There I was yesterday, pouring my blackened heart into writing about the fear of impending P45-related doom, and the only person whose empathy strings I twanged was Will Knott. The rest of you were aroused only by my brief, joking allusion to sex education. God almighty, did the nuns not beat the curiosity out of you with their great big metre sticks of shame? And by shame I mean compressed mountain Ash. No? Oh, alright then.
I went to secondary school in the nineties, which were hardly the usefully unenlightened times normally cited in blog posts/essays/articles/desperately pointless meanderings such as this. Girl's magazines were full of sincerities on how you should never have to do anything you felt uncomfortable with, and that you should always go at your own pace, which is why we tended not to copulate at breakneck speed whilst standing on one leg. A bastard was anyone who gave homework on a Friday. A fallen woman was something you'd find at the bottom of a stairs. Magdalene Laundry was Madonna's latest album. It was a time of hitched skirts, visible black bra straps, and getting your hair caught in Stephen Horan from fifth year's zip.
What could a Department of Education do in such worryingly shameless times, with Anne Summers shops sidling around our borders and nightclub toilets sprouting condom machines like tenacious fungi on a stag weekend? We had no fear of Hell, nor getting a bad name - whole cottage industries sprang up around embellishing a girl's reputation to a socially acceptable shade of naughty. One of my friends gave a term's Irish homework and a kidney for favourable gossip referencing her flexibility and addiction to More magazine. Nuns had been beaten out of the classrooms by their own varicose veins, and the priests were too busy supervising the under 16s rugby. How so could the State prevent a mass breakout of liberated girls and exhausted boys?
Through science, of course! The spiritual and the sceptical joined forces to keep Irish maidens pure... by employing such graphic, passionless and anatomically correct educational diagrams to turn our young stomachs quicker than an old woman's arse towards a Stanley range. No holds barred, no libido left unscarred.
"Here are the fallopian tubes," a grim lumpette of a Home Ec. teacher would state, sourly chronicling the passage of a fertilized egg from the false excitement of a jizz-up to its disturbing embedding into the womb, which she was happy to point out was a squishy yoke that festered within all of us wimminfolk. And this was far, far more damaging than watching a nun jumping up and down on a table, cheeks aflame at our burden of having tingly nipples in a coeducational school. The nun, you see, probably hadn't had sex. The Home Ec. teacher probably had. She had Fallopian tubes and periods and milk ducts and her husband had sperm swishing around in his Y-fronts and you know what they say, half an hour's vomiting in the school bathrooms after a sex ed. class is better than a trimester on your knees in front of the porcelain god. "What's wrong, girls? You wanted honest discussion on your next frontier? WHAT CAN BE MORE APT THAN A TOUR OF THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM IN ALL ITS INWARDLY MUCUSEY AND OUTWARDLY HAIRY GLORY?"
Forget a lifetime of being objectified by dudes on motorbikes and the parish priest crossing the road when he saw you approaching, teenage sex in the nineties threatened far worse repercussions. Smear tests. Unusual knicker stains. Hymens hanging loose and possibly swinging embarrassingly in the breeze at P.E.
We looked at the boys and the boys looked back at us. Dear God. If there was one thing sex education in the nineties taught us, it was that sex was a medical condition akin to contracting cancer or a hysterectomy or something.
It must have worked too. I didn't get pregnant until I was nineteen.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
I, at least was trying to be sympathetic, ya little wagon. Trying ta put a slight smile on your mug. Rather than having you hear about the times some tit while handing the P45 happened to mention 'no hard feelings then'. When all you wanted to do was grind his/her face into the closest dashed wall. When you felt so stupid for being committed to something as transient as work and when the the bint you were shagging was two time-zone pussy, where you knew with no income you could not do the weekend trip to some part of Europe.
Mind ya, I met that wan lately and she has four under five and one well on the way. And from what I hear the sire is stupping a younger model. I smiled, a little.
Well now, as to the errors in education. The one thing that they are absolutely terrified is that the girl is knocked up WHILE at school. The last thing they want is a nursing room or that the other girls see that they can do this as well. For other than the money and social reasons, teenage girls are really really good mothers.
Wonderfully graphic and superbly surreal. I was with you all the way until the "INWARDLY MUCUSEY AND OUTWARDLY HAIRY GLORY". At which time I forced my mind to think only of bricks, mortar, and the occasional bag of nails.
"Hymens hanging loose and possibly swinging embarrassingly in the breeze at P.E."
One of your finest lines (tell your mother your competitor would be incapable of such excellence)
My competitor would have better taste.
You're entirely right, Mr. Bastard. I too had to take a break and go for a quick but punishing run around the town to take my mind off it. I disgust myself sometimes.
Agreed, Vince. Teenage mothers can occur anywhere else but in school, where they start giving other girls ideas and stop fitting through fire escapes. There's enough fat chicks tearing the arse out of their school slacks without pregnant wans ruining the entire town's image, after all.
Slacks ?.
Your words give me a lazy one. Your imagery painted with such words does not. Yet here I am at full mast. What gives?
Oh right, tis morning.
Carry on.
Ah, nuh.nuh.nuh.nuh.nineteen.
A slow start alright.
Well at least your biology teacher wasn't telling the female members of the class, (yes I went to a co-ed), to, in the unlikely event of being raped, lie back and enjoy it...yes they were different times...
Clearly the kind of teacher who referred to the crime as "suprise sex!"
Vince: Yup. Slacks. Those shapeless trooosers they make fashionable teenagers go to school in.
Don't worry about it, Kev. I know you're going through some confusing changes, but it merely means you're becoming a man. Bless.
Conan, please don't rub it in. I am a source of shame to my whole community. Blame Swe. Ge. Due to his strange biology teacher's teachings, he was a late developer.
"rub it in"
Fnarrrrr!
Well sniggerty snoo! I actually noticed that when I was originally typing it, but I was at work and couldn't think of a less leading phrase in the time I'd allowed myself to comment. So fie upon you!
Excellent post.The one thing that they are absolutely terrified is that the girl is knocked up WHILE at school. The last thing they want is a nursing room or that the other girls see that they can do this as well...
Post a Comment