Thursday 12 March 2015

Mum, I’ve got a Penis

and guess what, you’ve got a China.

When Kelly’s Georgie was six he had sex education lessons at school.  Nothing but the most basic facts and a few diagrams, and, according to Kelly, very little in the way of sniggering, but great excitement. The moment Georgie's dad came home from work he too was treated to this staggering revelation, as was Georgie’s sister Chloe. “Dad, I've got a penis and so have you and Chloe has a China. “ Georgie just couldn’t get over it.

This little gem came up because Kelly told me about an exciting week with Chloe, who is twelve and has just started her periods. Chloe is miffed because she can’t go swimming this week but otherwise she is taking it in her stride. She is annoyed at being the first in her class but Kelly has assured her that she’ll therefore be the coolest among the girls and she’ll be the centre of attention for a while.

How times have changed. We had one lecture in my all-girls-school, for all ages, from 10 to 16 year olds (16-18 year olds were excused, presumably because they already knew the difference between boys and girls and the fun you could have with that difference). A man, he may have been a priest in my catholic grammar school, or less likely, a doctor, stood in front of row upon row of giggling girls in the school’s assembly hall and held forth about the birds and the bees and how kissing was sinful and the first step on the road to perdition. Come to think of it, he must have been the school priest, surely no doctor would have spouted such nonsense even in the unenlightened days of the late 50s?

I was one of the youngest and my knowledge of all things physical and carnal was still zero after the lecture. Menstruating for the first time was a frightening experience for an innocent like me, I was sure I was about to die. My mother, who never made any effort to explain the facts of life to me, blamed the school for not having done so.

Dear Aunt Katie, with whom I was staying at the time, just smiled reassuringly and when my mum came to collect me, told her to speak up, finally. All my mum managed was, “you’re alright, you’re not dying. That’ll happen every four weeks now.” Poor mum, she just never could overcome her inner straitjacket.


33 comments:

  1. I was very sick as a child and spent nearly two years in hospital. That is where I learned everything...from the nurse that attended to me. She was a lovely person with a great French accent - she was not only my nurse, she was also my guardian angel who nursed me back to health. I can also remember talking with my school chums about "The Curse" - which I had great knowledge and felt so important for a while - I had many questions. Later, My Mom gave me "a Book" to read and I said - "Mum, I already know". I learned all that in the hospital. I laughed at your opening line. I have heard one of my nephews say that. ha,ha Wonderful Post.

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  2. Gosh, what memories this brings up. I too wondered what was happening to my body when it happened, I was only eleven and it caught my mother by surprise, as I was the oldest. And no, they never taught us anything in school! Certainly not that I have a China. :-)

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  3. I grew up in the "pure" 50's also and sex was never spoken about. At age 12 when I got my period and tried to stop the bleeding with a large band-aid, my mome handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a belt and told me to use that instead. Not another word was said. Today, a child can learn everything about everything just watching TV advertisements.

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  4. Certainly not a headline that can be ignored. Funny about the word China. I am surprised it never caught on. Nuns and priests here preached nonsense well into the seventies. "Don't talk to boys through the cyclone wire fence or you will get pregnant". Interesting to muse on the possibilities but quite unlikely to happen after a chat

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  5. Well, I'm a guy so I have a different story. But it's similar in one way -- nobody explained to me what was going on the first time THAT happened. I didn't know what the heck was going on. Still don't!

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  6. At school we had one class in biology, the teacher
    made a lot of fuss about it. And all we've learned in
    that class were the names of the different organs.
    Not one word about how they'r to be used :))
    My parents couldn't do it either, from time to time
    they left a magazine open with an article about s.. .
    That didn't really help me either.
    My own experience later was way more helpful and
    way more fun ;)
    Have a beautiful day!
    【ツ】Knipsa , still laughing about the china :))

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  7. My mother had a HUGE book with a title something like the The Sexuality of the Human and I read all 400 pages re-reading those important sections when I was 10 or 11, so by the time mom or school got around to the talk, I pretty much knew it all. I also lived on a small farm, so that helped with the audio-visual part of the lessons.

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  8. I was fortunate in knowing what was coming, and I was exactly the same age.

