Sex education and the failed art of seduction

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/11/2023 (1048 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My sex education was spotty.

Which is to say that there were great gaping holes in it where scientific facts should have been.

I grew up a pint-sized prude in a house with two parents, five kids (four girls in one room with two twin beds), always at least one boarder, a menagerie of pets, and precious little privacy.

You’d think during that time I would have picked up some useful tidbits about the birds and the bees and how our bodies worked, and all that.

Alas, no.

Nowadays, having access to comprehensive sexual education has been recognized by the United Nations as a human right. When I think back to how muddled I was, that’s a very good thing indeed.

In kindergarten, bored with a rudimentary curriculum that included drawing pictures, making letters and numbers and singing songs, I had given myself an added assignment: finding how out babies were made.

“Ask your teacher,” my harried mother said.

“Ask your parents,” said my harried teacher.

Then, when I was six or seven, a friend confided that she was well aware of how she and her siblings came about: it was because her parents were “at it” all the time — a mysterious nighttime activity vigorous enough to regularly knock their bedside phone off the hook.

I gave my friend what I hoped was a withering glance.

“That may be where you came from,” I said piously, secretly confused about why phones were being knocked about at all, “but the prayer book says children are made through adoption and grace, and I wasn’t adopted, so I guess I was made by grace. That’s all I need to know.”

I tried to ignore her sniggering.

I eventually gleaned enough bits and pieces about anatomy and biology to realize that babies were not born of grace, per se.

My next discovery blew the “grace” theory out of the water altogether.

Searching in my mother’s bureau one day for Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, which was strictly forbidden to me and thus highly desirable, I found a tube of ointment that warranted further inspection.

Was my mother ill?

But no — a trip to the dictionary informed me that it was a contraceptive, and that a contraceptive was used to prevent pregnancy.

I was appalled. I was the last of the youngsters and there was no talk of any more to come. Surely my mother no longer had any reason to continue with amorous activity. I was certain there could be no pleasure in it and had assumed it was only ever carried out for reproductive purposes.

(For some reason I absolved my father — a teacher who was in the early stages of becoming an Anglican minister — of all responsibility. I believed my mother to be the ardent partner, which was why she wanted to keep me from The Thorn Birds and its story of temptress Mary Carson, who tried to entice saintly Father Ralph to break his vows. I read it several times.)

As I got older, my mother continued to try and shield me from the harsh realities of life.

She would switch off the radio whenever Rod Stewart’s Tonight’s the Night came on — declaring it “scandalous” — and didn’t talk to me about menstruation until the cursed day arrived. That’s when she primly presented me with a black-and-white pamphlet, circa 1950, complete with a white-coated doctor with pointer and blackboard, anatomy drawings and illustrations of sanitary belts that had been out of fashion for 15 years.

Later, when I began to feel romantic stirrings, our gym teacher, Mr. P. — my father’s colleague — was an early object of my innocent schoolgirl attentions.

When I fainted one Saturday morning at a girls’ volleyball clinic and he (clad in a purple velour tracksuit) lifted me off the floor in his arms, I was sure I had died and gone to heaven.

Plotting a way to spend time with Mr. P. outside the gym, I asked my father to invite him for lunch and suggested my mother serve homemade soup and open-faced cheese and bacon sandwiches.

I was a bundle of nerves when Mr. P. arrived and aimed to be charming but subtle.

My plan was thwarted at the table, however, when I started choking on a strip of bacon and had to haul it out of my throat hand over hand, like a fisherman trying to land a fighting mackerel.

Red-faced and choking as much on mortification as on the bacon, I couldn’t look at Mr. P.

My schoolgirl crush was, well, crushed; any aspiration I had of being a young femme fatale had been thwarted by a piece of cured meat.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com Twitter: pam_frampton