Birds, Bees, Technology and Red Satin

Some time ago I quoted here from a piece Nardi Reeder Campion, Class of ‘38, had written for Wellesley College magazine, listing all the modern “things” her class was “before,” such as penicillin, panty hose and the Pill.

There was nothing on her list that we didn’t know about, but no one that I know of had put them all together before; it was a stunning catalogue of the technological changes our generation had experienced.

I was careful to identify Mrs. Campion as the author, and to limit my quotations to what I thought was acceptable, short of plagiarism. Mrs. Campion wrote to thank me for my consideration; she said she had received dozens of copies of her piece, from various publications, and that none of their authors had bothered to give her credit. I myself have received dozens of copies of that provocative piece, and none of them mentions her either.

Now Judy Brown of Santa Barbara sends me another piece by Mrs. Campion (reprinted from the New York Times in Wellesley College). This one is called “Growing Up in the Age of Innocence,” and it is about what laughingly passed for sex education in her youth.

Again, we all know that sex isn’t the great mystery it used to be, but Mrs. Campion’s specific examples are evocative of that age of innocence we all went through.

“For us,” she recalls, “sex meant ‘male’ or ‘female’ on a driver’s license. In my family, sex was not mentioned. By the time I was 18, pregnancy could be mentioned, but if an unmarried girl got pregnant, she vanished.”

Mrs. Campion recalls, as I have, that most of what she knew about sex she learned from pictures of New Guinea savages in National Geographic. A whole generation of boys depended on National Geographic for their notions about the female breast.

Sex education was then known as Hygiene, she says. “After we worked our way through the reproduction of the amoeba, the paramecium, and the white rat, we were ready for Dr. Mary De Kruif’s famous 40-minute lecture on sex, known as The Organ Recital.”

Dr. De Kruif bombed. She was “heavy on warnings, light on information.” She advised: “Never wear red satin. It arouses men”--a piece of advice that, I imagine, made the girls wonder whether to wear red satin or not. “Dancing,” she warned, “leads to babies.”

Mrs. Campion observes that in her case the doctor was right: “I tangoed with my Harvard beau; we have five children.”

Mrs. Campion and her schoolmates knew nothing of the mechanics of birth control. One girl’s mother explained it tersely: “Birth control is deciding how many children you want, and then having that number.”

“Were we any better than our parents at talking with our children about sex?” she asks. “No. I grew up inhibited and when our children were young my vocabulary, at least, was still inhibited. . . . Our kids learned about reproduction in science class by watching hamsters mate. . . . As the children watched, open mouthed, the female devoured the male.”

I remember with discomfort my awkward attempt to inform our two boys about sex (long after, I’m sure, they had formed their own ideas from misinformation passed along by their contemporaries).

I tried to explain what really happens between the sexes. One of the boys asked me, “Why do they do it?” Part of the problem is that the sex act, viewed objectively, is utterly ridiculous. My answer, amazingly honest, was that “it feels good.” I immediately realized that some more spiritual explanation was required, and I added that “the sex act is the ultimate expression of love between two people.” That, of course, was an outrageous idealization of an act that, at base, is rather a comical business.

I was a victim of my own upbringing. My father, though rather a rake, had never talked to me about sex, except in jokes. My mother had never even mentioned the word.

I can only say that, armed with this distorted and unsatisfactory picture of what lay ahead, my boys managed to negotiate their adolescence without disaster; both married admirable modern women; one has two children, the other three.

Mrs. Campion wonders how it will all turn out. Will the pendulum swing back? Will cheek-to-cheek dancing be popular again? Will girls say no until the marriage bed?

Not as long as we have penicillin, panty hose and the Pill.