Sex-ed scarring

Sex education is a young man’s rite-of-passage
So too, for some of us, was not understanding it

I was at the vanguard of modern sex education, or at least the vanguard of it in my high school. Deprived the realities of “human reproduction” the years prior to mine had to make do with being taught the bedroom activities of rabbits (which thinking about our older boys explained rather a lot).

But it wasn’t to be so for me and my peers. The last of the nuns that had ruled the roost for oh-so-long had finally given way to a new generation of headmaster and for the first time the new boys of 1984 were to be given the unabashed and unvarnished truth.

Well, if their parents signed the permission slip that is.

My parents like most others, chary in equal measure of standing out from the crowd and of having to suffer this embarrassing rite-of-passage conversation with their adolescent offspring themselves, dutifully signed.

Which is how, at the age of eleven, a naïve and late-developing PPW, found himself in a classroom with thirty of his little friends being introduced to the world of sex in all its apparently joyless glory.

 

Hot plumbing

The “meat” of this lesson was an A4 printed sheet containing the classic cut-out drawing of the “male” and “female” “genitalia” “in coitus” coupled with several paragraphs of explanatory text with a selection of blanked out words we were to fill-in as the story unfolded. It’s a testament perhaps to the naivety of even the most advanced members of this Roman Catholic class of 1984 that not a single obscenity was found scribbled into any of those blanks.

I believe this factsheet to have been written by our science master, a gawky twenty-something who I suspect hadn’t the practical experience nor university training to back this particular lesson up. It was distinctly meritorious in two key regards. First of all he had managed to write a page about “sexual intercourse” without letting a single suggestion of pleasure get anywhere near it. Secondly he used some of the clumsiest and most awkward prose I’ve read outside of the Literary Review’s bad sex shortlist. His fiery red blushes burned through every sentence.

The audience for that lesson were a mixture of kids who already knew it and kids who weren’t nearly ready for it. We all develop at different speeds and sex education isn’t really something you can effectively schedule on a random Wednesday in May for two-and-a-half dozen kids thrown together by nothing more than geography, demography and received religiosity.

Afterwards outside the classroom the boys who already knew it all gathered to snigger and giggle while the unready slinked by keeping our, er, reservations to ourselves, save for one boy who marked himself for life by exclaiming “Well, I’m never doing THAT with a girl!” as he stalked off.

And I kept my reservations ’til puberty kicked in and my first shot at third base came to pass. While they remained, I have to admit, they troubled me more than somewhat.

 

Hot crabbing

Devoid of informative adjectives, lest any hint of physical pleasure be revealed unto us, the textures and touch of the anatomical components of that associated artwork sparked my first doubt. That drawing of male and female junk snugly entwined left me with the impression that girls were harbouring a rigid, bell-end shaped chamber inside of them in which an unsuspecting chap could quite easily find himself trapped.

I was a little concerned about what one would do if this were to occur, and the image of myself and my partner crabbing stark-naked into the nearest A&E to get our coupling de-coupled bothered me pretty much until the day that first curious, exploring hand found its way to third-base.

 

Hot flushing

My second worry was born entirely of the clumsy prose in the explanatory text. I don’t remember the words exactly but one phrase troubled me until puberty finally struck. It ran something like “the penis is stimulated by the male beforehand to an erect state.” I read “stimulated” as a verb and wondered why the associated instructions for stimulating it weren’t included in the accompanying notes.

Perhaps we didn’t get told that bit until we were sixteen?

Whatever the reason I seemed to be missing a valuable piece of the instruction manual for my junk and it left me pretty much shag-phobic until puberty came around. I was haunted by angst-ridden visions of my first time; the girl lying naked on my bed would coyly invite me to “go away and get my erection” and I would dutifully clomp off to the toilet to perform this secret male ritual with no idea how to do it.

Fortunately it wasn’t long before Mother Nature’s prose taught me what my Science Master’s had failed to. Stimulating it wasn’t going to be a problem. Keeping it un-stimulated was the challenge.

 

Hot topic

What was awkward, uncomfortable and troubling at the time is now little more than a stock anecdote, a favourite story for a seedy forty-something keen to kill a bit of time over a pint by demonstrating that I wasn’t always the way I am now. It’s all part of growing up after all. Or so it was for alumni of the school of hard-knocks, from back in the days when kids were allowed to feel bad about stuff, before last place trophies, before running to teacher at the faintest whiff of bullying and before the days of lavish shop-bought school-play costumes lest anyone tease you for being poorer than the other kids.

Back when preparing kids for adulthood including letting them learn how to deal with feeling bad. The school of hard-knocks seems to have closed its doors now.

And I’m kinda glad I graduated before it did.