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  9. Friko, you've taken me down memory lane to that foreign land called the Past. The 1950s were so different in so many ways.

    xo

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  10. Even though my mother was a nurse she couldn't manage more than a 'read this book, and if you have any questions ask me'. Of course I never asked. It's a different time and parents and schools generally do a better job now.

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  11. Hi Friko - thank goodness things have changed ... and I learnt little at school - strange I've never noted the word china ... but I can quite imagine the fun Kelly had regaling her story to you about her son ...

    Cheers Hilary

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  12. My mother showed me a sanitary napkin but neglected to show me how to put it on - I wore it side saddle for many months, pinned across my backside. She also told me Our Lady would cry if I discussed this with one of the dangerous male species. Ever.
    XO
    WWW

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  13. If I have a China, then where is all the tea?

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  14. The coolest girl because she has her period first? Not sure I agree with that - it's not something she has achieved by her own efforts, simply a case of physical change happening at that time in her life, hardly under her influence.
    When I hit puberty (more or less around the same time as most girls in my class, at 13-14), the other girls ridiculed me because I didn't have much in terms of breasts. The "coolest" girl in class had breasts like a grown-up woman, and everybody who lacked in size, lacked in coolness. It wasn't a very nice few years for me.
    Nowadays, when I see former class mates, I wonder whether they can still afford walking around without wearing a bra - well, I can!

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  15. I asked my mother why she never told me about sex, and her answer was, "I thought the schools would." That would have been in the seventies.

    I must admit, I gave my son the lecture with two glasses of wine...I drank them...(Just reread that.)

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  16. Dear heaven. Makes you wonder how we survived our youth. God I'm glad to be old.

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  17. Re sex ed, same here. Very little in my native Cuba. You learnt on the go, so to speak.

    Greetings from London.

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  18. I remember a friend saying that when she was eleven , she was told to take her little brothers out for a picnic ... and when they all came home later they found an extra little brother , lying next to Mum
    And she still didn't have a clue how

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  19. Oh this one made me smile!
    My sex ed was somewhat better than yours, but still sketchy. It helped to live on a farm.

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  20. ...and I was one of the lucky teachers to teach human sexuality to middle schoolers. They had just enough knowledge to be very mischievous in the class. It was fun.

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  21. I don't remember my schools giving me any sex education at all back in the 1950s, though we eventually covered reproduction in biology classes. My mother must have told me something about periods, as I wasn't taken by surprise when mine started at 14, but I honestly can't remember the details of her doing so.

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  22. We had films in 5th grade, with questions and discussions after. I don't remember the films at all -- whether they were straight black & white, "just the facts, ma'am" sort, or whether they might have been more cartoonish. I do remember that the girls and boys saw the films separately, to avoid embarassment and that sort of thing. It was a little silly, since the first thing we did was to meet on the playground after school and compare films: "What did yours say about this? Did it show that?"

    Of course, by fifth grade nearly everyone in class, even those who lived in town, had hatched a chick, seen puppies, kittens or calves born, and asked the relevant questions. As I recall, the hardest thing to get our minds around was the thought of our parents actually engaging in "that" sort of behavior. I guess we all preferred to think we'd been hatched, or something -- even kids with a clutch of brothers and sisters tended to avert their minds.

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  23. I learned all about "my china" from books. :) My dear mom (she really was) took me aside one day, with a house full of company, to tell me about the birds and the bees. She told me that a man plants a seed in a woman. That was it. Thank goodness for sex education in school - and books. tee hee

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  24. I continue to thank author Judy Blume for many things, not the least of which is her book ARE YOU THERE, GOD, IT'S ME, MARGARET?--a book that explained so very much about menstruation to me.

    So, when I was in middle school, we did get "a talk" given to us by the Dean of Girls, along with being shown a film. We were taught that a girl absolutely can swim when she had her period (tampon required, though)!

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  25. I have never understood why human culture deems the natural state of our bodies and it's processes to be shameful, hidden, and not talked about.

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  26. Girls today seem to develop earlier as my daughter says there were girls in my grand daughter's class who had their periods as early as 8. I didn't think that was possible... and definitely a bit scary. I was 14 and probably one of the last in my class. Mom didn't say much about any of it except the very basics. Luckily for me, I wasn't terribly curious.

