Phrenology, Prohibition, the Hays Code—What’s the Deal With Gen Z’s Weird Conservative Streak?
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Earlier this week, Rolling Stone culture writer Miles Klee tackled the recent popularity of phrenology and physiognomy among young, mostly white, women on the internet, and it was fascinating—but, it also made me think of a thing I’ve been seeing a lot of recently: people wondering if Gen Z is, like, sometimes weirdly conservative. To be fair, this question is overwhelmingly inspired by members of Gen Z who resurface old, problematic, often super conservative ideas, only this time repackaged as feminist. (Phrenology, yes, but also anti-sex scene discourse and even a recent proposal to bring back Prohibition.) But I think it might be worth digging a little deeper into why this is happening, because I’m not sure that burgeoning conservatism is the explanation for why this politically progressive generation is saying such weird things. At least, not the only explanation. But before we get into that, let’s talk about what the youth are saying these days.
Phrenology is like, really in right now
So, the pseudoscience. Quick reminder: phrenology was a 19th century pseudoscience developed by anatomist and physiologist Franz Joseph Gall, who believed that the shape and characteristics of someone’s skull could provide insight into their mental capacity. Developed in Europe, it became wildly popular in the U.S. around the 1830s, and was used to ‘prove’ that non-white people were intellectually inferior to white people and therefore naturally inclined toward servitude. What Klee described might also be an example of craniometry, which is specifically about skull size, weight and shape. It was invented by Philadelphia physician Samual G. Morton in the early 1800s; he was convinced he could identify any person’s race based on the qualities of their skull, especially its capacity, which he used as a measure of brain size. He assigned the highest skull capacity to Europeans, then Chinese people, Southeast Asian people, Indigenous people and finally Black people. He also decided this was proof of not only Black inferiority but also polygenism (that different races were different species)—and put it forward as evidence for the annexation of Texas as a slave state.
Physiognomy, on the other hand, is the pseudoscientific belief that facial features can indicate character or personality traits. This one is much older—Pythagoras (yes, of the theorem) supposedly used physiognomy as an admission criteria for his school, while an ancient Greek treatise, Physiognomonics, drew connections between a person’s body and their soul—but it took off again in the 18th century thanks to Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss poet and minister, and a whole bunch of eugenicists who loved having physical ‘proof’ for their disturbing, racist ideas about desirable human traits.
These are all junk science (obviously) and have been widely discredited. But the ideas are surprisingly resilient, and not just among overt far-right types. Like… right now, a cohort of mostly young white women of unknown political affiliation are taking to social media to argue that some people have “angel skulls” (upturned noses, projected chins and jaws; the ‘good’ kind of skull) and others have “witch skulls” (hooked or downturned noses, weak and/or recessed chins and jaws; the ‘bad’ kind of skull). As Mel magazine writer Magdalene Taylor noted back in 2021, when this type of content was mostly limited to femcel communities on Reddit, these phrenological categorizations are based on Western beauty ideals. That means, while a person of any race could have an “angel skull,” that’s still only possible if they have (or acquire via plastic surgery) stereotypically ‘European’ features.
Klee links this type of categorization with “transvestigation,” the term for online conspiracy theorists who attempt to ‘prove’ that celebrities are secretly trans based on their physical features, and explains that “underlying the various strains of this trend are profound anxieties over race and gender. The faux intellectual advocating for proliferation of ‘white’ genes may fear a so-called ‘great replacement’ by nonwhites in the global West, a conspiracy theory that has prompted deadly hate crimes. Transphobes are obsessed with policing identity along a strict sexual binary, while some conservatives have developed prescriptions for how men and women ‘should’ look, in accordance with their ‘traditional’ gender roles—meaning not just their outward style but their bodies as well. Incel communities are particularly committed to these standards, blaming their lack of a dating life on perceived misfortunes as slight as a narrow chin… So it’s not a coincidence or random digression when you see criticism of a feminist Disney princess morph into a referendum on facial features, skull shape or body size. That’s just how ‘anti-woke’ culture warriors move the conversation from social justice, equality and representation to the often racist, sexist and transphobic stereotypes they’d rather pursue.”
What about the (somehow still ongoing) sex scene discourse?
