Material Innovations

“Pick something from The Last Whole Earth Catalog that is interesting to you.”  With 452 pages each filled to the brim with half-a-dozen or more interesting things, the phrase, “option paralysis” comes to mind.  I don’t know a single person who wasn’t sucked out of the present upon the first internal gaze of the counter-culture tome.  Needless to say, I was overwhelmed with interesting stuff.  So, to tackle the assignment, I established a simple parameter: after closing the book, the first page I open to randomly will contain the item I’ll report on.  Joy. . .   The first was page 230 in the “Health” section, subsection “Sex”.  A book called, The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, PhD. first edition, 1971.

Forty years after The Last Whole Earth Catalog was published, and in-spite of countless attempts by various organizations around the world to curb or outright eliminate human sexual activity, it is with great relief that I report the following:  sex is still being enjoyed to the present day.  In fact, following its advertisement in the catalog, The Joy of Sex remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for eleven weeks and more than 70 weeks in the top five.  There have been several subsequent revisions and the love guide is now in it’s fourth edition called, The New Joy of Sex (2008) which packs twenty-five percent more material (positions invented since 1972?), updated language to adjust for shifts in social attitudes and 120 res-hot photographs and illustrations.

One key indicator that sex is happening is an increasing world population.  Midway into 1974, the world population reached 4 billion.  Only 40 years later, the population is near doubled at 6.7 billion with 8 billion projected for 2025.  Interestingly, though, the birthrate has dropped steadily since 1970, though not at a rate high enough to stabilize the global human head count.  A very interesting statistic register that displays dozens of related statistics in real-time is at WORLDMETERS.info.  I recommend a quick peek at this site.

In 1972 The Whole Earth Catalog sited “three recent trends [that] make access to good information about sex more important than ever.”  First, “highly visible controversies about pornography and abortion;” second, “the rise of the VCR’s popularity and the growing number of sexual videotapes;” and three, the “proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases.”  Well, in hindsight, it’s true that the VCR revolutionized porn.  It’s also true that a little more than a decade later, the internet revolutionized the porn revolution.  Here’s an eye-popping info graphic from BLOGTACTIC.com

enJOY!