“Given my current state of enlightenment, I wouldn’t dream of circulating through the bar scene— barhopping, we called it— but I did in those days. In the sixties and seventies, that’s what you did for recreation. That’s how you met guys. That’s how you got laid. What Women’s Liberation “liberated” was our attitude toward sex. Where we once used sex for barter, now we gave it away. I marvel at the prostitutes we must have put out of business, doling out sexual “favors” in the name of personal freedom. What were we thinking? All we ended up with were bar bums afflicted with pubic vermin.”
Sue Grafton, from “O” is for Outlaw, 1999 ♣Add a Tooltip Text
This is not my opinion, though I don’t completely disagree with it. We all give away things we should have kept, and take things that don’t belong to us or do us any good. I don’t know that any prostitutes have been put out of business by non-professionals; isn’t that a different market? This little ramble is not even the opinion of Sue Grafton, who distances herself from the lives of her characters through application of the Presbyterian principle of predestinationAdd a Tooltip Text.
The opinion belongs to fictional crime solver, Detective Kinsey Millhone, who doesn’t carry a gun in her purse. Now, what’s the point of a purse with no gun in it?