An Uneducated View of Sex, Food and Politics - Derek Haines (beach read book .TXT) 📗

to admit she was right. There wasn’t even a small one hiding.
I didn’t fully appreciate the knowledge I had gained at that precise moment, because confusion was reigning supreme. And it took a while, some days in fact, to confirm the fact that yes, all boys seemed to have Willies, and it would further seem from a limited amount of study at kindergarten that girls by default did not.
In today’s modern, technological, electronically informed, Bill Gates dominated society we live in, information such as this may be easier to access. As opposed to my ‘find out by pure luck and accident inspired guessing at life’s mysteries’ upbringing in a late 1950’s Australia that could not even pronounce the word sex due to the lack of anyone hearing the word said out loud, so hence no one uttered it, (maybe thought of only in bedrooms with doors locked and lights out) today’s babies must get it easier. Not being a recent father, I can only has at a guess that in this new, rapidly changing technological world, new born babies are more than likely taken from the delivery ward, and immediately deposited in a Microsoft designed ‘Introduction to Windows’ crib. And by taking advantage of a new born’s instinctive grip on to everything and anything, a ‘Grip Sensitive Mouse’ is placed in the baby’s hand. An interactive screen located at the focal point of the baby, (approximately 1.5 cm from the nose) and headphones are used to give the baby all the vital information it needs to survive in society.
25 Now commonly referred to as a GSM device.
As an added bonus to being Windows 98 proficient and finding out information as vital as that boys have Willies and girls don’t in less than two hours, the GSM also records fingerprint details, registers the new citizen for a Medicare card in exactly sixteen years time, updates the electoral role for eighteen years time, and passes the fingerprints to every Police Force in the country as well as Interpol. Social Security is also notified, and unless the mother applies for cancellation due to extenuating circumstances, the first welfare payment will be in the post by days end.
This advance in modern society is all well and dandy, but I believe I will stay with the past at hand. As I would imagine my readership (I am dreaming of a number bigger than one million here, but reality seems to keep interfering and indicating a vastly different number in a range of less than seven) is older than three years old, (i.e. pre Window 95) so more empathetic to my tales of woe and accidental discovery of sex than a ‘know it all in two hours’ post Windows 95 child.
After the basic discovery of an anatomical difference between boys and girls, the going got very tough. The road to discovery was not an easy one to follow. For a start, ending kindergarten and starting primary school bought a tremendous obstacle to information. It would be a number of years before I could re-establish communications with girls. The age I was entering at ‘big school’ was an age of hating girls. Boys just did not talk to girls. If you got caught, there was a very good chance that the school bully would call you ‘a girl’, and beat the living crap out of you. This put a dampener on my enthusiasm to discover this as yet undefined mystery that would be later in my life referred to as ‘sex’.
To underline the danger I lived in, it was just bad luck that had me sitting next to a girl in the lunch shed at age six and a half, and innocently I entered a negotiation for her peanut paste sandwich. I hated the way my Mum’s tomato and cheese sandwiches went all mushy by lunchtime, but as she indicated she liked her tomato sandwiches like that, it was easy to conclude a satisfactory exchange. My interaction with a girl, even though it was only based on pure greed for peanut paste, and a hatred of soggy bread, was duly noticed and reported to our school bully. He was a fat Greek kid, whose name eludes me to this day, but could inflict bone-crushing kicks to the shins. My personal cost for one peanut paste sandwich, were two bruised shins that took a week and a half to lose that neon blue and yellow hue. ‘Discretion being the better part of valour’, and ‘better a live coward than a dead hero’ were expressions that typified my next few years. The mystery would have to wait; otherwise I stood a good chance of being crippled by age eight.
After a hiatus of many years. Enough to forget that there was a mystery at all; events rekindled my interest in this matter that had remained un-named and forgotten for so long. The mystery now had a name. Sex. But what was it? And what do you do with it? As I mentioned earlier in this book, an answer can be of little help, if you have no idea of what the question is that you should ask, or should have asked. But there were hints to follow up. And blind alleys and red herrings and misunderstandings to ensure I lost my way.
Little girl: Mummy. Do you and Daddy have sexual relations?
Mother: Yes Dear.
Little Girl: Then how come they don’t visit?
26 I apologise for confusing topics here. I will try to avoid politics until the appropriate point in the book.
27 We have Americanised this to ‘Peanut Butter’. For the story’s accuracy, I have used the exact words printed on the jar in 1962.
28 Recipe 4. Mum’s Soggy Tomato and Cheese Sandwich.
The simple secrets to these very soggy sandwiches lie in two fundamentals. One. Always prepare with frozen bread. Two. Create two layers of sliced, (preferably over ripe) tomatoes encasing between them one very thin layer of cheese. Even simpler. The order is: Bread, tomato, cheese, tomato, bread. Perfectly soggy by lunch time, every time.

