
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees (photo of my mom circa 1950)
I was born in 1952, the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. Growing up absurd in a small southern Ontario town in the 1950s and 1960s meant being fed a steady diet of infantile pap courtesy of the newly nascent US television networks. We indiscriminately imbibed such gems as I Love Lucy, The Beverley Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and so many more masterpieces designed to turn tender young minds to mush.
The erotic content of these programs was thoroughly muted…and of course, by today’s standards egregiously sexist.
Even the slightest suggestion of intimate relations made my father writhe and squirm in abject misery and embarrassment, with characters kissing on the screen causing him to mutter, hum, whistle shrilly, or simply to flee the scene of the crime.
Meanwhile, sexuality permeated everyday life in those bygone days, as it has from time immemorial, but in a transmogrified form, especially in the hothouse realm of children and adolescents.
I have written elsewhere of my ‘sexual education’ in the caddy shacks of London, Ontario, in my early teens. While we awaited potential clients, the older caddies would wile away the time by providing ad hoc courses in sexual education, dispensing advice and information that made carnal activities seem a combination of orgiastic mud wrestling and implausible acrobatics fit only for depraved circus freaks. It’s a wonder that any graduate of a caddie shack ever fruitfully went forth and multiplied; the stories told by the “big boys” should either have generated an oath of celibacy or a lifelong career as a pimp.
School provided little to counterbalance the gross distortions and conjured horrors that led us to snicker among our peers but to cower and tremble alone in bed at night. Hapless physical education teachers were tasked with dispensing carnal knowledge, which they attempted half-heartedly, vacillating wretchedly before their bored or disgusted charges.
Sometimes in the life of a child small wonders unexpectedly emerge to save the day. Stepping into the breach left by her timorous hubby, my mom, Angelina Elizabeth McBryde, took the proverbial bull by the horns. I was about eleven years old and we were out for a walk on a glorious early October day, with the crisp fall weather and the luminescent leaves providing a propitious setting for a gentle, informative chat. My mother’s thoughtful narrative about “the birds and bees” served as an antidote to the vile dross and discomfiting innuendo propagated in the schoolyard and on tv. Her story soothed the night terrors of my childhood and has remained a balm ever since.
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Your friend,
Robert
For a witty account of ‘the dreaded talk,’ click here and use the link below if you’re stymied by a paywall.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/04/15/birds-and-the-bees-talk-age/
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