Sidney, dear, (you handsome thing, you!,lol!) did you address that question to me because of my outrageous albeit ludicrous behavior during the Beltane festivities, and because you think I may once again make a fool of myself during those for the Summer Solstice?
Well, I am deeply offended, I must say! <g>
Are you including among your concerns the Beltane species of jolly and only so very mildly naughty mock-flirtation? I mean, if you are, do keep it in perspective: All us funloving sillies were pretending to dart behind bushes and climb trees and talk Elizabethan and seduce one another in normal post text while whispering [in brackets, sotto voce] to assembled imagined rivals and push one another into fountains and pretending to conspire in the Private Meadow and doling out lavish hilarious and usually duplicitous compliments, and, of course, infidelity and betrayal and double entendres were worse than rampant, they were required for the laughs they produced; and I, myself, managed to obtain, over the objections of a very strict tree nymph, the lease to a luxury penttreehouse overlooking the vast fairgrounds for which (I am particularly proud of this) the U.S. Government (with your taxes!) has agreed to pay all maintenance costs, and what's more, to transport, beechtree and all, also at Government expense, to whatever site the next revel is located. (I thought of this to foil the fair Lady Edwarda from thwarting my penttreehouse advantages by changing venues, even though I did bestow on her a key, that ungrateful strumpet!)
In a rivalrous fit of pique, I am ashamed to admit, I scrubbed down the Fountain and shined the abundant statuary on the grounds with Lady Fox's discarded yellow sundress.
Somone else threw a large animal of some sort at a rival of his, and I won't even go into the humiliation that ensued!
So... Sidney, I evoke the mood of Beltane so you can see that the spirit behind it is of playfulness and absurdity and the most defensible and lovely naughtiness, or parody naughtiness, not that of serious adulterous assignations, and no step toward the destruction of our marriages.
As for the internet as a place for the setting up of real rendezvous, I guess my reaction is that it's one among many. Different people will use it differently. Some will find their true love there. Some will get their hearts broken, and their marriages. (I have two friends who've been married three times each, though, and had, between them, dozens of lovers, and the internet had nothing to do with it; in a way, plus ca change.)
But of course, just as cars and coeducation and women joining men-not-their-husbands in the workplace and birth control and feminism have all required that we learn new, self-protective mores, so will the internet; and some will devise sound new rules for themselves better and quicker than others, and some will use it while others get used by it.
What do you think, yourself, Sidney? |
