Sex in the public arena in the l940's was very different
from what is it today. This was 40 years before the pill, 20 years before the
work of Masters and Johnson, and 10 years before the first issue of “Playboy”
magazine. Condoms were hidden behind counters or in machines in men's rest
rooms. Couples known to have sex before marriage were subject to church
excommunication processes. Yet none of this really explains my early teen
years' ignorance and naiveté about sex.
I still marvel at what a slow learner I was. We raised and
bred cattle and hogs. I remember telling my best friend that I found it
interesting that roosters played tag with hens. (He laughed a little titter
which I did not catch on for another few years!) I am Number 3 of nine children
so my mother had had several children after me, yet the word
"pregnant" was never mentioned in mixed company. My instruction came
in very uninformed conversations with my sister Leona and finally from the book
which mom and dad left prominently displayed in the bookshelves, entitled What
Every Young Man Should Know.
But when I started living in an all-male dormitory filled
with teen-agers, sex and sex talk was not a secret. Some at least played the
game of knowing all about it. Others remained quiet. Maturing boys did a lot of
comparisons in our public showers. It was my guess that only one of the boys in
our entire school was having sex with his girl friend (and this was especially
scandalous because he was the son of one of our professors.) The rule was
absolute: "No sex before marriage " In spite of all this I know that
at least three of my small class "had to get married" within two
years of them being my high school classmates. And it was a time in which high
school girls loved to wear very tight sweaters (even to church) and we boys
were sure to notice and comment.
It is with considerable regret that I recall being
completely in the dark about homosexual orientation and all I knew about
homosexual activity came from dirty jokes all using the usually pejorative terms
of the day.
Nor was there any "sex education" under any
pseudonym in the high school curriculum and if it was ever spoken about in
class I have no memory of it.
But somehow I guess I learned. My wife and I are the parents
of five. And now some 70 years after graduation from high school I have had a
very satisfying and blessed sex life and I am not so sure I would change my
experience with that of my grandkids now in their teen years.
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