I wouldn't know. I missed nearly the entire space race thanks to the invention of pantyhose.

Like most teenage boys in the late '60s, I had a libido the size of a nuclear reactor and the love prowess of a jack-in-the-box monkey. It didn't matter that we were smack in the middle of the Sexual Revolution. When you looked like me, sex was just a theory.

School dress codes were from the Victorian era. Girls wore nylons and garters to school, which required low skirt hems to cover them. This was particularly frustrating to any boy who couldn't afford X-ray vision.

One day, on the stairs leading to the student quad, I spotted a couple of cheerleaders sporting hemlines that hovered near their collarbones. Pantyhose had arrived.

The exact date of this breakthrough is a mystery because my brain suddenly melted. It ran out of my ears and into a puddle at my feet. There's probably still a mark on the floor there.

Why the inventor of pantyhose never won the Nobel Prize is beyond me. Overnight, hemlines rocketed up. Any skirt hem that reached "to the knee" was considered pioneer garb by girls eager to flaunt what they had.

Pantyhose had detractors. School administrators, church officials and alarmed parents were strongly against the "devil's underwear" and in favor of keeping hemlines every bit as low as my mind.

Also, the girls with the shortest dresses seemed to have the tallest boyfriends. Stare too long and it was possible to end up thoroughly drubbed and locked in a Dumpster.

I mainly remember being grateful I no longer had to use my overtaxed imagination. Everything about the female anatomy - or at least 99 percent of it - was now there for the visual taking. Society had finally sunk to my level.

What a rube I was. Today, junior high kids can - and apparently have been - sending each other nude pictures of themselves via camera cell phones and the Internet. What are armpit-level hemlines compared with no hemlines at all?

Lawmakers are wondering what to do to curb this latest indulgence of prurient interest. Isn't there some kind of law that would prevent this sort of behavior?

As something of an expert on low pursuits, I'd like to answer that question by saying, "Nope." The interest has always been there. Technology has just caught up with it.

And speaking of getting caught, it's a little harder to hide when you're using a cell phone to indulge in a bit of nasty-mindedness.

Unlike pantyhose, you can't pull a cell phone over your head for a disguise.

rkirby@sltrib.com