Birds and bees were a mystery to me
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 25, 2025
- 199
In a scene from “Inherit the Wind,” the 1960s film based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, Spencer Tracy asks an important question.
“What,” he inquires, “is the biblical evaluation of sex?”
Frederic March, seated in the witness chair, doesn’t hesitate.
“It is considered original sin,” he replies, smugly sure of himself.
Their courtroom colloquy lasts longer than 15 minutes, and it’s well worth a trip down the Google/YouTube rabbit hole to study it in all its complexity, but for our purposes, that snippet will suffice.
Sex is an uncomfortable subject, cloaked in mystery and misinformation yet undeniably integral to our very existence.
We are all the result of sex, the bodily function of procreation.
But it’s not easy to talk about, especially for parents. Neither my mother nor my father ever sat me down to have The Talk. They were enlightened educators, with five college degrees between them, so they knew a thing or two about how to impart a message.
But that never happened.
Whether or not they shared their insights with my younger siblings, I can’t say, but I suppose it’s possible. Experts suggest that quite often a firstborn child is the one experiencing parental mistakes, an experimental dress rehearsal, a means to improve their skills.
But I’m not blaming Mom and Dad for anything like negligence.
On the contrary, they were as caring and loving as they could be.
Still, I didn’t know jack squat about sex, aside from its sinfulness.
A lot of that guilt sprouted from seeds sewn over the course of eight years of parochial grade school, a time when young minds are extremely malleable and soak up information like a sponge.
On the plus side of that equation, I ingested (and retain) a lot of trivial minutia about popular music and Major League Baseball; on the debit side of the ledger, however, I lacked anything resembling even the most basic building blocks of, well, social interaction.
So it was, essentially, a lot of trial and error, of swing and miss.
Throughout my four years in the public school system, I tripped, stumbled and fell flat, negotiating the sometimes treacherous yet occasionally rewarding landscape, adding and subtracting ideas and tactics, trying all the while not to seem like such an innocent.
But that’s what I was.
Along about 10th grade, it occurred to me girls were vastly smarter and incalculably more sophisticated in playing the game.
A line from “The Wonder Years,” spoken by Kevin Arnold as he tries to figure out Winnie Cooper, comes to mind. It’s something like, “Girls knew everything, and boys didn’t even know the rules.”
I remember passing out in health class during a filmstrip that detailed the dangers of venereal disease, an embarrassing interlude I kept from Mom and Dad for what must be obvious reasons.
But by the time I got to college, where men outnumbered women by a 7-to-1 margin, I shifted my id into neutral and focused my attention on classes and the sheltered, cozy world of academia.
Then I met someone, and the world tilted wildly on its wobbly axis.
She was just 17, an early-admission legacy freshman, and I was beginning my junior year. The summer before I had become involved with a girl, someone with whom I had spent a lot of time, but there was no sex. To quote Elvis Costello from his debut album:
“She thought that I knew, and I thought that she did,
So both of us were willing, but we didn’t know how to do it.”
The track is titled, appropriately enough, “Mystery Dance.”
There was a swirling maelstrom taking place 250 miles away from where she waited, wearing my class ring, faithfully calling every Sunday evening, but I was lost to her, spiraling into original sin.
My appalling behavior, the spawn of a heretofore unknown and embarrassing glut of riches, spilled messily into the real world when, home for Thanksgiving, I had my new girlfriend answer the front door when my old girlfriend came by to welcome me back.
The sheer ugliness of that scene still shames me, and as I’m doing my penance in Purgatory, I will have eons to reflect on my cruelty.
I’ll close this confession with an exchange from “The Graduate.”
Mrs. Robinson’s husband confronts Benjamin, who has spent most of the summer in bed with his wife but is now more interested in his daughter, and asks, “Is there something I’ve said that’s caused this contempt or is it just the things I stand for that you despise?”
Benjamin quips, “What happened between me and Mrs. Robinson didn’t mean anything. We might as well have been shaking hands.”
That’s a metaphor for sex that’s either brilliant or loathsome, but I’m in no position to cast judgment, being a lowly original sinner.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where nobody’s perfect but the music’s always good.