Some might say that the freedoms offered in that article are ones that somebody would have to be far wilder than them to ever want to exercise. They might go on to ask if the loss of that kind of liberty, is the only issue we have, here.

Far from it. A point to be made is that some of the more rabid aspects of radical politics have had far less than a liberating effect on many of our lives. (We remind the reader that this is to be a post-baby boomer group). Freedoms, traditionally taken for granted, have become little more than polite fictions. Some would say, if you have a problem, turn to your elders for guidance. But it is those very elders whose outrageously bad advice has often been creating the problem in the first place, as they have focused on causes at the expense of the people those causes presumably are ultimately supposed to serve.

With this thought in mind, somebody who would occasionally drop by our discussion group wrote and posted this article about gender relations among post-boomers, and the impact of that advice advice upon them. He wrote from the point of view of someone whose dating life began during that strange unhappy time after the turn of the decade when many people still thought our decade's manic hostility was fresh and new and served a purpose, though they were never entirely clear on what that might be. This essay is used with the anonymous author's permission.



Note added, Jan.7, 2003 :

Given who it is that we worship (Aphrodite), these are topics which we should be addressing. Nevertheless, doing so put us a little more solidly on collision course with the self-appointed elders of the "Pagan Community", who had been doing their part to build a religion which was little more than Political Correctness covered with a thin facade of recently fabricated mythology. Political Correctness (and the damage it was doing to the family and the fabric of society) is what was being addressed here. This, as much as anything else, points to why we have turned our backs on Neopaganism in general : what it has come to stand for are things which, in good conscience, we can't endorse, because no sane person could and because they are radically at odds with our very reason for being here.

Let's enter that discussion.