"I look back on my high school years with the sentient of an ex-con recalling hard time in a maximum security prison....
"We didn’t have classes in sex education in high school. We learned about it from more knowledgeable boys. Not only was there no sex education, there was hardly any consummated sex.
Most of us St. John’s boys and — I have to depend on attitudes on this — all of the St. John’s girls were virgins throughout high school.
That is not to say we didn’t talk about sex, or dream of it, or plan ways of getting it. We just didn’t do it.
We Catholic boys operated under strict rules and prohibitions taught and repeated many times by the priests and nuns: We were strictly to avoid “occasions of sin.” Those were entertainments and places where you knew you might be tempted to consider sexual sin as something pleasurable.
Movies with suggestive scenes, of course, could be an occasion of sin. Pinup photos of scantly clad women were not to be ogled. BUT if you accidentally saw a girl in a bra in a magazine, no sin. HOWEVER, if having turned the page, you should flip back it in order to lecherously gaze on that picture, you were guilty of the sordid sin of lust.
That was just the preliminaries. Intercourse outside of marriage was not only a very serious sin, only a little short of premeditated murder, but if you seduced a girl and awakened her sexual desires, you were responsible for all the sexual sins SHE would commit thereafter.
We had a lot of responsibilities and guilt in those days.
It was a common belief among we boys that females had little interest in sex and accepted it in marriage only out of a sense of duty and a desire to have children. Most of the girls we knew did little to disabuse us of that misconception.
We were taught that sex was intended only for marriage. If you truly loved a girl you waited until then and you stayed with her and cared for her the rest of your life. After the wedding, not only was the stain of sin and guilt removed, but it became a means of gaining grace in the sight of God. Sex wasn’t as free then as it is now, but I’m not sure we missed all that much.
Our classes never went into details of what intercourse was. Matter of fact, some of the nuns didn’t seem to know what intercourse was, at least not in the sense we lewdly think of it.
A woman friend of mine told of going to high school at a boarding school run by nuns in that period. The nuns, she said, thought of intercourse in its lesser used meaning of conversation between two individuals. So, a posted sign in the lounge of the woman’s dorm stated: “Intercourse between men and women will be permitted in this lounge only between 7 and 10 p.m.”
I was a high school sophomore before I learned the sexual details. I learned it from Ralph. He told me people did it the way dogs did it. But since I had never seen a naked female, I was uncertain about the mechanics. I thought girls had a penis like boys, only theirs was hollow.
You may think me naive, and I was. Many of us were. At a high school reunion a few years ago, one of my female classmates, by then a grandmother, told me that when she was in high school “virgin” to her meant only the Virgin Mary.
So, when a raunchy boy from a public high school asked her “Are you a virgin?” she shook her head, puzzled. “Of course not. Do you think I’m the Mother of God?”
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