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In his book Sex and Drugs before Rock 'n' Roll. Youth Culture and Masculinity during Holland’s Golden Age Roberts sheds light on one generation of young men who grew up in the affluent 1620s and 1630s – Rembrandt’s generation - and their fascination with fancy clothing, binge drinking, lust for stone-throwing, preoccupation with sex, and ‘drug issues’.

"If you have to wear out a pair of fool's shoes in order to become wise" Jacob Cats proverb hardly seems a formula for a Golden Age, but as Benjamin B. Roberts convincingly argues the peace, prosperity, technology, colonalism of the 1620s and 1630s produced a generation of long-haired hangjongeren clad in brightly colored silks and satins whose anti-social behaviour was not simply tolerated but valued as a incipient maturity and successful socialisation and who were responsible for the Dutch Golden Age of the mid-17th century.