50 Years Ago, Sex Meant Groping for the Right Words

My New Hampshire colleague and pen pal Nardi Reeder Campion has sent me a copy of a column she wrote recently for the New York Times on her 50th wedding anniversary.

I became acquainted with Campion when I quoted liberally from a column she wrote on the things her college classmates were without--panty hose, nylon, TV, ballpoint pens, frozen foods and the whole inventory of modern conveniences.

Since then Campion’s list has popped up in various columns and at numerous class reunions, never with attribution to her original work.

It was inevitable that when she reached her golden wedding anniversary she would also think of how things have changed since then. Mostly, she says, the change has been in attitudes toward sex.

Keeping in mind The Times’ circumspect attitude toward sex in its pages, as delineated by David Shaw in his recent stories on that subject, I will try to impart the flavor of Campion’s piece without offending my editors. (Of course it was in the New York Times first, and consequently must be fit to print.)

Her column is titled “Fifty Years of Sex,” which suggests its tenor at the outset. She says she was “a green girl” when she promised to “love, honor and obey a fresh young blade from Harvard. Neither he nor I had any idea what we were getting into.”

Exactly nine months later she had her first child. Under the circumstances, that was only to be expected. “I admired birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger but I had no idea what she was recommending. We did our bit for the population explosion: five children, seven grandchildren, so far.”

My wife and I were somewhat more prudent. We had only two children, and the first was six years in arriving. Sex education is where you find it. I got mine as a youth in the Merchant Marine.

Campion notes that when she was growing up, solid information on sex was difficult to come by. A friend’s mother slipped her a book called “Marjorie May’s Thirteenth Birthday.” “We were amazed by its message. . . . “

My instruction had come mostly from such novelists as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser, who unfortunately weren’t very specific. But my wife worked for the Owl Drug Store, which provided her not only with good advice from her fellow workers, but also with the appropriate merchandise. Sex was not that great a hurdle.

Campion and her mate suffered from a “meager” sex vocabulary. “Even if we knew the correct word for anything we would not utter it. We said bust for breast and wouldn’t say bra in mixed company.”

My wife and I weren’t that demure; but to this day, despite two years in the Marine Corps, I am reluctant to use four-letter words in conversation, except under extreme provocation.

Campion had little more sex instruction from her mother than that given by the classic British mother to her daughter: “Just close your eyes, dear, and think of England.”

Campion says she has learned to see the wisdom of Malcolm Muggeridge’s remark: “Sex is a funny thing, and the older I get the funnier it gets.”

She has learned to laugh as her generation has “zoomed with the speed of light from the era of the chaperon to the era of the Pill.”

A few years ago, she recalls, a New York Times editor deleted the word vagina from one of her columns. Recently, “without batting an eye, it quoted a female college student: ‘A year ago I wouldn’t be caught dead with a condom, but now it’s like an American Express card--you can’t leave home without it.’ ”

(I recently had occasion to use that word and noted that I had never before used it in this space.)

“When I was in college,” Campion recalls, “I had never heard the word condom, and I thought oral sex meant talking a good game.”

In his articles Shaw said he found many journalists who believe that male editors and reporters are far more reluctant to use sexually explicit words than women are, and pointed out that the older they are, the more reluctant they are, most of them coming from a time when newspapers could not even use the word rape , the acceptable term being criminal assault.

I am from that era myself, and I remember trying to shame my editors into using the word rape by writing such sentences as, “Police said he kicked her down the stairs, bashed her over the head with a tire iron and tore off her clothing, but he did not criminally assault her.” Such absurdities were actually printed.

Campion concludes: “After half a century, that young blade from Harvard still delights me.”

See, you don’t have to know anything about sex.