Another example of this supposed conservatism among some members of Gen Z is their seeming distaste for sex scenes in movies and TV, which we’ve seen pop up over and over in the last few years, most recently thanks to a women who was upset about her husband potentially seeing Florence Pugh’s breasts in Oppenheimer. In 2021, film critic Christina Newland questioned whether Hollywood was entering a new age of puritanism, because mainstream movies have increasingly moved away from including sex scenes. She cited writer Kate Hagen, who crunched the numbers and found that “only 1.21% of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 [according to the IMDB database] contain depictions of sex. That percentage is the lowest [of any decade] since the 1960s. Sex in cinema peaked in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller, with 1.79% of all films featuring sex scenes. That half-point decline is massive in relative terms, considering almost four times as many films have been released in the 2010s as in the 1990s.” The reasons, Newland argues? A rise of sexual frankness in television, especially on streaming platforms (ahem Bridgerton), a push toward ‘family friendly’ content from mega corporations that don’t want to risk alienating audiences, a cultural understanding of sex as something ‘serious’ thanks to the #MeToo movement and, tucked away in there, the revelation that millennials and Gen Zers of all genders are having less sex, the implication being that they’re less interested in, or comfortable with, seeing it on-screen.
Among Gen Z at least, there does seem to be some pushback on explicit portrayals of sex and sexuality. Back in February when Penn Badgley said he doesn’t like doing sex scenes, which is why You showrunner Sera Gamble reduced the number of said scenes for season 4, some people characterized this preference as puritanical, which was weird, while others—who all seemed to be pretty young—expressed their support for Badgley… because they thought sex scenes were gratuitous, or were uncomfortable seeing nudity, which, you know, also kind of weird. This became a wider discourse on sex in movies and TV in general, with some (quite misguided) talk about how they hadn’t consented to seeing that type of content, and even a proposal to bring back the Hays Code as a solution.
But… the Hays Code was a racist, sexist and homophobic policy from the 1930s that was ostensibly intended to encourage the creation of ‘acceptable,’ ‘family-friendly’ content, but which was actually “bigoted to the bone,” as Pajiba features editor Kayleigh Donaldson explained. “Female characters were usually the ones who suffered the most under the rule against ‘sex perversion’, which is why you see so many films where the seductive dame must die before the credits roll. The banning of miscegenation helped to erase people of colour from film in any sort of role that wasn’t a racist stereotype. Anna May Wong, one of the few Asian stars in 1930s Hollywood, wasn’t allowed to play the lead in The Good Earth, a drama about Chinese farmers, because her romantic co-star was a white man in yellowface and the Code wouldn’t allow her to kiss him on-screen. So they cast a white woman, who then won an Oscar for her troubles. Even the vaguest suggestion of queerness on-screen was to be snuffed out or demonized. This was how the Code worked. These weren’t accidental consequences of its enforcement. The ‘clean’ image of Hollywood that politicians, religious groups and scornful campaigners the land over wanted was one of conservative whiteness, straightness and patriarchal rule.”
Similarly, writer Katharine Coldiron argues that the Hays Code “set back the liberation of American thought” by at least three decades. So… bringing it back is not a great idea… or a viable solution for the non-problem of portraying sex and sexuality, which is, you know, a part of being a human being.
Tell me you don’t know why Prohibition was actually pretty terrible without telling me you don’t know why Prohibition was actually pretty terrible
I even recently saw a tweet saying there’s a feminist case for bringing back Prohibition (though the account has since gone private).
… Here’s the thing about that. It’s true that suffragettes supported this legislation; women were key members of the temperance movement that eventually ushered in Prohibition and many of them saw voting rights for women as a way to achieve their goals around curbing alcohol use. But in classic white feminist fashion, they advanced their rights at the expense of many others, particularly Black people. IRL, Prohibition was discriminatory legislation that encouraged white supremacist terrorism and helped establish mass incarceration. As writer Christine Sismondo explained in Maclean’s, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was an even greater influence on this legislation than women’s temperance groups. This is the organization that “invented ‘pressure politics’—flooding the public discourse with incendiary propaganda and intimidating politicians to support its campaign to do away with the saloon. Much of the ASL’s propaganda leveraged anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment with stories and images that painted various ‘others’ as debauched, immoral and a threat to wholesome white families wrapped in the flag.” In fact, ASL fostered an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, and fomented a massacre of Black Atlantans that was instrumental in drumming up support for Prohibition in the South.
So again, probably not something that we want to revive, what with the racist violence and all. But also, not something that seems to align with the actual research on Gen Z’s values? In fact, none of these things reflect Gen Z’s largely left-leaning politics. According to a recent report on this generation from education advocacy organization Murmuration and the Walton Family Foundation, “while zoomers, millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers generally agreed that it was important to safeguard the rights of vulnerable populations, zoomers were particularly moved to vote by these concerns.” Like… by a lot. 78% of Gen Z thought it was important to address systemic racism (compared to 60% of baby boomers), and was the only generation to rank abortion and reproductive rights as the political issue they cared most about (29% compared to 18% of millennials, 13% of gen X and 8% of baby boomers). They also overwhelmingly (73%) support combating climate change and believe it’s important to address student loan debt (72%). These are not conservative values. So what’s going on?
