Peter’s Story
Section Four - Episode Two
Sex and the facts of life in 1950's suburbia
The dysfunctional reality of a repressive culture, especially
regarding sex and sexuality.....
The real big control, of course, was on the totally taboo subject of sex. It simply did not exist in the New Zealand of the 1950's.....
The real big control, of course, was on the totally taboo subject of sex. It simply did not exist in the New Zealand of the 1950's (I don't know where all us “baby-boomer” kids were supposed to have come from, if no-one was having sex!) It was never mentioned by my parents, nor at school, and only very discretely in the media. I can recall on one occasion, in all innocence, asking my parents at the dinner table the big question about where do babies come from? There was an embarrassed silence, and my mother referred the question to my father, which was always her tactic to avoid embarrassing questions like this. He made a comment about storks and finding babies under gooseberry bushes, with a nervous laugh, and said no more. That was all the “sex education” I was to ever get from them.
But in the playground at school, there was endless “dirty talk” by the boys, and endless speculation around the subject of sex. Sex had a grubby, unhealthy energy associated with it, it was closely associated in our minds with going to the toilet. Words like shit, piss, and the sex-related vocabulary like our rude words for the sex organs, were all mixed in together in an unhealthy mish-mash of misinformation and voyeur-type curiosity.
There was a very unhealthy energy around the changing sheds at the school swimming baths. These were made of corrugated iron, and if any boy even thought of maybe trying to take a peek through a nail hole into the girl's changing shed, well, this would have been a capital crime, so we did not even dare imagine doing such a thing!
If my sister or I were ever caught swearing (words like shit, piss and bugger were the swear words of these days, we had never even heard of the “f-word” or similar such words), we were immediately marched into the bathroom by mother, to have our mouths literally washed out with soap and water! We really were, it happened several times.
And the half-truths and outright untruths that some of the bolder, allegedly more “knowledgeable” boys used to spout about sex! I was so ignorant on the subject, but so desperate to not show my ignorance, and therefore not expose myself to possible teasing. I would pretend to know all about it, all the time wondering what really was the “big secret” that they were talking about?
The legacy of this unhealthy, smutty, energy around sex has remained with me right through my life, as it must have for everybody who grew up in the 1950's. It has been one of the major obstacles to my having healthy relationships with women, as both I and the women concerned have had this legacy of these unhealthy attitudes to overcome.
It's more than the idea that sex is sinful and dirty, and our sex organs are filthy and contaminated. It's also the whole male-female thing of men craving after “it” and women reluctant to give “it” because to them it's dirty, distasteful, somehow “unclean”. These attitudes originate from these childhood times behind the bike-sheds and in the changing-sheds, with any attempt at open healthy discussion rigidly suppressed by what was a fundamentalist society.
Even in these times when the most intimate details of the sex life of the President of the U.S.A. (written in October 1998) are being splashed all over the world's media, there are still some taboos about our ordinary everyday bodily functions that are “not nice” and are never mentioned in decent company. Just try to raise the subjects of menstruation, masturbation or oral sex over the tea-cups at work tomorrow, and see what I mean!
I once read a science-fiction story that featured an alien race which had absolutely no taboos around sex or the elimination of waste matter from their bodies. They would think nothing of having sex in front of each other, and dropping their trousers to eliminate their body wastes in front of everyone in broad daylight. They had no taboos about their body's organs of reproduction or elimination. But they had their own very strict taboo about something that we take for granted. In fact, our society concocts elaborate rituals where large numbers of us get together socially to indulge ourselves openly and unashamedly in what, to these aliens, was a secretive, shameful activity.
While they had no taboos about the elimination of material from their bodies, they had very strict taboos, enforced by their legal system, around the ingestion of food and drink into their bodies. To eat or drink in the company of anyone else was unthinkable to them, and was only ever done strictly in private, and never ever spoken of.
The story centered around the cultural clash between these two cultures, theirs and ours, and the difficulties that individual members of the two cultures faced in learning to live in each other's cultures, surrounded by the open expression of an activity that had been programmed into their psyches from birth as shameful and disgusting, and to be kept secret at all costs.
To them, the sight of hundreds of humans happily munching Big Macs together at the local Macdonalds was the ultimate obscenity. And, to the humans who visited their planet, the sight of thousands of their people openly copulating in public, just like in an X-rated video, was the ultimate culture shock. And of course, there was much drama around the occasional slip-up when someone forgot the local customs and indulged in a taboo activity; like when a human tourist to their planet casually pulled out a chocolate bar and began munching.
Where is the logic in the customs of either culture? Theirs and ours? In reality, both sets of taboos only exist because of a very strong tribal belief system backed up by rigid laws.
And, in both cases, these belief systems and laws have succeeded in making what should be a simple fact of life, a pleasurable natural activity that everyone does openly in public, into a shameful dark secretive activity that is indulged in only in private and only spoken about within the framework of rigid customs as to what is within the bounds of “good taste” to mention.
But back to my story. Let me describe an incident that, to me, graphically illustrates the absurdity of our inhibitions about our own bodies and our sexuality.
