The Future’s Sexy

It’s apparently 40 years since the first flight of Boeing’s 747. While reading up on this (yes I’m a sad little boy who used to build Airfix kits and occasionally has the urge to buy one …) I realised how difficult it is to predict the future, especially when we humans are often such smug little bastards.

The reason I say that is two-fold. Firstly because the 747 in itself was always meant to be the plane that everyone made do with until we all went supersonic and flew across the Atlantic in rocket powered aircraft in under 3 hours and secondly because they would be operated by (amongst others) Pan Am.

Well, we all know that supersonic flight was never profitable and its final tragic chapter was the crash of the Air France Concorde. Then there was Pan Am. Successful and lauded by many as a model of a customer focused organisation at its peak and even featured in the Kubrick film 2001 operating space liners. In 1991 Pan Am filed for bankruptcy.

It’s the same with sex. Barbarella had us all having non-penetrative weird hand touchy sex, Woody Allen’s sleeper introduced the mysterious and addictive silver ball that was the Orgasmatron. Neither particularly serious predictions of the nature of sex but quite reasonable in some ways.

I mean, why would you want all that messy horrible squelchy sex? You know, with the rubbing and grinding and hands touching bits they shouldn’t …

Because it’s fun that’s why!