The Un-Sexiest Generation Ever!
Somewhere between the free-love '70s and "friends with benefits," a curiously chaste breed emerged. Frustrated DAVID KAMP reflects.
By David Kamp
Photo Credit: Jessica Antola
At the height of the first dot-com boom, a former boss of mine famously boasted that raising funds for his Internet startup was "as easy as getting laid in 1969." It was a fantastic quote, but ugh, the icky imagery it summoned: face-painted baby boomers swaying in their birthday suits at muddy rock festivals, hirsute and flabby in the marijuana clouds, coupling and recoupling like feral dogs. My friends and I, a half-generation younger, take pride in not having been part of this embarrassing bacchanal.
And now we find ourselves in another sexed-up epoch, albeit a more mercenary one: the time of the Paris-Lindsay-Britney crotch-shot triptych, of the slutty anomie of the Laguna Beach girls, of the endlessly replenishable supply of vain coeds willing to flash for cash and make a rich man of Joe Francis, the oleaginous (and currently imprisoned) hustler behind Girls Gone Wild. My friends and I, a half-generation older, take pride in not being part of this embarrassing bacchanal.
But, but . . . well, how to put this? Oh, I'll just come out and say it: A lot of guys my age feel we missed out. We were too young to sample the post-Pill, pre-AIDS bonanza that the boomers gab on and on about. And we're too old to experience the current era of casual hookups and Halloween nights in which even pre-med students dress like hookers. We had honor and self-respect, yes, but maybe not . . . fun? To quote a 39-year-old friend of mine who is married to an intelligent, beautiful, successful working woman of the same age: "Damn! Why didn't we have girls dressed like that and 'friends with benefits' when we were in college?"
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