Everyone loses the `game' of sex
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
"History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects and is affected by everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then in perspective that patterns emerge." - William Manchester
Patterns:
A man, about 55, walks into a restaurant. He's wearing a topcoat, a suit and a tie; he goes to the bar and orders a beer.
He's on his way out of the restaurant when he stops and asks the hostess, a young woman of 21, if Leeanne is working today. The hostess says she's new and doesn't know, but she'll check. She walks over to her manager, then returns and tells the man that Leeanne has moved to Florida.
"I wish I were in Florida, too," the hostess adds.
The man looks her up and down - she's wearing black heels, black nylons, a black skirt, white blouse and black blazer.
Then he says, "A little number like you could do well with the older guys in Florida. All you'd have to do is take your panties off."
The hostess is stunned. But all she can do is glare.
"Hey! Don't get offended," he says. "I'm just tellin' ya the truth."
He looks her up and down again, then walks out.
The hostess is my daughter. She tells me this story long-distance from school.
Patterns:
Another man, 27, has three kids by three different women. He is now hitting on another woman. Every time he walks by her at work, he shakes his head like a dog with a bone, makes a comment about her legs, and whistles. This is his mating dance. He has done it before, with obvious success.
Patterns:
The churches in my town - all but the Catholic churches - are in favor of having condoms in the high school. They don't condone teenage sex, of course. That's what they tell the kids. But they believe that teens should have free and convenient access to condoms, just in case.
Patterns:
A girl of 14 has sex with a boy she hardly knows because she is tired of being a virgin; a woman, just 22, has sex with every man she dates because she sees no reason not to. On Sally Jessy Raphael three people - a woman, her husband and his female lover - talk about their relationship. The wife tells the TV audience how she found out her husband was cheating. She caught them, she said. There was her husband, semi-nude, and there was this woman on her knees. . .
Then she described what she saw.
People absorb all this - old people, young people, men and women. And they are affected, changed in countless ways.
Patterns:
In Boston Magazine this month a young woman, a Harvard Law School student, writes under the headline "Girl Talk" about the joys of vibrators. The piece is vapid and vulgar. It isn't well-written. It doesn't entertain, educate, provoke or persuade. It simply demeans, not just the writer, and not just the other young women about whom she writes. It demeans all women, for it creates the impression that even bright young women, even the cream of the crop, are interested in just one thing.
And, worst of all, it gives men permission to make the kind of lewd comments the man in the business suit made.
An excerpt from "Good Vibrations": "I was drinking one evening with Joanne and Robyn at the Top of the Hub in the Prudential Center," the self-proclaimed Good Vibrator Fairy of Harvard Law School, writes. "Having arrived from a formal business function, we were wearing business suits and drawing a bit of attention to ourselves, as professional women are wont to do."
The author then relates how she held court for a while, and how "the men at the next table looked at me as if I had insisted that I had seen Elvis riding the T. Will men ever get used to the sight of women talking business?"
The talk then turns to vibrators, which the author says, "got us another round of scotch-and-water from the gentlemen at the next table."
Is this what women want from men? Free drinks to toast their sexuality? Is this what women seek in the most respected halls of learning?
Nothing happens in isolation. All things affect one another.
Exposed to language, we learn to speak.
Exposed to kindness, we learn to be kind.
Exposed to meaningless recreational sex - on television, in print, in conversation and even in churches - we learn that sex is meaningless.
Devoid of love, affection and commitment, sex is meaningless, a clumsy game - sometimes a contact sport, sometimes solitaire - but never anything more.
A man can say, "A little number like you could do well with the old guys in Florida." A woman can write about her experience with vibrators. A 14-year-old can worry that she's still a virgin. For when sex is a game, permission permeates the air.
Those of us who remember when sex was attached to love pity these new players.
