Before we had sex

A dispatch from bewilderness

I began working in media when I was in my 20s and magazine covers were painted on caves. Back then, we didn’t enter our usernames or prove we were human.  We didn’t have essential workers. We didn’t have chatbots. We did the writing ourselves.

Also back then, women didn’t get pregnant. We were either “expecting” or a stork would soon arrive. We also didn’t have sex, friends, or girls. Correction, we didn’t have Friends, Girls, or Tinder, which invented sex in 2012. We didn’t log in, couldn’t identify

Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

humans with Captcha, and didn’t have ads for erectile dysfunction, or rather, against it.

This was before California exploded, followed by Oregon, Turkey, Europe and Asia.  On a good day, when winds were low, fires burned in place.  Things burned every day.  Countries, continents.  Unless there were also floods. In that case, it was fire and flood, fire and flood, fire and flood.

Folks weren’t small-batch, vegetarian locavores. We didn’t wonder if the happy chickens you see on boxes of free-range/antibiotic and hormone-free eggs were really happy. We didn’t chip, swipe, post, Insta or battle identity theft. It also pre-dated Ozempic.

Women did not “get” breast cancer then, because we couldn’t say “breast” in media, though you could show them in men’s magazines. Correction, you had to show them in men’s magazines. In fact, some thought the real competition in men’s magazines was to see which one could put the hugest, most naked breast beneath its logo.

But it wasn’t as easy as that. Men’s magazines also told you what to do if you’re lost at sea; broke down in the desert; stuck in the woods. How to survive a twister; what to do when the ice gives way; how to make sure you won’t blow up a joint; how to check your swing for testicular cancer; how to have great adventures—by land, air, sea and bed. A few things to save your life, a few to endanger it, a few to make it huge.

Sample headlines:  Dress for more sex.  Size really does matter.  How to make her better in bed. Best male sex enhancers. Almost nude starlets.  More almost-nude starlets.  Your best hardest body ever.

Men’s magazines were about smarts, survival and size, as in large. Women’s were not. Women’s magazines promised to make your thighs taut, your butt tight, your legs long and your teeth white. Plus ban back fat and brain fog.

Back then, nets didn’t flick, pods didn’t cast and seasons lasted 3 months, not 3 hours. consumers. The world changed and so did I.