I was about eight or nine years old, and in Standard 2 or 3. Our class was in one of the row of “pre-fab” classrooms that had sprung up in a long line along the fence-line of Hornby School to cater for us baby-boomers. As the bow-wave of the baby-boomers proceeded through the grades at school, every year one or two new pre-fabs would be added to the long line of these hastily-built, poorly-designed, pre-fabricated, wooden boxes masquerading as classrooms, over on the edge of the play-ground by the Hei-Hei Road boundary line of Hornby School.
One of the boys in my class drew some very crudely drawn pencil drawings that supposedly depicted the bodies of naked women. They were very crudely drawn, and as I recall not exactly correct, nor anywhere near complete in their anatomic detail. The artist passed them to another boy in the class, and he passed them on, etc, with some giggling and sniggering.
The teacher, a young unmarried woman, Miss Someone-or-Other (I cannot recall her name), eventually noticed that something was going on, and intercepted the drawings.
I have never, before or since, experienced such a fuss. To say that she was shocked and upset would be a huge understatement. The Headmaster was called, all of us boys in the class were severely reprimanded, and notes were sent home to our parents informing them of this unacceptable incident! I can still, to this day, sitting in that pre-fab classroom, feel the hugely venomous energy of Miss What's-her-Name, as she repeated one word over and over and over and over ..... “Disgusting.... Disgusting.... Disgusting!!!"
I was totally bewildered. What had we done wrong??? And why was a few harmless pencil lines on paper so offensive???
I realized years later that this incident had left a very deep wound in my sexuality, and that I have only very recently healed that wound. And likewise in the sexuality of every boy and girl in the class. It's little wonder that we perpetuate our insane taboos and inhibitions, resulting in all sorts of dysfunctional behaviour and misery, from generation to generation. Well, for me it's time to break the chain, cast aside this insanely bizarre dogma that insists believing that everything to do with sex and sexuality is automatically dirty and distasteful.
Another legacy of my primary school days was the bullying. It was rife at Hornby School in the 1950's. I was large for my age, but this did not help at all, as I was a very gentle, shy boy. My hair was blonde and very curly, and this made me a target for teasing, my school nickname was “Curls”. Curly hair was considered by the playground gang to be “sissy”.
Class photograph, at age seven, at about the time that the “reality” of the
terrible truth of school fully struck me.....
In the group of kids that I went right through primary school with, there were several boys who were blatant, habitual bullies. But there was one in particular who made my life a total misery for years. He was a little shorter than me, and he had straight, dark hair.
To the teachers, this boy masqueraded as my friend; and even to me for a lot of the time he would be friendly, as if we were mates. But he had a mean, vicious, sadist side to him. He would often pinch my leg and jab me with the point of his pencil or pen under cover of our desks. I would often sit at my desk, with him at the next desk, petrified with fear, wondering when he was next going to strike.
I was in a totally co-dependent relationship with him, exactly like the battered wife of an abusive husband. I was totally helpless, unable to retaliate for fear of dire retribution, and with no-one to turn to for help, and of course helpless to leave the relationship. I just had to sit there and take whatever he dished up, day after miserable day, year after year. He made my life hell, for all those years.
I used to even sometimes bump into him on Sundays! He attended the Anglican church and Sunday-School, just down the road from the Presbyterian one that I attended. I would sometimes bump into him on my way to Sunday-School, and he would make some mean comment, like “You are late for your Sunday-School, it started ages ago!”
Maybe my co-dependent behaviour years later in tolerating the abusive relationship with Cynthia, and aspects of my relationship with Jeanette, had their roots in this abusive relationship with this boy?
Finally, the day of liberation came! I finally walked free, out the gates of my torture chamber, Hornby Primary School, for the last time! My tormentor was going to go to a different High School than me! Liberation!
I only ever saw him again just the once, briefly, many years later. I am sure it was him, I would recognize the face of my torturer anywhere! I was driving down Riccarton Road on a visit to Christchurch, and there he was! He was dressed in grubby blue overalls, of the type that mechanics wear, emerging from a building of a firm that had something to do with the car-repair industry. It may have been a panel-beater or an engineering firm, I did not notice exactly, as my eyes were riveted on his miserable, mean face. He still had the same pained, spiteful squint on his face that I had experienced for all those years.
What did I feel? Seeing my former torturer, all these years later, both of us now mature men. Nothing. I felt absolutely nothing. It was him. But, so what? My reality had shifted from what it had been way back then. I had moved on, with five years of high school and years of adult living added to my life experience. He was now in a menial job, and I was in a comfortable well-paid job. I had moved on from the boy I had been back then, even though this brief encounter took place before I was to do any of my self-healing work on myself. He had no bearing on my current reality, no power over me. He was a stranger..... a ship that passes in the night, without a second glance.
In the many hours I was to spend, years later, shedding tears, and screaming my lungs out, in the workshops and therapy sessions, and psychodrama and group therapy, plus all the really deep work with the flower essences, homeopathy, and all the other self-therapy..... among the ghosts of the past that I was exorcising, were many which originated from these playground and classroom bullies, and from the repressive teachers who were so afraid of a natural human function like sex.
Click here to continue on with the next episode of this section of this (1998 version) of the story......
Section Four, Episode Three..... Fear and despair in the classroom.
