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Millennials ……… and sex

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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Having fun in the hills!


« on: August 12, 2016, 02:39:58 pm »


Mark Morford

No sex please, we're Millennials

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 3:07PM PDT - Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Pray your virginity will be over soon, my son.
Pray your virginity will be over soon, my son.

PERHAPS we've got it all wrong. Maybe the downfall of western civilization will not, in fact, come by way of a gaseous cloud of rancid, orange-faced ignorance. Maybe we will not unwittingly consume our own souls by way of savagely neglecting of the increasingly overheated, unstable planet.

Perhaps our imminent doom will, instead, come from a far less melodramatic source, one as cruelly nefarious as it is, you know, devastatingly boring.

It will be from sex. Or rather, the meek, the laughable, the deeply unfortunate lack thereof.

It's all the Millenials' fault, of course. Isn't it always?

“Millennials are having less sex than any generation in 60 years,” is what the headlines (tepidly) blared, spinning off a swell little study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, written by sassy, hot-topic author (Generation Me, The Narcissism Epidemic) and San Diego State professor Dr. Jean Twenge and her crew, and apparently reveling in the idea that there is, right now, a surprisingly large, sad army of enormously uninteresting thirty-somethings (and teens) out there who are choosing to skip the delirious joys and time-consuming responsibilities of sexual relationships altogether, in favor of, well, whatever bullshit nonsense tech-stupid dogma Generation App has been trained by Silicon Valley to believe is the real point of human existence: overwork, $8 coffee drinks, video games, trolling YouTube, coding a new widget, taking the Google bus home at midnight, dreaming about VC gold and stressing about rent and/or which of their roommates broke their vaporizer and if this oversized hoodie is too rancid to be worn one more month without washing it.

It all results in what we might call a wholly new American species: Intelligent and vocationally skilled, but also a sort of flavorless and lost, missing an essential ingredient, a funky, chthonic scent that tells you this is someone who can't tell a clitoris from a kneecap, a Hitachi Magic Wand from a hand blender. You know, just like the Puritans. Only with lamer fashion sense.

Is that too harsh? I'm not so sure. Is it all quite laughable? No question.


New Millennial tech recruits, in their adorable matching uniforms, march toward their ignorable fate of never having sex for a very long time.
New Millennial tech recruits, in their adorable matching uniforms, march toward their ignorable fate of never
having sex for a very long time.


Way too much MDMA, way too little skillful hour-long cunnilingus sessions. Less MDMA, more skillful cunnilingus.
Way too much MDMA, way too little skillful hour-long cunnilingus sessions. Less MDMA, more skillful cunnilingus.

Here's the thing: It doesn't matter what generation you call home or which unbearable religious dogma you've allowed to decimate your soul, the idea that it's of any sort of inherent value to say you can't be bothered with undressing the slippery mysteries of humankind's single-most gorgeous and worthwhile contribution to the entire goddamn cosmos, all because you're too busy doing who the hell knows what — playing Pokémon Go, chasing VC cash, listening to the heartless spiel of numbed-out billionaire trolls like Peter Thiel — well, the gods have a message for you. It goes something like “pbbbbbttthhttt!”

But let's be fair. Maybe the overexposed, tech-addled millennial generation deserves a break (and dear God, we in the media are sure as hell tired of writing about them).

After all, here in the Bay Area, once the beloved epicenter of the sexual revolution, the birthplace of the love-ins and topless strip shows, home to the Folsom Street Fair, Burning Man, Kink.com and debaucheries of a thousand flavors, the bland lure of tech has become so potent, you can smell it in the air. And it smells like… sadness.

Translation: For all its gargantuan ego and mountains of hollow money, Silicon Valley and the tech biz overall are, far and away, the least sexy, least erotic, least romantically charged, least culturally interesting hub of inventiveness in the modern world, a place where “normcore” is considered a valid fashion option, sexism is baked into the very software and Tinder is still considered the sine qua non of basic human connection.

I mean, no wonder so few care (or know how) to get it on. The “M” generation has been trained to be about as sexually awake as a Samsung commercial playing on an iPhone 4 in the Whole Foods parking garage in Mountain View.


If you're over 30 and don't know what this is, much less how to use it or why it's a far more miraculous, joyful, essential invention than iPhones and Teslas and round ice cubes and Jesus, combined, it might be time for you to reconsider your life choices.
If you're over 30 and don't know what this is, much less how to use it or why it's a far more
miraculous, joyful, essential invention than iPhones and Teslas and round ice cubes
and Jesus, combined, it might be time for you to reconsider your life choices.


But of course, we shall not get carried away. There is plenty of reason to believe this generation, as all others, will be just fine, sexually speaking, and we will instead destroy ourselves in any number of the more traditional ways.

After all, coaxing another useless trend piece from the wary conclusions of a small cultural study is the hallmark of the witless new media culture, and is almost never to be trusted. As The New York Times drolly pointed out, it might be true that lots of Millennials aren't having sex — but a vast majority are. And hey, at least they'll have virtual sex education (thanks, porn industry)!

Sure, Millennial sex might be terrible. Their skills might be embarrassing, inept, all kinds of clumsy due to so many years slumped behind various screens instead of kneeling at the altar of a partner's orgasmic rapture, their gropings and comminglings of an overall quality that would humiliate a hyena in heat.

