Re "Seraphita, you are so far out of Barry's league it is laughable.":
Perhaps I'm just the squeamish type. The truth is I wouldn't sleep with someone if I had come down with something as trivial as a cold! How people can have sex knowing they have serious infections is beyond me. (At least if they don't *inform* the partner. True love can make couples willingly decide to embrace each other - and the consequences.) Some of my all-time favourite writers are those 19th-century decadents. It astonishes me that so many - maybe most - of those brilliant, sensitive, creative artists I so admire had syphilis (contracted from - and then passed on to - prostitutes) and suffered the horrendous consequences, usually having to resort to a vast intake of opium for relief and many dying insane. Talk about suffering for art. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: ---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote: The thing is: would you really want to bed someone who took monthly tests to see what STDs he/she might have picked up over the past four weeks? It reminds me of a spoof condom ad I saw with the tag line: "Let's face it, if she'd sleep with you, she'd sleep with anyone." Isn't life so much simpler if you find a soul mate and stay faithful to each other? Sigh . . . Guess I'm just old-fashioned. Re "I read a short rap by one of my favourite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin": The only one of her books I've read was The Lathe of Heaven which didn't really work for me. However, I've always had a soft spot for anarchist ideas and I understand that two sci-fi titles that pick up on this theme in a sympathetic style are Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Le Guin's The Dispossessed. (One hostile critic of The Dispossessed dismissed it with the comment: "Happy campers in North Korea". Ouch!) Have you read either and would recommend? Seraphita, you are so far out of Barry's league it is laughable. He no more knows what to do about/with you and your posts than he would know what to do with a delicately spun glass implement. You're having fun with him now and I'm having fun observing. ---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: A number of years ago, I read a short rap by one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin. In it, she brilliantly pinpointed something about the "sexual revolution" that I had never seen pinpointed before, and have rarely since -- its brevity. She defined the "sexual revolution" as that short period of history that existed between the invention of penicillin and the birth control pill, and the entrance of AIDS. That was it, according to her. At *every other time in human history*, having sex was a potentially fatal experience. Women could easily die in childbirth, and before penicillin diseases like syphilis were largely untreatable, and sometimes fatal. We now live in the post-sexual-revolution era. At this point, sex has become a potentially fatal experience again, or at the very least, an experience that could lead to some non-fatal but pretty devastating STDs. That's why I see this guy, and his app, kinda as heroes in the ongoing sexual revolution. He took a problem and solved it, fairly gracefully. http://www.fastcompany.com/3020641/meet-the-safest-man-in-america-to-have-sex-with http://www.fastcompany.com/3020641/meet-the-safest-man-in-america-to-have-sex-with
