The idea that we might become fully realized adults, experiencing sexual freedom and fulfillment, was not fathomable.

I'm sure the urban Tinder dates will be far more chivalrous than the small town boys. Please. Your bitch ass is either going to end up with either a thousand cock stare or a sexless, rape culture paranoid, terminally online feminist equivalent of TheImp.

They weren’t just dying from so-called deaths of despair—from drugs or suicide. Many of them were also dying from cancer, heart disease, or respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer

These are linked. Dying small towns that have been hollowed out by decades of neoliberalism are going to have elevated rates of all of these.