Eat Your Greens, Have Your Sex, Mind Your Manners!

Three weeks ago, a man referred to me as beautiful.  As in, “Here you go, Beautiful.”  I was so shocked, I thought that he was talking to my omelet.

I will grant you that part of my shock came because I turn fifty this year, and also because it was eight in the morning, and I’d just rolled out of bed and pulled clothes on, deciding to shower after getting breakfast at Embassy Suites.

But the other part of it is that I realized it’s been years since anyone has addressed me with that sort of name – anyone I’m not married to, at any rate.

Even in Portugal – where I was born and lived till I was twenty two – that type of behavior to women seems to be a thing of the past.

Oh, sure, if you walk past a construction site, you’ll get improbable suggestions on what you can do with one or two or all of the workers.  But that’s not the same thing and it’s only at construction sites.  When I was growing up, at least in Portugal, there was an awful lot of casual gallantry.  You could walk past a man at the corner and be told something like “Ah, to have you look at me like you looked at that book” or “For a face like yours, I’d conquer any land.”

When I got married and moved here, things weren’t quite that poetic.  Call it a difference in temperament.  After all it is is said that every Portuguese has an unfinished poetry book in his desk drawer.  But I got called “Beautiful”, “Sweet” “Honey” or “Dear” all the time.

Of course, I was twenty two, not nearing fifty.  But I don’t think that’s the only difference.  I don’t hear younger women addressed that way, either.  Instead, we all get called Miz or Miss and treated with scrupulous politeness.

This shouldn’t bother me, I suppose, but of course it does.  It does, because it takes away a little bit of the flavor of ordinary life, a little bit of the fun in every day.

The subconscious annoyance came to a head because that morning was the day after the wake for a friend’s mother.  My friend’s mother, whom I never met, must have been a heck of a woman.  At the wake people shared stories – stories of drinking excessively, of driving too fast (sometimes at the same time) of parties, of exciting times.  It all painted a picture of the past not as we think of it – a past when people risked more; tried more; had more fun.

I’m not going to endorse drinking and driving.  Mostly I’m not going to endorse it because it is the sort of activity that CAN hurt other people (though most of the time it didn’t.)

But it seems to me, having read Robert A. Heinlein’s bio, listened to the stories of my friend’s mother’s life, and heard of early twenties opium dens, that our idea of a stodgy past and of people in other eras who would be shocked at us is self-flattery more than anything else.

I will grant you this was not the experience of the average person.  The average person in the thirties probably – how do we know for sure? – didn’t live in the fast lane.  But the least racy of lives included smoking, a few drinks every night, and might or might not include amorous liaisons that we’d now consider shocking.

Don’t tell me that kids today have more exciting sex lives.  From what I can see, hear and read, of the rising generation, yeah, they have a lot of indiscriminate sex – and sexting and phone sex, and who knows what else – but it’s all curiously joyless.  The poor dears have been sold a bill of goods.  Instead of being told that sex is sinful and dangerous, they’ve been told it’s good for them.  If they don’t have a lot of sex with a lot of people then they’ll not “experience life” and perhaps develop “hangups.”  Since at least the seventies, sex has been sort of like health food.  You have to have a certain amount to keep on an even keel.  Of course that takes all the fun out of it, and turns sex into a kind of paired yoga or horizontal aerobics.  Women as young as their teens are having plastic surgery on their vaginas, because they want to make sure everything is “normal” or “perfect” or “per specs” down there.  In my time – only twenty years ago – men were so happy to get near that part of you that they didn’t care if it was totally irregular or if you’d painted it green.  Mind you, that’s because they were having sex for fun, and not in the same spirit they ate their greens.  And they didn’t have to be so careful about the sex they have being “legal.”  The rules and intervention of government in our sex lives these days – no?  What about the accusations of rape because some guy talked you into bed while you were tipsy? – might very well in the very near future make people seek out a notary public to certify the consent to have sex within carefully stipulated limits.

And that’s where we hit, I think, what is turning us into a world of drones.  We live in a time where what isn’t forbidden – smoking, drinking, “sexism” – is enforced: sex, social activism, recycling.

Political correctness and the busybodies who know what’s good for everyone else have made men afraid to call a woman beautiful to her face – even if she’s not really, and they’re just trying to cheer her up.  The castrated language created by those who take offense at everything and who would enforce total equality of address have made it impossible to be poetic about sex.  The mania for turning everything into a disease or a syndrome would have us believe a woman who has a glass of wine a day is doing herself serious damage.  Smoking will probably get you burned at the stake, even though it’s fairly obvious the studies on second hand smoke were doctored or grossly exaggerated and your life should be your own to do with as you please.

But your life is not your own.  You are a cog in the machine that is “the society.”  You’re told you must “give back” if you’re successful as though economics were a zero sum game.  You’re told that if you’re sick, you should be cured so you can “be a contributing member of society.”  You’re told you MUST (not should, MUST) give to those who have less than you.  The government seeks to arbitrate your health, your reading and your spiritual life.  Your life belongs to the arbiters of how it should be lived.  The government, the intellectuals, the “scientists” and the perpetually offended.  They are willing, ready and able to medicate us out of all the joy and the sadness, to declare any binge a symptom of something.

The way we’ve been going lies a future in which we all wear grey coveralls and are madly afraid of behaving not just in a way that shocks others, but in a way that’s not exactly the same that everyone else behaves everyday…  A future where the vast majority of people are predictable serfs with no interior life.

I say tell political correctness to take a hike.  Call a woman beautiful or call a man handsome today (both if you’re feeling daring!).  Smoke at least one cigarette to see what it’s like – what?  I guarantee you won’t die after one.  You might hate it, but give it a try.  And have a drink now and then to relax.  And if you have a few too many and get a hangover the next day, resist the temptation to go to an AA meeting.  Trust me, you’re just living life.  And that’s what life is for.

Do you really want the stories at your wake to be “she always did exactly what she was supposed to do?”  Forget that.  If you don’t make mistakes, how do you know what it feels like when you do the right thing?  How do you judge between the two?  (No, religious belief isn’t enough of a guide.  How many religious people think we should have the government redistribute wealth, because we should look after poor people?  Thus they buy envy under the guise of charity.)

Start your liberation from political correctness and conformism today.  If we all do it, they’ll be too busy to punish us ALL.  Live your life outloud.  And tell the joyless busybodies of the establishment to go soak their heads.  It’s for their own good.