randulo’s unblog

You can't make love to all the women in the world, but you owe it to yourself to try. Likewise, you can't taste every wine made, but you should try to taste every kind of wine, rather than staying with the one you like best. Go back to your faves but always try to find new ones.

Gotcha, didn't I?
 
Listen to the song Girls, Please, Girls while you read this note.
 
It features some very classy playing by Freddy Roulette on lap steel guitar, Victor (Balco) Conte on bass and Nat Ginsberg on piano, both of whom played in the Herbie Hancock Monster Band, Victor played with Tower of Power as well, along with drummer Ronnie Beck.
 
Because of the (innocent to me) title of the song, the server it was on was brought to its knees by horny guys - ew the image- trying to see women get together and please each other. The title actually refers, in fact, to my plea as a band member to the wives and girlfriends sitting at the front tables night after night in bar we played in. That was in my single days of course. Anyone I wanted to be with had to pass the test with the other women at those tables. No wonder I like Sons of Anarchy so much! Bands are like motorcycle clubs without the chains.

I am not capable of imagining what it would be like to be young and single today. Yeah, I can imagine staring endlessly at an iPhone, Tweeting and having a Facebook account. What I can not imagine is the challenge of fully living your sexuality today, as a single person.
 
When I grew up, it had only been a couple of decades since the Second World War. The 1970's happened nearly 40 years ago. My parents' generation vividly remembered what it was like during the war. The Americans who did not fight abroad probably can't imagine what it was like to live in Europe in occupied territory, though. Today, you can't totally grok what the warm sexual climate felt like in the 1970's. (Do people still say grok?) The stigma of sex out of wedlock has been dead among most western cultures for ages, but the serious risk of AIDS still hangs a dark shadow over spontaneous lovemaking. By the way, I'm not advocating that anyone throw caution to the winds. The age of which I speak is OVER. At least for now.
 
My older brothers lived their young adulthood in the mostly puritanical society of the 50's. Only a "tramp" would go all the way in those days, while men hypocritically wanted just that. How lucky I was to be a young, single adult during what was then called the Sexual Revolution.
 
When I was in high school, every male had a condom in his wallet. Few of us ever got to use them, but you had to have one just to show around. This was just before the said revolution, when the birth control pill had been invented but its use was not so common. What opened the flood gates of the 70's were birth control pills and the lack of serious sexually transmitted diseases.
 
Between the advent of ubiquitous birth control and that of AIDS, was this incredible period of sexual sans-souci. You didn't worry about things like reputation or disease, an entire society was exploring its sexuality.
 
In the next 50 years, what will become of the social networking paradigm? Will Facebook become rife with "disease", too dangerous to be practiced "unprotected"? Will something come into play that changes the entire way the Internet affects our lives the way AIDS has changed the way we view sex?
 
I'm trying to imagine how life will be better in 50 or 100 years. I'm guessing that another sexual revolution will be needed (and could well be stimulated by improved disease control relegating both the fear of disease and the horrible paraphernalia to the museum along with poverty and homelessness.) We're human beings and as much as we can do online, there will always be more to do in person.
 
I have always thought of Merlin Mann as one of the brightest lights on the Internetz today. He once said something like "Go out and do things, have sexual intercourse" but the closest link I found is here.