Plain Talk About Sex
For Christian Young People
Orr
1950-1957(?)
Sex is everywhere! Magazines, movies, television, and even athletics are ruining civilization. Girls, this is your responsibility. If you wouldn’t be so brazen in flaunting your lady parts, men would have more control. Boys, you have a responsibility too. You are smarter and stronger than girls. (Which is interesting, since evidently these boys become mindless sex fiends if they see a girl in shorts.) Our author also throws in a enough “wrath of God” talk to force everyone into a cold shower.
I hope everyone starts living clean and pure after reading these helpful tips. You don’t want to make trouble with the man upstairs. Aren’t you glad your librarian is here to help you avoid damnation?
Mary
Not the first time I’ve noticed that much as some people hold up the fifties as a utopia of peace, virtue and stability, the decade never saw itself that way.
Walls o’ text don’t help. It needs some illustrations. But – of what? Certainly not the items under discussion!
Ah yes, “white skin” is the prized symbol of purity and beauty, and girls who wear revealing clothing should be spanked. We ought to keep these books around just to prove that the 1950s were NOT the good old days.
Exactly! I love the line about how dancing is physical and mental preparation for sexual contact. I guess I’ve been going to the wrong dance classes then. Or do I need to have a drink before that starts happening? Although, I did see one good piece of advice in there for the guys. “You can have fun and fellowship without pawing your date.” I think the Do Not Paw rule should be an integral part of sex ed.
Yes, my ballroom dancing teacher (starting in the third or fourth grade, not sure now) would definitely have been surprised to hear that! So would her students, for that matter. Dear Miss Magwood, those certainly were simpler times…
AIDs. Bratz dolls. Abercrombie and Fitch sexed up underpants for 6-year-olds, 4Chan, sexual slavery on the rise, skyrocketing numbers of single-parent homes, usually enmeshed in poverty… For more than mere anecdotal evidence, I recommend Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom,” or for a more visceral experience, Porter’s Imami All Mind.
The book is old and out-of-date: weed it in any public library. University libraries, on the other hand, will want to keep it for its prophetic “if this goes on” content.
Considering how things have turned out viz the exploitation of women, children, and vulnerable handicapped adults, the mockery is perhaps ill-advised.
AIDS? We had STDs long, long before the decline of Western Civilization (whenever you imagine that kicked off).
And single-parent home statistics are complicated. A lot of analysis lumps in “unmarried parents” with single parents. They’re also skewed by the fact it’s no longer necessary to lie (“No, I’m not an unwed mother, my husband is … out of town.”) and the decline in married births. Even if single-parent births stayed constant, having married couples birth fewer kids means the percentage of single-parent births rises.
In short, not much of a prophet.
You do realize people have been exploited by others for a long time? If this is news to you, perhaps check out some history books. Many groups of people have struggled for their rights or to be recognized as actual people all throughout history. Whether you think the advice is good or not, please don’t suggest that there was this golden era where everyone was treated wonderfully.
Sadly, yes. As you would have realized, no doubt, were you familiar with Dalrymple’s work as a prison doctor, or the realities of life in polyamous black ghetto America. The sexual exploitation of young homo sap. directly correlates to the social attitudes in the communties in which they live does indeed vary from time to time and place to place. The rot usually begins (as it so often does) at the top. It is typical of the temporal parochialism of the lumpenintellegensia that they imagine that all times and all places “progress” in sexual enlightment, and is every bit as foolish as the notion of a golden age of the past.
Sometimes things get better. Sometimes they get worse. This time it was the latter.
Then again, sexually active women are much more socially acceptable than they used to be. Rape victims get better treatment in the courts. Sexual harassment and spousal rape are crimes, as is domestic abuse. We still have huge problems regarding rape and the double standard but no question we’ve improved from the days when this book came out.
