So there, dear reader, the forum for today homes in on sex. That should make for some interesting business, for I intend to try and convince you that the practice of birth control-itself among a handful of what we shall for the sake of argument and rhetoric call "sexual technologies"- has altered the landscape regarding lovemaking for the rest of the days of all tribes. First, by way of introduction a series of somewhat rigid dichotomies.

• procreation versus recreation
• rights versus responsibilities
• promiscuity versus hypocrisy
• expression versus repression

There, that should do for now. In the seek-and-find of your eye stay alert for those subtle foreshadows as they grow long on the day of this essay. The easiest avenue to pursue would be to challenge you with the notion that since at least the Enlightenment, man’s quest to harness the powers at his behest (not the least of which is science) has doomed him to immersion in a quicksand of ironic anti-nature disasters which have insidiously eaten away at the fiber of his moral being.

Simply said, not even an extreme egotist would be brash enough to assume that this thesis is entirely defensible. But it does get us started. Which is meat for the beggar.

Because I was on the phone the other night and the woman I was chatting it up with was single (never married, in fact) attractive, 35 and wildly successful, owner of a condo and a million possibilities. What she was doing talking to lil’ ol’ me is fodder for a comedy. Nonetheless, she suggested to me rather strongly that the business world was turning her into "just another man."

I was struck by the despair in her voice, or maybe it was disdain, something the Average Male has become rather used to as of late, sort of like the porch-hugging hound comes to welcome the harsh sun and the swift kick as inevitabilities.

So I pressed her on this.

Do you mean, I ventured, that the ability to take a turn in the marketplace—amorously dreamt of previously by women who were chained to their sexuality and subordinate gender roles as babymakers-brings more than just earning power and the feeling of liberation? I am facetious. She called me on it.

And yet, she agreed.

There is something about doing business that turns one into a machine sometimes, she said, and not wanting to cut in I just thought to myself about friend Weber and the inherent logic of institutions and the bureaucracies that love them: 100 years old that tree and still bearing fruit.

I don’t think women knew what they were getting into in a way, she mouthed, and I began to extrapolate that out onto the plain of another discussion. Relational thinking, Bourdieu you magnificent Frenchman... smashing. Because I was at a dinner party the other night, the kind where the couples are handsome, their trappings first cabin and the houses immaculate, and you think, wow this is what some of the more industrious of my classmates were doing while I was breaking shot classes in the Pub all those nights. I was having a set down with an older woman, she said 54 and I agreed, silently. At least. She had probably never been terribly handsome but she wore money very well and it saved her. A husband, hers, gray, thin and insignificant, lingered on the periphery while we batted sex back and forth. "The pill changed everything, believe me."

I believed her, especially when she told me how embarrassed they had been, her friends, to even GO to the gynecologist in the late 50s. To talk about sexuality, much less experience it in any way aside from "duty," was just NOT DONE by "good girls."

Then, came the Pill, which certainly deserves a capital letter for among other feats the clean dispatching of all or the lion’s share of the culturally proscribed quotation marks in the last sentence. And quickly came Roe vs. Wade, and these two events sandwiched the hot liberation years and followed the sexual revolution, which I might add is now being televised, a veritable orgy if you will. Even if you won’t. "It opened up a can of worms that we are still settling in about. We are free but it’s all very complicated now as well."

Back to the polar opposites and we will unpack some of what is obviously an argument larger than this crawl space we have been granted by cyberspace. What if I told you that by having the option of having sex without nearly the risk of pregnancy, women have gradually been allowed to redefine the primary and secondary uses of intercourse? And what if I told you a purposeful confusion of primary (procreation) and secondary (recreation) has enabled women to participate in, perpetuate and propagate the dastardly double standard that heretofore has carried men to the head of the class as major assholes?

Are we to do the mathematics and discover that after all the remonstrating to the contrary, two wrongs actually do make a right? I wonder. Of course, this depends on what you imagine sexual intercourse is for, and this is a complicated question in today’s overeducated, undermoraled secular messpot, with its propensity for melodrama and self-indulgence. Is it for making babies or is it, as Norman Mailer insists, for making self-esteem and fashioning leavened loaves of psychotherapy material? What if I told you it is for advertising?

