Private Parts

I can't keep up with all the scandals at the moment. I have limited experience in such matters, but there has never been a time where I thought it would be a good idea to tell a woman about my genitalia, much less provide a product demo, unless she had expressed an interest in the topic.

The biological imperative is strong and it can be unruly, but we've established norms concerning such matters that are long-standing. We've always had libertines among us, but until about 1963 or so, when the Pill first became available, there were obvious consequences to pursuing a libertine approach to one's sex life. The past 50+ years have been a great time for libertines, but it's beginning to look like that might be over, and quite suddenly.

Back in the middle of it all, in 1983, I remember listening to a record by T-Bone Burnett called "The Sixties." There's an audible sneer in Burnett's voice:

It's a little tendentious, but his description of a shmuck trying to play the game brought me up short back then:

When he was younger and out struggling to climb the ladder
He used to fight with his wife
Or have a night out with the boys
And he'd maybe go to a bar and try to pick up some strange
If you get my drift

And after a while, he started hearing about free love
And he felt left out
And he tortured his imagination dreaming of pot parties
With those suntanned girls in halter tops with their cutoffs
Slit up to their belt loops
Then he saw a picture in Playboy of Ursula Andress
On the arm of some hippie
And that did it

He began his rebellion late
But now he's got a designer camper
And one time he even got to sleep in it with
One of those girls in the cutoffs
But it made me feel awful
Cause he had to pay her fifty dollars
And it was twenty for anybody else

Glamour is seductive. And our glamour factories haven't been working so well lately. I don't know what rough beast's hour has come 'round at last. But it's here.