OK, it’s time to write about sex. At 88 I’ve lived through decades of change in our general attitude toward sex.  I’ll share my own early1950’s sex “education” which as I’ve aged, I’ve discovered was pretty much the norm for that time.

At fourteen, which today would be much too late since ten-year-olds now have periods, my mom attempted to explain how babies get here. Her take was to explain that babies came from a husband and wife physically connecting. She said it was a beautiful act to create new life.

I took this as meaning this was something we did only when we wanted to have children.

But I went to a Catholic all-girls high school where we had yearly retreat days where a priest would talk about not letting a boy even put his arm around us because it would give him sinful thoughts and urges. I couldn’t imagine why a teenager would want to have babies, so I began to suspect there was more to sex than just getting pregnant.

Me being me, I became curious about this. As a sophomore I started going steady with a nice Catholic boy who was also having retreat talks about sex at his all-boy high school.  He was fortunately either better informed or not of a curious nature and took these warnings seriously, though he did put his arm loosely and carefully around my shoulder at movies.  He eventually kissed me goodnight at my door, but it was a very sweet short, closed mouth kiss.   I thought it was nice, but it didn’t make me want to have babies.

He went away to college and I started college at Rice in our hometown so we agreed to date other people. Rice was an all-scholarship school.( It cost me $200 a semester for books! That was all since I lived at home.) It happened that it was mostly a science and engineering college so at that time there were 4 boys for every girl.  I dated quite a few boys my freshman year and kissed one good-bye at the end of the year when he was graduating and going into the navy. Again, a sweet, closed mouth kiss. I remember one good looking football player who, when I demurred kissing on our first date, told me I was never going to have many dates that way. I was reasonably good-looking and outgoing, so I thought that was funny, but figured that since he was a freshman and a football player, perhaps he hadn’t figured out the boy-to-girl odds at Rice. My high school steady came home for the summer and we picked up where we had left off with sweet, closed mouth kisses at the door. In the second half of my sophomore year, I began to date another football player who was a senior and not playing after the season. We were snuggled on a school bus coming back from an out-of-town basketball game with a throw around us. He not only started open mouth kissing, but touching my upper body in ways that suddenly made me understand what the big deal was about sex.  I’ll be honest…I never actually had sex with anyone before I married. But I really enjoyed dating that guy. But at the end of the school year, when he asked me to marry him, I realized I didn’t love him in the same way I did my high school boy friend. It really was just about sex. I don’t think I can claim the moral high ground on sex because of what havoc many of us so called “good” girls in the fifties caused the guys we dated for any length of time.

God cleverly made sure humanity procreated by having sex be very, very pleasurable. When people were marrying at fourteen and fifteen, that may not have caused as much havoc. Having more than one wife probably helped on one level also.  But times changed. And society’s attitude toward sex has gone back and forth between extremes ever since. And I don’t think the illusive far-off possibility of hell ever stopped anyone. The total life changing shame my generation of women experienced from pre-marital pregnancy limited me to just torturing my football player for the pleasure and not because of love. I’m pretty sure, I wasn’t in the minority.

One of the problems with the changes in society from one generation to the next is that as parents, we didn’t recognize that the next generation would be living in mixed dorms with the freedom to make out in your own room, and movies and books making it look like everybody’s doing it, so our attempts to teach them the hazards are insufficient for the new freedoms and temptations.

More to come on the changing issues of each generation and our difficultly preparing the next to find solutions that don’t turn sex into a toy or make women the only gatekeepers or gays/lesbians being the only ones that don’t make mistakes and have abortions or divorces with children who end up the losers in our social attitudes toward sex.