This is an accounting of how I learned about sex as a Southern Baptist boy growing up in Texas in the 1960s, first the deep piney woods of Tyler, then in Plano, then a small-town north of Dallas. It is certainly not about sex education. Such a thing did not exist at that time.
Adults never talked about sex – not my parents, or in school, or in church, or on television, only obliquely in the moves, or anywhere, and long before the internet. I learned mostly bad information from other raging hormone teenage boys as ignorant as I was about it.
Terribly shy around girls, I absolutely never talked about sex with them. As far as I knew, they only ever thought about romance but never about sex. Fortunately, I never experienced sexual abuse myself and never found out about anybody who had in this timeframe. In retrospect, my sex education, such as it was, is amusing and astounding, and kind of sad. This little memoir is to the best of my memory – I certainly didn’t take notes – with all the shortcomings that come with remembering from as long as 60 years ago. I’m reminded of the joke that came around in the late sixties or early seventies – I remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty. The further back, the more suspect the details and the timeline.
Warning: I use the word “dick” and “boner” throughout for the male organ for authenticity. I learned the word “penis” long after I started using “dick”. To the best of my recollection, I first learned the word penis as a senior in high school – more on that later.
When I was six or seven, my family lived in an apartment above a garage – this was in Louisiana. I vaguely remember a gathering of young women in the driveway. The way they talked, the way the laughed, the way they looked, everything – we might call it female energy now – made an impression on me. That was my first consciousness that women were different, strange, and mysterious, though I knew not why.
My first lessons in female anatomy came from flimsy True Crime detective magazines on the racks in a little open-air knick-knack store – a kind of a forerunner to convenience stores. I came across pages with pictures of women in panties who had black bars over their eyes and over their mysterious breasts. Talk about tantalizing, probably more so than had I seen full frontal nudity. I had to know what was under those bars. I realized women had hidden delights and they were scary and naughty and exciting, and I had to know more.
My first sex education lesson came from a fourth-grade neighborhood boy, Timmy. We were sitting in the branches of a birch tree when he frankly said sex happened when men and women rubbed their butts together. Not long after I heard something about rubbers and sex. The only rubbers I knew about were the rubbers on the pitcher’s mound in baseball games. So, my first visualizations of sex were of a man and a woman with pitcher mound rubbers tied around their waists to their butts somehow and rubbing them together.
Yes, seriously.
In Junior High, I started getting what I would come to know as boners. They just happened – sproing! My mom had bought me skintight jeans for whatever reason, and it was quite obvious on the days I wore those. I didn’t know enough to know what do about them – they just happened, demanding some kind of attention, but what? I don’t remember even knowing enough to be embarrassed until one day I was standing outside the cafeteria, unbeknownst to some friends nearby. A stocky crew-cut kid named Ross pinched up a roll of his inner thigh, said “Clack” and the boys laughed. With his thigh still pinched into a roll, Ross looked up to see me looking at him, stopped laughing, and looked off into the near distance like he saw something. I smiled and turned away. After that, I knew enough to be embarrassed.
Further lessons in Junior High about female anatomy came from a girly magazine abandoned along the roadside a friend and I on our bikes had, innocently enough, happened across. This led to scavenger hunts on bicycles looking for more such treasures. We found a hollowed-out log in the nearby woods and stashed some pictures there. I learned from these what women’s breasts looked like, with little raspberries on them, and that the space between their legs were totally skin like the rest of their bodies.
One day, a neighborhood kid I did not know all that well invited me over to his house to watch grainy black-and-white film from a nudist camp while the parents were out somewhere. It was like being in a movie theater. The film was mounted on a reel that rotated with a flickering hum and rolled in front of the camera bulb that projected onto a screen, just like in the movies. Women were playing volleyball. This is how I came to know that the space between the legs was not just skin, but hairy and the hair covered up something, which only deepened the mystery.
I became ever more dependent on other young highly unreliable teenage boys to learn more about sex. My dick kept getting hard without warning throughout the day and I had come by now to hazy notions of why and how and that it had to with girls in their mysterious dresses with their mysterious giggles and their mysterious purses they wouldn’t let boys look into, and that strange place between their legs now known to me as “pussy”. I did not have the first clue what to do about any of it.
A Junior High classmate asked me to a party at his home by the lake. A handful showed up, including a some girls. I found himself standing by a tree with one of them. I didn’t know what to say but I wanted to know what kissing her would be like. She let me only because, I would come to conclude later, she was curious too. When we stopped, we just looked at each other and went our separate ways. I never saw her again, but I always remembered her, my first kiss, and the way she looked at me afterward, disappointed too.
Finally, formal sex education for us seniors in high school – such as it was. A tall, imposing red-headed teacher I did not really know strode into our homeroom and talked about sex and anatomy. There was no rolling condoms down bananas. My only lasting memory is when she represented a penis – there’s that word – as a rectangle squared off at the top and open-ended at the bottom and how weird that must’ve looked like for at least some of the girls. I now suspect most of them were probably far better informed than I was.
Not long before that … ahem … education, l had my first real girlfriend. That’s when I found out what kissing and hugging and scrunching up together could do to a guy, turn him inside out, crazy with thwarted desire. But it was I myself who thwarted the first opportunity for consummation of that desire. On a cold night in the back of a VW bug, she pulled away, looked at me and said, “I want to make you happy.” I had a failure of nerve even as I had a raging boner right then. That will come when it’s the right time, the nice shy Southern Baptist boy said to her. It never came with her. We broke up. I spent many years after gaining carnal knowledge truly regretting missing that first opportunity. Our making out sessions were truly fantastic. She was hot. She was ripe and I was ripe. I’m fully aware the relationship probably would not have lasted and could have ended badly … but still.
That relationship set a pattern for future ones – first, crazy passion, then a routine, then restlessness, then a passionless break up, then heartache, then loneliness. Each girlfriend would give me a confidence that I could find another girl quickly after a breakup, a confidence that proved unwarranted.
It was not until I was attending a Southern Baptist college that this nice, shy Southern Baptist boy lost his religion and then lost his virginity. The first time I thought I lost my virginity I actually had not. It felt rough. Only after I truly and giddily lost my virginity did I realize that first time I was really just thrusting between my girlfriends’ buttocks and the couch. I climaxed anyway. A few days after, we got it right, our anatomies properly aligned, and it felt GREAT! We didn’t talk about it. She was quiet and mainly stared distractedly even as I drove her to her dorm. Clearly, she had lost her virginity too, but still we never talked about it. She quickly came to enjoy sex as much as I did. She’s married in Wisconsin now.
Only after I lost my virginity did I learn how to masturbate. I spent the next few decades of self-abuse of my life making up for that self-abstinence in my teens.
Now I truly knew what my dick was for – or did 1? Like love, sex is irrational, more connected to the heart than the brain. Both have brought me the greatest joy and the greatest pain. They should both be tightly bonded always, but too often are not. Carson McCullers said it well – the heart is a lonely hunter indeed.
My sex education, or mis-education, now seems like it comes from an ancient time. Formal sex education is now common in school curriculums, sex talk is pervasive in popular culture, and oh my, the internet.
I’m happy to report a girlfriend I had a brief romance with shortly after we met in college reconnected some thirty year later and are happily married now. She’s smarter than me and reminds me often of my shortcomings and sometimes I make progress, but probably not nearly as much as she’d like. I like to think she at least gives me an E for Effort.
That appendage demands far less attention in my old age. They say it will harden one last time when I die. Somehow it seems fitting.
Copyright © Johnny Clack 2022
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