Summer class goes on. Meanwhile, I checked out my own Charlatan blog posting a little while ago to see what would greet those hundreds, maybe thousands, of online users visiting the website. I find a Charlatan poll, asking the hot and provocative question, “Are you kinky?” It’s been there for several weeks now, and has a remarkable total of 57 respondents entering a preference.
Actually, more likely it’s 55 because I voted “yes” three times.
The surprising part is that two-thirds of those voting said “No.” That’s a pretty discouraging thing. Either the religious fundamentalists are at work here, or the sexy among us are too busy engaging in intimate acts to respond affirmatively. I have some classical liberal tendencies and so favour affirmative action for this kind of thing, but not for much else.
But the difficulty I have with the poll results is that no self-respecting student of my student era (the mid-1970s) would have said anything but “yes, I’m kinky.” It would be no different from saying, “yes, I’m sexy.” Anybody who didn’t think so, poor thing, just wouldn’t bother responding. Who would think, “No, I’m not sexy, I’m not kinky, and I’d like the poll to reflect that reality?” It wouldn’t be done.
What’s going on in the late first decade of the 21st century, such that the recorded vote would be so skewed? Are summer students not having sexy sex any more? That’s a very good question. If summer students are disproportionately old farts, like me, we might be so used to doing outrageous sex acts that we’d think it was commonplace on campus. We’d hold back and not vote. (The internal dialogue would go like this: “I THOUGHT I was kinky, but maybe there’s a new kind of kink out there.”)
Even in this situation we elderly wouldn’t vote, “No, I’m not kinky,” we’d just be silent. That would explain why only 57 bothered to vote, but not the two-thirds to one-third problem.
I can’t believe students are that much more “conservative” these days. They must still go out there in large numbers and smoke dope, drink too much, have sex all over the place, take the lord’s name in vain and listen to prohibited music.
Maybe it’s the financial question. Nobody can afford to talk dirty and get expelled, right? I mean it costs only $600 for a full year’s term in the mid-70s (Yes: $2,000 for a three-year BA if you didn’t eat.) Our basement apartment on Cambridge Street cost $165 and we split it between the THREE of us; we washed our dishes in the tub and Kraft Dinner was under a quarter. I should add that minimum wage was $1.65, by the way, but we could easily earn enough in the summer to pay for tuition.
But once we paid up, attending Carleton wasn’t just about grades and academics (even if you once actually had to know something to get an 80 average). My first year was spent in the pool hall – not playing, but watching all my buddies play – then going for a jug next door. But today, THERE IS NO POOL HALL in the Unicentre, and the pub was sliced in half and turned into a BOOKSTORE!
The drinking age was 18 then, and we had five years in high school, so we gained two years right there. We went to the Chaud in Hull. Now it’s not called Hull and there is no Chaud. I don’t know about “this generation,” but if we had no money because tuition was so expensive, and there was no Chaud and no quarts of beer, we’d throw up our arms and be proud to have kinky sex.
I was comparing notes with a friend in Toronto last weekend (get this: at his daughter’s wedding!) and he was wondering what happened to the pool hall trophy, seeing as he was its frequent recipient. Good question, I said I’d check into it for him, but where would I go to find out – the chaplaincy?
Speaking of polls, there was a poll one day on the radio – around 1976 or so – reporting the ratio of gay-to-straight in the population to be one-in-seven. I whipped down to the pool hall. I sat on the bench and counted off the bodies sitting beside me. “So,” says I in a very loud voice, “I see that there are seven of us sitting here on the bench. New statistics say that one person in seven is gay… and it’s not me.” With that, I stood up and walked into the pub.
Now back then, even for non-bigots like myself, that was considered a pretty good joke. But now, I just don’t know. I feel I haven’t got the pulse of the nation in the palm of my hand anymore. How would those kinds of pool hall smarts be taken today? Funny? Offensive? Irrelevant?
Take a poll. Let me know.