Do you ever wonder about how much life has changed in the last 10, 20 years? I do. (Let’s face it: I’m at that age where I occasionally glance over my shoulder, if only to slow down the hurtling speed at which my life now seems to be proceeding.) I’m amazed at the quantum leap that civilisation has taken in my relatively short lifetime. In the twilight of their years our grandparents may have thought that the world had become an unknowable place, but from our vantage point today, the status quo hadn’t changed that drastically in their lifetime. I’m being facetious here but the difference would be, what? The newfangled motor car system of travel exchanged for the horse-and-buggy? Puhleeze, we may think today. Indoor toilets as against going to the crapper in the midst of the elements? Eh, so what? Rotary telephones instead of homing pigeons or the Pony Express? Big fat hairy deal. While these advancements were monumental for that generation, it’s easy for us to write off those achievements in light of the strides we’re making these days. I mean, rotary telephones are now mounted in museum showrooms, for God’s sake. Today, we have cell phones that can do everything but copulate for us. And, who knows? By the time I’m through writing this, maybe there’ll be one on the market that can do just that.

The point is this: times have changed. We are the technology generation. Anything we want done is now infinitely possible. The thing, though, is that we aren’t making the necessary provisions to deal with the reality of our expanding world. Or perhaps we could make the case that our planners aren’t thinking sufficiently far ahead. Change, these days, comes not simply once upon a generation; it occurs every day. So when the short-sighted developers of my apartment building decided to construct in the early 1990s, they made no allowances, when contemplating the car park, that there would come a time in Jamaica when working-class people would actually own cars. Let alone cars that were possibly bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle. Hence the teeny, tiny parking lot they built with hardly enough space to accommodate today’s single-family household that has an average of two motor vehicles. And this doesn’t take into account visitors’ vehicles. The result: car-park clusterf-k, the source of more bad feelings all over this great country than improperly cooked pork.

The same problem has occurred with reference to our dams. The population has swollen in our cities and our water-storage facilities haven’t. This, coupled with the prevailing drought, is enough to create the water misery many of us who were around in the seventies would never have believed we would still be experiencing 30-odd years later.

Tunnel vision is clearly a thing best left in the past. Lawmakers, for example, have to take into account an area like cybercrimes, which, a few years ago, didn’t even exist as a concept. Our lexicon has had to be updated, as well. It warms the cockles of my heart to see how the Oxford Dictionary has been rising to the task of reflecting the vibrant changes that have been occurring in language and the current culture. How thrilling to discover that words like gaydar, mini-me, threequel, screenager, cyberslacking, eg, are all legitimate words now and no longer need to be said with air quote marks.

But, it recently struck me, it’s not enough to merely add words to the lexicon. It may be necessary to expand our definition of older words that in our current culture may have become ambiguous.

Take a word like sex, for example.

I recently came across an interesting blog on Salon.com, titled “What is Sex?” I was completely discombobulated to realise that my opinion about the meaning of that word is perhaps no longer relevant. Apparently, a recent survey by researchers at the Kinsey Institute, America’s foremost researcher of matters dealing with sexuality, gender and reproduction, discovered that there exists no complete consensus on the definition of the word.

Penile-vaginal penetration is where the highest consensus takes place. Where things get murky, though, are the areas of oral and anal sex. Do these count as sex sex? What is the yardstick we now use to measure sex? Clearly, penetration has been upgraded.

The study, published in a recent issue of the journal Sexual Health, randomly surveyed 486 mostly heterosexual adults between the ages of 18 and 96. They were asked: “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behaviour you engaged in was [blank],” and then followed more than a dozen “behaviour- specific items.” A press release said that “two out of ten people did not concur that penile-anal intercourse was sex, and three out of ten said ‘no’ to oral-genital activity, as did half of the respondents about manual-genital contact”. This result floored me, though: while 95 per cent classified penile-vaginal penetration as sex, that number dropped to 89 per cent in cases where the man doesn’t ejaculate.

Really?! So, what about the (from what I gather) large percentage of women who fake an orgasm? Because, in that case, there may be only one woman somewhere in a rural part of, shall we say, Italy who’s ever truly had sex.

There’s also the newly added dimension to the confusion in the form of cyber sex. Does it count as sex if it’s done online? There are people skulking about, reading their partners’ text messages and what not, and requesting divorces and split-ups on the grounds of adultery and alienation of affection for messages like: U B 6, I B 9.

Is this sex?

Personally, I believe redefining what sex is something modern societies have to tackle with urgency. When one thinks about the spread of sexually transmitted disease, our young people, especially, need to understand what it is they’re dealing with. I had an enlightening conversation recently with a young man in his early twenties, who insisted that oral sex isn’t really sex. “No penetration,” he explained smugly.

“I knew of someone who got an STD from an oral,” I said. I have to admit feeling satisfaction at seeing his face collapse in profound confusion. He’d evidently, never considered this before.

That’s where I have to draw the line, dear reader. If it can make you sick, it’s sex.