Beyond Babedom

We're (way) over 40. Deal with it.

Friends with Benefits

New concept. . . not.  We just had another name for them, way back when (though I guess for some of us, there may be some more recent history). We called them f@ck buddies. I mean, really. What is it with the euphemisms? Friends with benefits? What, do you go shopping together and he lets you use his credit card? It’s not as if people are so discreet about their private lives nowadays, posting every intimate detail on FaceBook and sexting to every cell number they have.

It is pretty funny to think about the differences in attitudes toward sex now and back in the 70s. We had “free love” and “if it feels good it’s alright.” They give hum -in – a, hum-in-a’s –  and get nothing in return. Or “hooking up” or – of course – with their “friends with benefits.” Back in my day (oh; I’m sounding like Dad. . . ) we didn’t pull any punches. We didn’t hook up. We didn’t kick boots or slap skin or bump uglies (really? Bump uglies?). We had sex. Good, old American sex. And all we had to worry about was VD.

Oh, yeah. There was a time when a diagnosis of VD was akin to – or worse than – the scarlet A. And all we had to do was get a course of penicillin – yeah, plain, vanilla penicillin – and we were good to go. Condoms? We had the pill – and none of the rest of the STDs you have to worry about now.

Maybe that’s why sex was sex. The only thing you had to worry about was the clap. Once herpes hit the scene, it was “Oh, good! I only have VD!”  That’s when we started to appreciate the era we grew up in. Free love. Birth control. Practically no STDs.

And no friends with benefits. Just good, clean (hopefully) f*ck buddies.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 8:35 PM and is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Toni Fredella says:

    There is a euphemism for everything now. From “friends with benefits” to “special ed” etc. etc. Nobody “loses” anymore and no one is a “cry baby” (there’s a bunch of medical terms for that, too… you know, the people who run to a psychologist and get prescribed something for anything).

    People are so indirect these days and it’s only getting worse. Why can’t we just be blunt?
    -F*@k buddy.
    -He is mentally retarded.
    -Maybe if you tried harder at practice, you wouldn’t have lost. Or maybe… Some people are just better at baseball than you.

    And finally,

    -This isn’t a pity party- build a bridge and get the f*@k over it.

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