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  27. The school had a film for all the girls and their mothers one evening when we were in fifth grade. My mother had never told me anything. All we did was sit in the desks and we watched this film that explained menstruation in very basic terms and told us we were women now and shouldn't go swimming but could still ride bikes. I don't remember there being any talk about sex, but then I was only 10 years old and may have missed it--LOL! All us girls were so embarrassed to be there with our mothers you could hear a pin drop all through the movie. There was no discussion afterwards that I remember. On the way home my mom asked me--do you have any questions? Of course, I said no, but I didn't really learn anything I needed to know. I raised rodents (sold hamsters, mice, rats, and guinea pigs to local pet shops)...females came in heat, were totally at the mercy of their bodies, indiscriminate--males were crazed, insatiable, and sometimes violent. The only saving grace for the females is the males may have been repetitive, but they were extremely brief--lol! I had absolutely no desire to have anything to do with sex.

    What's funny is that I think I still have the pamphlets they handed out in a box of nostalgia stuff. Was the 1959-60 school year. Now I want to go dig them out and see what they really did say. Did they mention about how the babies got there? I seem to remember the planting of the seed concept and thinking of my mom's garden. ?? I haven't looked at them for many decades. I don't think I threw them out. Now I will have to search them out--LOL! :)

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  28. I love Georgie's excitement over his sex ed class discovery, Friko! I remember only two classes when I was in Catholic school. In the first, when I was in sixth or seventh grade, came from an Irish nun who came into the classroom and announced that some of us were smelling really bad and needed to bathe more and also to use deodorant. She also said that those who had their periods already should remember to put their used pads in the proper container and not to try flushing them down the toilet. And that was it.

    When I was a senior in high school, there was this really twisted nun who gave us a "life education" lecture series. It consisted of her bringing in a bulging folder of news clippings about sex crimes. She would read one of her favorites every day. Then she would carefully place the clipping back into the folder, peer at us through her glasses and say "And this, girls, is what happens when you mess around with men!" Yikes!!

    My parents were pretty good about answering questions -- though my mother was a little embarrassed and my father not embarrassed enough. When my doctor told them that I was starting puberty (at age 8) and might get my period at 9 or 10, they were shocked and struggled to think of a way to bring all this up to me. Finally, one morning at breakfast, with the whole family present, my father said "Well, baby, the doctor tells us that before too long, you're going to be on the rag!" What?? Deeply humiliated, I put my fingers in my ears. I couldn't hear it. Not from him...not at the breakfast table.

    Later in life, when I was working for a teen girl's magazine, I specialized in health and psychology and wrote the kinds of articles I would have liked to have had available when I was growing up. Eventually, I wrote a book about health and sexuality (The Teenage Body Book) with a pediatrician friend. It was filled with everything we both wished we had been told when growing up! (Those cute little pamphlets from the sanitary napkin manufacturers just didn't make it...they were so coy...)

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  29. I've returned from a little blog holiday to find this post and have a good laugh, first of all, and then a big sad at the way you were [not] introduced to this wonderful mystery of the female body.

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  30. When sensitives like us have such mothers it flavors our approach to life. I strive to move on from that voice.

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  31. Oh I enjoyed your version! My Mother explained nothing...well she did share the don't have sex part. In school they took all the fourth grade girls into the milk room and showed them a film. I don't know what they did to the boys. I had a friend whose Mother explained it all to us in detail...she was such a kind lady. :)

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  32. Aren't you glad those days are behind us? I certainly am. I was a very late bloomer. I thought I'd die because I had heard about the thing from school and from my friends, and from my cousin born just ten days before I was born. At 16, I still had not started menses. I had lied to my cousin that I had started for at least a year or more. Then, she was at my house and had to use a feminine product and we had none. My mother said, "Sally doesn't need them, and neither do I." I was humiliated. I'm sorry it happened to you the way it did.

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  33. Having a progressive Dad helped me a lot. He wanted to make sure I knew the facts and having an other daughter 10 years after me gave him the opportunity to be frank, As time went by he told me I could come and talk openly about any concerns. My mom found it more difficult to chay openly until her later years when I already had male friends. I was the first born girl. She did take me to shop for supplies when it was time and told me to keep a calendar record so I would have no surprises. And I was not banned from swimming in tthe lake if I felt up to it.

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