Safe Sex is No Fun

[Paul Mackin]

Seems to me Heikki makes a good point about the wrapped up nature of sex
in contemporary America. I know you can't prove anything by television,
but don't sitcoms pretty much illustrate this in the way they handle
sexual innuendo? A person who hasn't tuned in lately is likely to be
a little shocked (maybe pleasantly so) by what they might hear and see
on primetime. But a regular watcher, never. Isn't there always the sense of 
some kind of a drawn-in-the-sand line of acceptability about it all? A 
predictability that is positively stultifying. Happy Days is an apt referent.

But that sex-during-a-hangover stuff I'll have to think about. You Finns 
are a hearty people. After a session in the sauna and a roll in the 
snow, who would know whether one still had a hangover or not?  
But we Americans generally like to "sleepoff" our hangovers. This is 
_our loss_ it sounds like from what you say.

What I really miss of the Old America is the prodigious amounts of
drinking and fantastic exhilaration that went into producing those
hangovers. Harder and harder to find drinking buddies these days.

Does Heikki's theory-in-progress of GR as an L.A. novel receive any support 
from this contrast drawn between a "recklessly Zonal . . . Europe" (nice 
phrase) and "careful contemporary America" ? On the surface, maybe not.    
But who knows what will come.
						P.



On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:

> 
> 
> 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
>     
> 
>