Intro -- my sexual attitudes

Since I was born in 1951, I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, reaching adulthood at the height of the sexual revolution. If you liked sex it was a good time to grow up. We had the pill and nobody had ever heard of HIV or AIDS.

I attended a snooty women’s college for two years. I consider myself straight even though I doubt if anybody is truly, naturally, completely straight or conversely, truly, naturally, and completely gay, and my college experiences reinforce that opinion. I have been divorced twice, but I do not consider men in general to be enemies, just the two jerks I married. I have had to come to grips with the fact that I am not a good chooser of men. Being single does not bother me as much as my being single seems to bother some of the people I know. But I just remember that there are always miserable married people who feel that everybody else should be miserable and married too.

Much of my professional study has been in American and Canadian families and family organizing and structure. I have become a firm believer in allowing gays and lesbians the right to marry and I have become convinced that society does better when marital fidelity is maintained. I believe that infidelity is causing us more long-term problems than chemical dependencies or screwed up finances have caused. But I also know that sexual drives are not the same for everybody and that mine is relatively low, so it is relatively easy for me to make statements which people with stronger drives may have trouble living with, so I tend to limit such statements to academic environments.

And despite my present attitude there were a lot of things that I did when I was younger with both men and women, especially before my first marriage and I suspect that I would likely do many of them again under the same circumstances. We do not always do what our better senses tell us.