A War of Words

Some time ago it occurred to me that, in retrospect, the Sexual Revolution was mostly a war of words. I don't think that there's any more sex going on now than there ever was, what has changed is that people are more willing to talk about it openly and realistically. If you remember, when we were going through puberty, reliable information about sex was hard to come by. The adults were reluctant to talk about it honestly, and the other kids didn't know what they were talking about. The result was that a lot of the information we got was just plain wrong. Puberty is a rough time in any kid's life, but not knowing exactly what was going on made it even rougher. I mean, we knew that something important was going on, and we had an understanding of the basic mechanics of it, but we had little understanding about how it fit into the grand scheme of things. At least that's the way I remember it.

Kids nowadays have better information available to them, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are paying attention. People were all excited about the pill when it first came out, but it turned out there were a couple of problems with it. One problem was that a woman couldn't just stay on it for the rest of her life. I forget how long it was but, after a time, she had to switch to something else or there were undesirable side effects. That shouldn't have been a problem because there are numerous other methods that are reasonably safe and reliable, but none of them, including the pill, will work if you don't use it. That's the other problem, people just don't use that stuff as much as they should. I think that most females, when they get to a certain age, have this biological imperative to have a baby. They may not consciously realize it, but it's there, like the elephant in the closet. I'm not sure what the guys are thinking. Maybe they think it should be the woman's responsibility, or maybe they're just not thinking at all.

I once read something in a science fiction story. In this scenario, everybody, male and female, had some kind of procedure done to them at birth that prevented them from becoming sexually active. Later, when they decided they were ready for it, they would go to a doctor and get switched on, but first they had to get approval from some kind of board or committee. Additionally, the women had an implant in their arm that prevented them from getting pregnant. When they decided they wanted to have a baby, this implant could easily be removed by a doctor, again with the approval of some kind of government body. Of course this raises civil rights questions, which was kind of what the story was about. I doubt that a program like this would ever play in Peoria, but I think the basic concept is sound. Instead of taking something to prevent pregnancy, you should have to take something to enable it. That way there would be no more "accidental" pregnancies, every single one of them would be on purpose. Well, in the book, there was this rebel faction that opposed the whole concept, along with other concepts that had become ingrained in the main stream culture. I don't remember all the details but, just when it looked like the rebels were going to overcome and trash the whole civilization, this big mother ship came down out of the sky, loaded all the rebels up, and took them away to some utopian paradise on another planet. They kind of lost me at the end, but I still think that birth control thing would be a good idea, if they could find some way to implement it without pissing everybody off.