******

Guilt! A very powerful motivator and tool of obedience unsurpassed for effectiveness and control. Especially of children. In the early 1960’s it was an essential child rearing tool and society control. It was used by any form of authority that had any form of power or need to persuade. From parents to Governments. Fear was another great tool, which will get a smaller mention due to its connection with guilt. What is guilt? In simple terms it is having your small brain programmed to immediately react when you do something. At the moment of enacting an action, and sometimes if the program is particularly well embedded, at the conception of the thought of the possibility of planning an action, an alert is subconsciously raised that says, “You’re gonna get into trouble!” Or another well known alert, “If I get caught I will get a belting. Better move my bum to the vacant block down the street.”
Guilt promotes alternative behaviour. Sometimes this was done for the child’s own protection. As in, “If you go near that stove I will give you a belting!” created a fear, but also a guilt if you happened by the stove, and inadvertently got just a little too close. It must be wrong to go near that white thing in the kitchen. There was little mention of being scolded by hot water or getting burns and needing skin grafts. The fear and guilt was enough. Being dragged from the side of the road and being told as you are dragged by the scruff of the neck that “I’ll kill you, you little brat if I catch you on the road again!” is a good example of a guilt implant being created. This in-building of guilt about going near the road was effective in keeping me away from the road, but it created a greater fear in my brain of my mother than it did of the dangers of being squashed by a car on the road. But, I did feel guilt manifesting in me when I ventured to the front garden. I was innocent up and including the fence line. Further than that I was guilty!
Guilt also hangs around for a long time. Reshaping itself over the years to be truly active and relevant to each new stage of life. As a brain program, it is one of those little blighters that can be very hard to erase.
1962 revisited. Location: Bathroom. Situation: In bath.
Any six year old boy can tell you, if free from a guilt complex, that he has discovered that his penis (Willy in this era and case) does not always look the same. Sometimes a little longer, wider, skinnier, shorter or even dumpier than the last time it was inspected. As its singular function of freeing up room in the bladder for more cordial, coca cola, water or ginger beer is performed a number of times a day, and has to be held and aimed correctly, Willy changes do get noticed. As a six year old, I knew this too. No big deal. Until it became a big deal.
This big deal came about in a flash. On entering the tepid water of my daily bath, I happened to notice that Willy was in one of its silly upward and firmer modes, and noticing my mother noticing, I immediately laughed. The humour to me was the fact that it looked funny just poking out of the water like that. Like a little submarine’s periscope. My chuckling at my submarine humour was cut short extremely promptly by the sudden lash of my mother’s tongue.
“It is not funny. You naughty little boy. That’s very naughty. Get out of the bath this instant!”
Silence prevailed as she towelled me dry. The matter had been discussed fully. Nothing more was to be said. I gathered this from the silence that was maintained. A concept was now firmly in place in my small brain. My Willy was not something to be discussed, looked at, admired, laughed at or mentioned. Any change in condition of my Willy was naughty. Anytime he was to get into one of his silly upward and firmer modes, I was to feel immediately guilty. This was going to be difficult, as over the coming years of my young life, I would discover that no matter how hard I tried, my penis was one part of my body that was difficult to control, and obeyed very few of the social controls I was sure I should have possessed over its behaviour. For a young boy or adolescent in a family home environment, just getting out of bed in the morning could take on mammoth proportions of guilt, anxiety or embarrassment.
This one seemingly unimportant and minor experience, similar I am sure, (but not confirmed by returned questionnaires) to many young children of the sixties and before, created the guilt. The beginning of the program that would be embedded in my/our brains as children. Before long this guilt program was enhanced by teachers and relatives. “That’s dirty!” was a favourite expression I can recall being used on probably hundreds of occasions. It is only now that I realise that these key phrases were used to trigger the guilt program any time we ventured close to the truth about sex. Is it any wonder I got told, “That’s dirty!” I was in a no win situation. No one was going to tell me anything. So I had to find out for myself. And if I was discovered looking for clues, out would come the guilt lines. “You dirty little boy!” for looking at a bra advertisement in the Woman’s Day magazine.
So the safest way was to only seek information from my peers. This was not the preferred or, in hindsight fastest road to the truth.