WHAT follows is about sex, and if are offended by sex, turn elsewhere. Why do we get offended by sex? What is that sensitivity, mixed with guilt, which causes us such deep unease? In this year of 1997, it surrounds us, as it surrounded the citizens of Dublin in the year of 1903, when Ulysses was written. It inspired Brian Merriman when he wrote the Midnight Court, and it was in the forefront of the minds of the stonemasons of the sile na gig.
The sile na gig are interesting, for some even show the manner in which a woman can give herself sexual enjoyment. Were those masons men or women? If they were men, they knew things that later generations of men were (apparently) to forget completely.
For the frank expression of sexuality and of pleasure ties deep within the Irish culture; and so too does an overt rejection of it, with a passion often greater than the passion of enthusiasm.
A Vagrant Beast
But that is not unique to Ireland; most cultures have an obsessive embrace/revulsion attitude towards sex, not least in the US, which experiences a gamut of enthusiasm for either extreme than anything we have seen in Ireland.
We do not need Freud or Masters and Johnson or Shere Hite to understand that what is at work here is not some problem within society, which would be solvable if only we were just a little bit better educated (one way or another) no, what we have which troubles us so much is a vagrant beast within our souls and within our bodies, which causes us immense happiness and immense distress, vast pleasure and vaster loneliness, and an enduring proof of our inability to compose rules to govern the management of that beast.
It would be easy to mock the 25 teachers of St Oliver's school in Killarney who have refused to teach the Department of Education's Relationships and Sexuality course to their primary school pupils for being reactionary, small minded and wrong. And that in itself would be wrong.
To speak out in Irish life these days against whatever new consensus is the orthodoxy takes some courage - now as always. These people are serious and deserve to be taken seriously.
Right and Wrong
They are probably wrong. They are probably right. Nobody I have ever met regarded their sex education as having been completely right or completely wrong. Perhaps things have changed these days, but I doubt it: my own memories of sex education in my Catholic boarding school in England are that alongside an avidity for more knowledge lay a disdain for the ridiculous and decrepit adults teaching us - some of them might have even been over 30 and were clearly too old for such matters.
Like all teenagers we created our own culture of music and general lore, which involved sex at a largely mythic level, into which outsiders attempted to intrude their knowledge of the real world at their peril. We knew; and we did not know. We were omniscient, yet yearned for more knowledge; and what we absorbed as truth depended not so much on what was truth as what the group decided was truth.
Later, as a young adult of the late 1960s, and belonging to the generation which discussed women's sexuality openly - or thought we did - I was sure that the old mould was over. People, we were sure, and women in particular, would not permit the days of ignorant male fumbling and one way demands ever to return. Teenagers, boys and girls, would learn about sexual pleasure, and it would become part of their lives.
Listening to Naomi Wolf on the Late Late Show the other day gave us a salutary lesson in how things go awry. The lesson she learned in California some to years after my adolescence was not how girls could discover pleasure, but rather, how girls could give pleasure to teenage boys.
In other words, that extraordinary teen culture which selects what messages it wants and rejects others had chosen the primacy of male pleasure over female pleasure - the very reverse of what we had been so earnestly discussing in UCD at the end of the 1960s.
Abominable Notions
Indeed, we could not have suspected how the message of, sexual pleasure could have become distorted - the normal activity of Naomi Wolf's pre adult teen friends was to give their boyfriends complete oral sex (and, what's more, get nothing in return).
Now, I find it a truly abominable notion, that 14 year old girls are doing such things; but, you do not have to go to California to find that practice. A schoolteacher friend of mine in a Dublin working class housing estate was asked recently by a 14 year old pupil if she could, get pregnant that way.
Within that teenager's peer group, that had become a normal activity, and not because of sex education, which had hitherto been non existent. The teenagers' own mini culture had created norms which accepted that kind of behaviour. Nor do you have to go to Dublin to find strange new sexual norms for teenage sexuality; no doubt, they exist in Killarney too, and will exist regardless of what the good teachers in St Oliver's Primary school want.
They fear - and understandably fear - for their children's childhood; but childhood is a sturdy thing, and perhaps sturdier than they imagine. The mere academic knowledge of where babies come from is known to any farmer's child, and is of little enough interest. When I was told that Father Christmas no longer existed I told my informant he was a fool, and continued to believe in him. When I was told the facts of life, it was further proof of the bizarreness and undesirability of adulthood, and I continued in my little boy ways.
The day is over when we can pretend that ignorance protects childhood. We have had too many tragedies - not least in Kerry - to believe that. Childhood depends on two other J letters, Innocence and Inexperience. Both can coexist with knowledge, and both are better protected - inasmuch as they can be - by prudent knowledge. But what is prudent? Ah indeed.