the pill

Sacred objects, family heirlooms, graven images, vows from fathers to son, and in the end a little litany which I predicted, but was not interested in hearing, about the guns you owned.  I'm surprised you didn't include their baby photos, didn't tell me their names, cute little anecdotes of things they said.  That guy who you said was like a son to you is clearly not your favorite son, because your favorite sons, along with your daughters, Old Betsy, Cindy, and Dorothy, and the aged grande dames Evangelina and Floradora, dwell in some well appointed space in your house in genteel luxury.  

Bull goose looney, the whole lot of you.

The sexual revolution is probably overrated.  I think it has always been going on.  There seem to be alternate waves of prudery and licentiousness, but even in the most prudish of times there was probably plenty of it going on because, well because people are people.  The 50s were pretty prudish though, in fact the 50s were downright straitlaced, it seems like there were all these rules for everything, but those were the years when we grew up, so it is hard to compare them with anything.

There was the pill, that had to have some effect.  Let me pause here because it just occurred to me, how come we have so many unwed mothers fifty years after the invention of the pill?  Isn't that one thing keeping poor people down, that they have so many babies?  They can't finish high school because they have to take care of the baby, and the baby grows up in poverty because mama was on the dole and doesn't get any kind of education and ends up in jail unless it is a girl and then she gets pregnant before she finishes high school.

There were a couple guys who wrote a book called Freakonomics, and one of the things they asserted was that the beginning of legal abortions coincided with a drop in crime because basically you didn't have as many poor kids running around with no place to go but jail.  I'm not sure how good the statistics were on that, but it makes a good case in seat of the pants common sense.

What if, at the age of fertility, like we give vaccines, we gave every girl birth control pills.  I don't imagine we could make them take them, but surely more would than do now.  Oh a lot of people would be outraged, but I think that would be mostly because they would think their daughters would be having more sex than otherwise, but, you know, as long as they weren't getting pregnant who cares?

Well I don't see how this could ever actually become a program, but I think it would be a damn good idea.

I guess the best thing about the sexual revolution, and this would go hand in hand with women's lib, is women didn't have to be so ashamed about having sex.

Anymore we have this strange political correctness about it, having sex, which is, if you ask me, nothing but that old time morality posing as enlightenment and empowerment.

I guess that will do for this week.