Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 comment:
A couple of years ago , as many of you may have been aware of at the time , marked the 50th anniversary of the introduction of “The Pill.” (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual (just in case mother, the very young, or the clergy are reading this, although the young are hip to this thing already) revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x (ditto above) now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing.
That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it, praise be. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)
Someone recently told me a story that placed this ignorance and confusion notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way (you know Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracey, etc.) the way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married.
Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him in some dead- of- night office house and fill in the paperwork. Before the blessed ceremony the "has been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.
Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over it but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic, and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control.
I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth? Hell no, not about the do part anyway. No, I learned about sex "on the streets" (and in the junior high and high school gym locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I many times thanked a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that “The Pill.”
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