could you expand on the dynamics point?
Sure!! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, I was out of town for a bit and lost track of things. For context, I believe this is the post in question.
I think a lot of people in 2026, especially younger people, aren't aware of how infantilized women were in the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the 1980s and beyond. Women in the US only got the right to open their own bank account in 1974 with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and for women in the UK it was 1975. That's just one example, but it speaks to a larger social understanding that women were the responsibility of their fathers or husbands, and that the men in their lives had not just the right but the duty to control them and make decisions on their behalf.
Maybe more pointedly, it was common practice in the earlier part of the century for doctors to give medical information about a woman to her husband rather than to her, and for her husband to be in charge of sharing (or not sharing) this information and making decisions about her treatment. (In case you needed another reason to hate George Wallace, he hid his wife's uterine cancer from her for years while she got sicker and sicker and didn't know why.) This practice started to be dismantled in the 1970s as medical ethics evolved, but it was definitely still happening into the 1980s and 1990s (including with Paul and Linda), and didn't become strictly illegal until the early 2000s.
So, with that being the larger cultural context, I think it comes back to this dichotomy we often see in beatles discourse. On the one hand, people are prone to judging their actions through a modern moral lens and failing to recognize the sheer normalcy of behavior we now consider unacceptable. On the other hand, without that context we can't understand the larger implications of their behavior and the underlying cultural beliefs it ties into. In general, we just seem to be blind to the degree of social and financial inequality in most of their relationships and what that meant both for them and their partner.
In regards to the beatles themselves ending up on the wrong side of that dynamic -- this is really more a comment on the fandom than on the beatles themselves, but I find it interesting and honestly pretty uncomfortable that people can so seamlessly shift between "the beatles were basically Brian's kids and he had an enormous level of control over their lives" to "it's so diva that he was sleeping with John." I don't know that either of those things is exactly true, but the fact that they can comfortably coexist probably tells us a bit about how we ideate gay men, and in particular gay men in a historical context.
I think part of the reason people can't see anything strange about "it's so diva to fuck younger men over whom you have enormous social and financial control" is because pretty much every relationship in the beatles story (including some of the platonic ones) is defined by a very stark power dynamic that almost definitely harmed the people involved. That being said, in this specific case some of it is also garden variety homophobia and the dehumanization of queer relationships. I think you see that in how even within this framing Brian's pitifulness and his utility to others (and in particular his utility to men who primarily want to be with women) is what's emphasized.
