No Sex

Dear S. Q. My 30 year-old, college-educated daughter is navigating a new world in which both of our knowledge and experience is like falling down a rabbit hole. By her age, I was a sexual diva with a hot career and distance thoughts of marriage and kids. She's struggling to find a descent job with any kind of benefits, piecing together gigs and short-term contracts. And sex -her 20 year-old boyfriends were jerks (no different than mine) but she and her friends abstain rather than enjoy the hell out of lovers and losers. Where's this headed?

Dear Mom, Let's start with sex, never a dull topic. The world's attitude toward sex has always had its ups and downs, from buttoned-up Victorian, to Roaring 20s flappers, to 1970 Flower Power (remember the birth control pill was introduced in the 1960), back to sex fears of AIDS in the 80s, to the introduction of the internet and explosions of all sorts beginning in the 1990s. True that sex is significantly down worldwide, and true also that fewer young adults are in relationships where sex regularly occurs. There are no simple reasons for the shift our young are going through, but plenty of speculation. Where it's headed is where it always has, some glorious unknown, where us elders hold their hands until they let go, and support their good choices thereafter. And, naturally, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." -Robert Frost and S.Q.