhere.