This is my first diary. I've been sort of a posting smart ass to other peoples efforts. This started out as a comment, but when my wife read it she encouraged me to take the plunge and publish it as a diary.
So here goes, there's more below the squiggle.
As a male who was in his teens in the late 1960s, it was clear to me that my relations with women were not only different from my father's generation, but different from guys just 4 or 5 years older than me. My male buddies and I weren't so different, but the young women seemed to be. None of us, boy or girl, seemed to know that we were in the beginning of a great revolutionary change in the relations between the genders and the role of women in our society. Nobody had access to the pill and we watched the changes of the 60's on our TVs for the most part. The most obvious challenge to our world view came into our little town with returning Viet Nam Vets. They told those of us too young to serve yet, not to go, to avoid the war any way we could. A huge shock to us and a bigger one to our fathers. The war about war was coming to our families.
But I was safe enough and could enjoy myself beer drinking on country roads, skipping school to go hunting, and and tip-toeing terrified into the mysterious territory of girls. I was soon sexually active in high school and my girlfriends and I were constantly in fear of an un-intended pregnancy, and how it would end our fun and youth. We feared becoming one of those too-young married couples, condemned to work and child rearing, and living in a parent's converted garage apartment. We used condoms, rhythm method, guessing, and finger crossing as birth control. At times we would await the beginning of a period with the same grim hope of prisoners facing execution and focused on that call from the Governor.
But in the early 70's after relocating to Southern California from a small rural town in Ohio, I encountered a social world where young women and their sexual partners were not subject to these fears and dreary outcomes. Young women were on an equal footing sexually with young men. I encountered a great and hugely fun horizontal leveling of men and women. I had met the pill. And the exciting joyful party that ensued didn't remain just sexual. Mine was the first generation of young men to work side by side in almost any kind of work with women. Even to have female supervisors in occupations where women a generation before couldn't even apply. The women that I have remained friends with since those youthful days of pot and roses, have for the most part, had professional careers, solid marriages, and almost always, one or two children. They married later than their mothers and have raised lots of happy successful children. This cohort of women became adventurous, strong, interesting partners in a way their mothers never got a chance to be. And my wife, and her brave sisters have made my life and the lives of my male friends, so much richer and more full than I ever thought a man's life could be.
Ladies, you didn't just liberate yourselves, you liberated the men of your generation, our children and all the children to come. No wonder the reactionary power structures of male privilege want to keep your revolution from being passed on.
To these men, my lost and left behind brothers, I say, "Fat chance you pathetic losers". We can never return to the narrow stale confines of your dusty memories. We already inhabit the future you are so afraid of.
I just had to weigh in on this birth control business. I am so grateful for the way the women of my generation seized the life opportunities the pill gave them, and for the world-expanding changes we all share thanks to their courage. Guys, haven't they been magnificent?