Interesting analysis Heikki - what you leave out, however, is that
just leaving bars with any old Schmo here in the wild and wacky states
is eventually going to land you on the 6 pm news as another tale of
random body parts found in the forest preserve. Ol' Jeff Dahmer was
picking up his dinner companions in the heart of Chicago's bar scene.
And we've all seen "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."
Slightly paranoid, perhaps, but we are a distrustful society, as a
whole.
Jean.
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Safe Sex is No Fun
Author: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> at Internet_tco
Date: 3/22/96 4:36 PM
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