But stop.

Without getting off on a tangent about popular culture and how it drowns us in a monotonous pageant of violent and appealing sexuality, and before I explain the links between the electronic media and impossible body image, eating disorders and sexually transmitted diseases, a word about the Internet.

No, not about pornography, for that is too lucrative a mine for these opening forays. Patience begets late July.

I am talking about a web site I found from Procter and Gamble, trumpeting the latest statistics about cosmetic surgery. Technology. Obligation. Hand in hand. Do you realize that Americans solicited and conjured the magic of over 2 million tummy tucks, facelifts and buttock raisings (not even on the same page as consciousness raising, one ass-umes). The average cosmetic surgery costs about four grand. Not sure what one must Dole out for a sweaty palmful of Viagra. Must check.

Safe in the belief that we can beat the system-which means nature-and well aware that the latest technologies can alter our bodies and give us the confidence we have lacked and which will empower us to well, to...to express ourselves and have happy, productive...sex lives, uh... And what if I suggested that we don’t have to face the consequences of sex anymore. We can fix our mistakes. And we can also erase bad marriages with no-fault divorces. We can seek the gratification that we firmly believe is waiting for us in the right sexual relationship with another human being. But what if, as Lippmann predicted 70 years ago, birth control and other sexualized technologies have altered our sensitivity. The more we use sex for fun, the more its effects become watered down, its charms diminished. If we do it enough, sex for us becomes like youth, in a moment it is come and gone and remains only a memory of something which cannot be rediscovered. Here, the transcendent value of love-and one will agree that in the good moments sexuality is a splendid box car component of the elusive love train-begins to fade away, and we are left with a ‘50s consumer culture which sold us a car with the girl attached, or the household product with the sexy model hawking something more subtle than the product. We are left now with sex and the single consumer.

Oh, far afield have we gone, but you are getting the picture, dear reader, I trust.

Convention tends to lose its force and effect in modern civilization. I do not blame the female for a wanderlust leading from Rosie the Riveter to Betty Friedan and on to greater liberation and opportunity. Truly, one would be mad to deny others the chance to actualize, grow and have the tremendous rush of the reach exceeding the grasp every now and then again. Surely, many unwanted children have been avoided with the Pill, and so have many unwanted diseases been sidestepped with other versions of contraceptives. But it just seems that our entire notion of what sex is for has changed. It feels like we are encouraged to have as much as sex as possible. I certainly feel that as a young male growing up in the ‘70s, sex was the magic elixir which if guzzled enough would lead directly to American manhood. We were measured, as it were, not by brains but by how prolific we could be, or what outstanding lies we could tell about being first rate cocksmen.

Not that I am naive enough to think that man has not been complicit in this whole sordid affair. Please hold the letters on that one. But I feel duped, like a rube who was convinced that to fit into the big city group I had to sell what embryonic version of morality that troubled me unconsciously in the dead of night, trade it for the big score, or even the little score, any score.

So, has the Pill changed things? Really?

Has it enabled women to gain the chance to do many of the same misguided and hurtful things men have done with their sexual power? And enabled men to be, well, even more "mannish"?

For every victory over repression, and for every "healthy" orgasm, and for each empowering idea swallowed by the women of the world, I also imagine that never before have the conditions been so ripe for a pervasive hedonism that threatens to obscure all else.

In the bad old days, habit, necessity and a dearth of other alternatives-all these factors combined with severely limiting roles for women-meant on one hand that sex may have been had in solid supply, but on the other that it had not yet become an emblem and icon for an entire generation. And that, my friends, is what I believe to have been the early returns on the legacy of the Pill, alongside certain debatable health benefits we won’t banter of here. Sadly, some of the very positive forces of change which have swept women into what laughingly passes for an equal footing with men have carried unintended consequences which are just now approaching our cultural radar screen, which also sadly is as McLuhan warned, only visible in the rearview mirror.

It is a fact that talking with one’s mouthful is impolite. It also makes it hard to speak clearly. Thus, as I have obviously bitten off more than this space’s jaws will allow me to chew, I leave you with the notion that despite the indulgence, I believe the food for thought is abundant.