The other day was the anniversary of the first mainstream media mention of what we’d come to call AIDS. Forty-five years back, on July 3, 1981, the NYT ran a story headlined, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” It wouldn’t be long before editors at the Times and other media outlets would be having meetings on how, in a G- or maybe PG-rated way, to describe certain sexual practices and why they might be relevant to this new disease.

I’m talking oral sex, anal sex, PIV sex, the gamut. Believe me when I tell you people sat around conference tables discussing anal sex. I was in a few of those meetings, or heard about them afterward.

Then came Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. She performed oral sex on him in the Oval Office! (“Oral in the Oval” — did anyone write that headline? If not, they missed an opportunity.) And she did that thing with the cigar! More meetings, more letters to the editor from parents mad because they had to explain a blowjob to their middle-school children. And I’d bet anything the kids already knew about them, but enjoyed seeing their parents stammer through the explanation.

Years later, it was #MeToo, and stories about forced sex, bad sex, guilty sex, and erections. So many erections, young women pulled down onto the lap of some creep and his boner, or having it rubbed up against her at a drinking fountain, or wherever. I was largely out of the game by then, and the previous meetings had taken away some of the scandalousness of describing sexual orientations and practices in what we always called “a family newspaper.” But I’m sure there might have been a few more meetings.

This week I saw a headline and thought, my how things have changed:

File that one under Things That Make Me Feel Old. And Platner is out, so his future sex crimes will be between him, the women involved and law enforcement.

What else today? Here’s Bret Stephens and his problem with democratic socialists:

A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.)

Heavens to Betsy, let me clutch my pearls! When will these comfortable opinion-havers figure out that this is exactly what Democrats want to hear, after two years of the Trump administration? They don’t want Chuck Schumer’s strongly worded letters, they want choking in the mud, because that’s what the administration has already done to the Constitution. I swear, these people.

OK, then. The week, it limps to a close and a pretty good weekend awaits. Enjoy yours.