I think it’s important to remember that it came out of a sort of “happiness patrol” era of chipper bigotry in the 80s, the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan polite and sunny hypocrisy of that period,

the beginnings of mass incarceration,

 the homophobia, the casual misogyny, the nationalism, the dismantling of labour law… all with a lot of media censored of all the ugly shit.

Y’ know what I mean?

There was a reason for discourse being the way it was.  Shock value was a protest against a very genuinely censorious establishment.  It’s lead to bad places but it didn’t start there.