Yes, women are expected to be sexually active and at ever younger ages. Predatory male behaviour has no social restrictions. When the only checks are legal, the outliers become the norm: Sharia and gangsta rap in the same cohort. Rape, sexual harrassment, and assault are soaring again, as vulnerable populations: young women, the elderly, handicapped, endure the results of an anything-goes (so long as it’s technically legal, and/or you can get away with it) rule set. But at least the number of poor black men imprisoned continues to rise past pre-Civil Rights numbers (but do you really want to call that “improvement”?) I agree that if one is rich, white and privileged, the freedom to mess around seems so much more fun and consequence-free than a more socially restrictive society that emphasizes stoic virtues. Those lacking sufficient economic power, however, suffer tremendously from the loss of cultural capital. If you won’t read non-fiction, good urban fiction is a must: for many trapped in this world, their lives are hell on earth.
But we’ve gone far down the rabbit hole: The fact that we are capable of having a rational disagreement about the facts on the ground and the implication this has for the opinions expressed by the author of the book in question should clue you in to the dangers of making weeding decisions based on hubris. “I (the enlightened librarian) don’t think like Those People, so the book should go,” rather than objective standards.
Soaring is debatable. It may be that as we become more willing to prosecute, more women are willing to speak and more cases get prosecuted.
And yes, if someone wants to mess around, I think it’s good that they can do so with fewer people judging them for it (and I know plenty of women friends who are happy this is an option). But rape and elderly abuse aren’t the result of more sexual freedom, they’re an abuse of power. We have rape in Saudi Arabia, which isn’t noted for sexual freedom, for instance, and we have sexual abuse in Christian churches that obsess over chastity.
And as someone pointed out upthread, there are more contemporary books on the same topic. A 1950s book isn’t going to have much advice about current media, fashions, etc, so why keep it?
The book itself is dated, and the library probably needs something with a good update,and some of the ideas aren’t exactly right, but it’s still shameful to do ap ost essentially mocking God’s standards. No one needs to be puritanical or go overboard, but if young people would keep themselves pure until marriage and treat sex as part of the bond between a married couple as it was meant to be, there’d be a lot less STDs and unwanted pregnancies. The fact is, our culture IS too sex-drenched and we need to return to a better standard of morality and drop the ‘sex sells’ mentality. There’s also nothing wrong with being modest…no one’s saying to cover everything, but many of today’s outifts ARE indeed way too skimpy.
I don’t think the post mocks God’s standards (setting aside for the moment that not everyone agrees what God’s standards are), but rather some of the book’s notions that are outdated and unlikely to serve a community: the ideas that girls are responsible for boys’ behavior, that white skin is to be prized (too bad, I suppose, if you’re a person of color), and that wouldn’t it be nice if we could hit a girl whose clothing we don’t like.
Libraries have room for books about faith-based approaches to sex, and the merits of chastity–but how about something from this century?
Actually, I don’t think this is too bad at all for it’s day. It says that “fellows” should be held to the same standards as “girls”, that women really shouldn’t overdo the flesh as it’s not really fair on men, and that there are a lot of conflicting messages about sex coming from media. I’m a 21st century agnostic feminist, and would agree with the above, even though I have a completely different take on sex and religion than the writers do. This is actually a really interesting primary resource for gender studies. Reclassify and keep?
Reclassify as primary source material for history research? Definitely. There are plenty better sex ed sources, including Christian/Gospel focused ones, that directly address things like sexting, “modesty” (I would call it being safe or prudent) online, etc.
Stop flaunting your sex curves.
God, I’m glad I didn’t have to live through this time.
Still in print, still a bestseller (but only in Arabic).
The section starting “And then we’ve arrived at the age of ‘Queens'” did not go the way I thought it would.
Yes, how is a pure young man supposed to resist the scantily-clad, period?
If I spent my time giving empty-headed, giddy and thoughtless girls the spanking they deserve, would that make me “sex-wackey”?
JennyOH – I thought the same exact thing!!
“Tastily” attired? Sounds like a “wolf” to me!
Freudian slip? Hopefully they meant “tasteFULLY”.
I love (for certain very peculiar values of “love”) the consistent tone of body-shaming: women, you’re so much easier to look at with clothes on because frankly you’re kind of disgusting, even though your naked flesh turns guys on… this reminds me of a guy who wrote in to Miss Manners (Judith Martin) to lament the shedding of girdles and hint that a lack of girdles caused (a) ugly women, but (b) also a rise in the teen pregnancy rates. Okay then!