The perils of non-surprise
When you’re my age – i.e. a stage at which most of what was once worth retaining of one’s body has already “gone south” (or missing) there’s a certain rhythm and lack of expectation to life.
The prospect of being lured upstairs on the spur of the moment by an ageing lothario with intent for a spot of what we used to call in my day “being ravished” is conditional upon whether either or both parties (by the time we get actually there and have removed our hearing-aids, along with our stays, knee-supports, incontinent pants and ‘alarm wristbands’) – can remember our own names, let alone why we went, is remote enough that it doesn’t actually matter.
These days I tend look on with a degree of bemusement and condescension at what little I see, hear about and/or understand about my Millennial-generation granddaughter’s relationship concerns and sexuality.
Partly this is because I don’t do ‘social media’ and that it is upon this medium of modern digital person-to-person inter-action that my descendant apparently posts photographs of every orifice of her body, swaps dick-pics and interesting latest and/or new sexual peccadilloes (which I could tell her are nothing of the kind) and generally ‘lets it all hang out’.
Or does she?
I only ask because of the in-depth survey published over a year and a half now which highlighted compelling evidence that modern 16-30 year-olds are having progressively less sex these days than ever before.
My view of this news is grounded in the belief that in reality it is all bound up in the ‘mind’ and that the wonderfully ‘naughty’ aspects of erotica and furtive discovery that in former times kept both genders constantly on edge in the search for opportunities to be intimate with someone else have, simply and sadly, gone by the wayside.
These days – with everything readily ‘on tap’ at the drop of a hat – and many young people just ‘hooking up for sex’ and only afterwards going to a bar or coffee shop to introduce themselves to each other and thereafter possibly find out if they actually have anything in common (or even like each other, or perhaps even speak the same language), it’s no surprise to me that many youngsters are going off sex.
When you’ve got six Moschino dresses in your wardrobe and some easy ways of acquiring more, you eventually get bored with them all.
In the same way, when anyone can go to bed with anyone, eventually the query comes to you “Why go to bed with anyone at all? Anyone can do that. I want the additional – almost forbidden – thrill of one day having something that takes a bit of time, effort and persistence in the getting …”
Just a thought as I recall fond memories of passions long ago …
To finish today, here’s a piece I spotted by Katherine Rowland on modern female views on sex which appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