But hey, at least they're trying. Most of them, anyway. The dears.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/08/10/no-sex-please-were-millennials
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #1 on: August 23, 2016, 01:11:39 pm »


Mark Morford

Generation Uber: The world's most annoyingly entitled?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 9:41AM PDT - Monday, August 22, 2016

Why suffer the savage indignities of Whole Foods yourself? Hire someone to shop for you. And eat it for you.
Why suffer the savage indignities of Whole Foods yourself? Hire someone to shop for you. And eat it for you.

IT probably won't last long. There will surely be another painful correction, another tech bubble burst, an impressively horrible socio-economic downspin wrought of, well, who knows what. Global warming. Massive lightning strikes. Water wars. A Republican president who, once again, makes America ashamed to be an American. You know, the usual.

Whatever the cause, one can only hope the current trend of catering to, reveling in and fetishizing every hiccup, burp and micro-brewed demand of the Uber Generation ends relatively soon, if for no other reason than there simply doesn't seem to be much space left in this era's stupefying ego, and things are getting a little… embarrassing.

Examples? Everywhere. Perhaps you already heard that Uber, the nastiest/awesomest/most ferociously successful company in your lifetime, already lets you play your own Spotify playlist during your ride? Because heaven forfend you be without your questionable taste in music for that nine minute cruise to the sushi bar? Because that exhausted Uber driver, already beat to hell trying to scrape together a living out of pleasing your every quirk and burp, simply cannot wait to revel in your awesome Major Lazer/Mumford & Sons dance party megamix?

That was just the beginning. Turns out Pandora also inked a deal with Uber, making it even easier to play your own music in your ride — because, as fate would have it, the Spotify setup was just slightly too inconvenient to actually use. And if there's one thing you simply cannot do in the modern era, it's inconvenience a Millennial.

Is that too cynical? Too hater? I'm not so sure.


Meal kit delivery services. It's like ordering take-out, except way more annoying.
Meal kit delivery services. It's like ordering take-out, except way more annoying.

Uber. It’s like the new Microsoft. Except … meaner!
Uber. It’s like the new Microsoft. Except … meaner!

Be not unclear: This is not a defense of the wayward charms of a cab driver's choice in audio entertainment — although, really, where else do you get to enjoy bizarre AM talk radio, Vietnamese dance pop, or soft FM hits of the '70s? Expose yourself to the new, sheltered tech bros.

This is about how all the flotsam and jetsam currently clogging up the modern cultural slipstream feels like it's about to reach critical mass, as the giant lump of toxic pretense known as the “convenience economy” spins, inevitably, toward its own doom.

Oh sweet Jesus with a Task Rabbit disciple, the convenience economy. What do you need, sunlight-deprived tech-bro startup automaton wearing the same plaid shirt, flaccid hoody and Brooklyn facial hair as everyone else? A ride? A haircut? A backrub? Laundry service? Pot edibles, some Red Bull, your car parked, a sandwich, apartment tidied, spreadsheet fixed? Two dozen cupcakes, a bottle of scotch, dim sum, a sushi burrito on a stick?

Fear not: There's an instant-delivery micro-service at your beck and call — one usually founded by some glib Ivy League business school grad with about as much soul as a Trump rally in Phoenix. Or not! Just guessing.

It's called the “Uberization” of everything — an ultra-personalized, app-driven, do-it-for-me dystopia of shameless overpampering that not merely undercuts the old model — AKA the one where you actually go places, do things, touch the world, run your own errands, take care of your own crap and quit thinking the world owes you everything because you write mediocre code for Sergey and Larry — it actually savages it — although, so far, it seems only Uber is making a trillion dollars doing it and nearly everyone else is burning through mountains of VC cash like it's Webvan 2.0.


In the future, everyone will have someone to boss around. And not just your kids.
In the future, everyone will have someone to boss around. And not just your kids.

Ride hailing services are probably not long for this world, if driverless electric cars and global warming have anything to say about it.
Ride hailing services are probably not long for this world, if driverless electric cars and global warming
have anything to say about it.


Is this what they call wariness? Wisdom? Might be. Because now that I am officially old enough to have survived Tech Boom 1.0 (circa 1995-2000), but still young enough to remember that it was, in its own way, equal parts thrilling, obnoxious, revolutionary, entitled and horribly dressed, I get to righteously mock this trend, even as I indulge in some of its finer accomplishments. Hypocrisy? Only a little.

Nevertheless, the question floateth above the sea of slouchy hoodies and artisanal beer bellies like a cloud of pot smoke in Dolores Park: In the coming decade, which handful of technologies and services will prove themselves of genuine, lasting value amidst the avalanche of wasted creative energy masquerading as cultural necessity? SnapChat, Tinder, ManServants? Get real. Tesla? Instagram? PornHub? Maybe.

But if Tech Boom 1.0 taught us anything about imminent, melodramatic shakeouts — and it didn't — it's that you never know who, or what, will be the trigger.

All you can do is rest assured that a shakeup is nigh — simply because a shakeup is always nigh. As for Uber, it might be printing cash, but it's also ripe for self-immolation. Did you hear that only 15 percent of Americans have ever used any ride-hailing app? And fully a third of Americans have never even heard of Uber? And we're on the threshold of cooking the planet and wiping out all the animals and no one knows how to stop it, much less hail a ride to get the hell away from it all? Perhaps you haven't. Just not all that convenient.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/08/22/generation-uber-the-worlds-most-annoyingly-entitled
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If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

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