A lot of things, I think. For one thing, while Gen Z does have overwhelmingly progressive political beliefs and, like millennials, believe government should do more to solve problems, a 2019 Business Insider report found “while roughly half of the respondents to Business Insider's survey did not label themselves as either liberal or conservative, the remaining Gen Zers we polled were almost evenly split between the right and the left.” This political division indicates that, while we tend to see Gen Z as a “unified, progressive force,” the reality may be more complicated. Still, I don’t think this type of commentary is only coming from those members of Gen Z who identify as conservative, or that it signals a shift in the generation’s overall political leanings.
This is probably more about how we communicate online than any particular political values
I’m more inclined to believe that what we’re seeing is a) a natural reaction to the world they’re living in, b) proof that Gen Z, savvy as they are, aren’t immune to the messages they’re receiving on social media and c) what happens when you are loud and wrong, like many of us were in our 20s, only with the potential of your bad takes going super viral.
I am a whole 38 years old and am often overwhelmed by what often feels like the swift decline of Western society; imagine entering adulthood now? It is not only logical but actually totally probable that younger people would be deeply impacted by this period of political and social upheaval. As writer Nadine Smith pointed out amid the Penn Badgley/sex scene discourse, “this younger generation is one that came of age during a widespread public reckoning with sexual misconduct. Like no wonder they have some hang ups. Something that has been discussed a lot in the last 5 years is how many violations of consent there can be on a film set! It seems very logical to me that there would be a lot of fear and paranoia if you grew up with that awareness.” Combine that with COVID, which caused profound social isolation, and suddenly discomfort with intimacy is maybe not so weird!
And, since this generation overwhelmingly learns about the world via social media, they’re uniquely vulnerable to these platforms’ polarizing effects. The Business Insider report found 59% get their news from Instagram and according to Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, as of 2022, 40% of Gen Z eschew Google and instead use TikTok and Instagram for search purposes. That’s already kind of troubling when you consider the way these platforms encourage us to communicate—they incentivize the types of commentary that lead to engagement, whether that engagement is in good faith or just verbally dunking on something you disagree with. As a result, we’ve learned to try to ‘win’ a conversation rather than actually communicate with one another, and companies have learned that the simplest, most contentious hot takes are the quickest way to prompt that kind of response. This is not even taking into account the way right-wing extremists have infiltrated online social spaces to recruit young people into their belief system. I mean… remember the gnome-hunting TikTok trend from the spring? Or high-value women and their alt-right counterparts, tradwives?
Lastly, a lot of this is just ignorance. It’s what happens when you drop a spicy Twitter take based on skimming an article about the rules Hollywood studios used to be subject to, which also argues that movies were ‘classier’ back in the day, without realizing that ‘classiness’ has become a conservative signifier, much less how much damage the Hays Code wrought on American society and actual people. And to be clear, this isn’t something that’s uniquely wrong with Gen Z. We all said stupid shit at 23. We just didn’t say it on TikTok, you know? In some ways, the most annoying part of all of this is that the nature of the algorithmic internet disproportionately funnels attention toward the loud and wrong, which then spreads these mostly silly takes widely—and their subsequent scale imbues them with importance they wouldn’t otherwise have. Obviously, we can’t really ignore them at that point (we do have to keep a pretty close eye out for social media radicalization, obviously). But at the same time, I don’t think these examples are actually evidence that Gen Z is secretly moving right-ward—or that we should generalize an entire generation based on some ignorant social media posts. It’s kind of giving ‘kids these days,’ tbh.
And Did You Hear About…
These dramatic retellings of the Berenstain Bear books.
ProPublica’s super important reporting on a custody case in the U.S. where both parents believe the other is abusing their child—and how one has physical evidence and reports from mandated reporters, while the other is relying on allegations of a disputed mental health disorder. (Massive content warning; this story contains descriptions of physical and sexual abuse.)
This post about what we should do when we feel hopeless about the state of the world.
Writer Grace Byron’s essay about attending conversion therapy as a teen.
This insightful piece on online fashion discourse, and how vintage shopping became conspicuous consumption.
Random Man in Atlanta TikTok. (If you need a primer, start here.)
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