Safe Sex is No Fun

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

On Thu, 21 Mar 1996, Paul Mackin wrote:

> Another type explanation would involve the zeitgeists of the eras in which
> the authors worked. (Can a zeitgeist change in 20 years?)
> The seventies were a period in America when the sex revolution went 
> through the roof so to speak. Having sex with someone became like saying 
> "howdy", as it pretty much was for Slothrop in bombed out London and
> through the Zone.
> The careful-nineties-and-beyond has a problem with this approach.

I think you have the case here. I'm talking about the contemporary 
zeitgeist in America, I guess it's less so in Europe. During my trips to 
the States and Canada twice within the last five months, I often, not 
always, felt some kinda mom's apple pie atmosphere there. Even many,
not all, hippie and grunge folks I came across made me think: "Do 
not these people sound like, eh... hippies from Happy Days?"

Those American exchange students come here every year, and, after a while,
you actually cannot see them anywhere in the *daytime* - as one of the 
university faculty I can tell it. They seem quite knocked out -- this 
goes for girls and boys alike -- by the fact that you can go to a bar and 
quite easily just leave with someone without any frustrating labyrinths 
of dating systems etc. (Of course, alcohol plays a big role here - I 
don't even know how it is possible for sober people to start going steady 
in Finland - and great majority of sex is done here  during a wonderful 
hangover -- and I really mean, wonderful.) All this, I gather, is also 
due to the less suppressed status of women here, a situation which my 
male self has always appreciated.

So, if we think only of this aspect of the zeitgeist in both America 
and (at least some parts of) Europe, _IJ_ might be the panorama of the 
careful contemporary America, but there might still be something more 
recklessly Zonal in Europe.

Now I guess there will be a swarm of American undergraduates insisting 
on how wildly sensuous lives they lead -- a thirty-something European 
dude like me should mind his own business! 

Heikki