In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, when the impetuous and passionate Marianne Dashwood makes a journey in a carriage with Willoughby to Allenham, the property Willoughby is to eventually inherit, she is admonished by her sensible elder sister Elinor. Elinor in fact “could hardly believe it.”
Elinor was shocked and concerned for two reasons. First, it was presumptuous to enter the house while its current owner Mrs Smith lived there; and second Marianne “went with no other companion than Mr Willoughby.”
In other words, Marianne, an unmarried woman went on a journey with a young man unchaperoned. This was not proper in Regency England. Such behaviour, Elinor informs Marianne, had “exposed you to some very impertinent remarks.”
In this clip from the exceptional BBC version of War and Peace, Prince Andrei courts the exquisite, ‘one of a kind’, Natalie, under the watchful eye of her loving parents. At the very end, the couple walk through the snowy park and you can spot the chaperone.
Young ladies such as Natalie and Marianne had to have a chaperone in the company of an unmarried man. Chaperones were there to protect young ladies from rogues and to keep a young lady and gentleman from doing anything they would later regret, something for the young lady that would lead to her ruin.
The chaperone was necessary because the elders whether in Regency England or Tsarist Russia knew a truth universally understood if not publicly acknowledged, namely that the last thing a young couple needed were lessons on how to get sexually intimate. The problem, in fact, was keeping them physically apart.
This is what struck me as I read my colleagues excellent exposure of the sex maniacs at DCU, and the material they intend on inflicting on the captive teenage audience in the classroom. We owe a debt to Niamh Uí Bhriain – she went through this material, so we don’t have to.
What kind of person really believes the youth need lessons in sex? What exactly is the point in them? The lessons were not confined to discussions of fertility, conception, consent, sexuality, contraception or STDS. The lessons covered and suggested sex acts including some very degrading and disgusting sex acts. They didn’t go into lurid detail. They didn’t have to – the internet exists. Just why do teenagers need lessons on sex acts?
What seems obvious to me is that the youth might need lessons in French or trigonometry or whether the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 caused an irreparable split in the American body politic or that the Treaty of Versailles was indeed the cause of the Second World War, but the one thing, the one thing we can be sure that they don’t need lessons on is how to be intimate with each other.
Truly, there is an irony that today, in the most sexually liberated and sexually saturated culture the world has ever seen there are some people who would have you believe the young people need advice from ‘The Sexperts’ on sexual intimacy. Give me a break.
I’d wager my house that even the most innocent, should it come down to it, would know what goes where. That’s why it’s called the sex drive and not a sex walk or sex meander. Drive implying a very strong emotion that can be difficult to keep under control.
That’s why mankind has been able to reproduce themselves until now without the help of The Sexperts. Heck even I managed to produce four children without consulting a manual or any help from The Sexperts.
The truth is men and women are meant to be with each other, God made one for the other. They don’t need any further encouragement to become one flesh, if anything the problem has been keeping one’s clothes on, not taking them off.
It is only if you want to attack the innocence of young children and degrade the emerging sexuality of teenagers that necessitates The Sexperts to be called in.
If you want to expose to teenagers to humiliating, vile and unnatural acts as described here, for that you need a ‘course’ and ‘further education.’ The fact that teenagers asking about certain acts is deemed to show a desire in them to ‘get dirty’ tells you all you need to know about The Sexperts. Do you know what another word for dirt is – filth? They are literally celebrating filth. As ever in Modern Ireland, it’s a race to the bottom. Just how low can you go? In this case, as low as possible.
And what exactly is with the “Sex OR Intimacy” board game? (This is where you rank in order certain sexual acts, some of which are incredibly demeaning.) Surely all sex acts are intimate but not all acts of intimacy are sexual. Or is it the case, and I’m just asking a question now, that these Sexperts want our young people to believe that you can have sex or carry out certain degrading sex acts but not necessarily be intimate with the person you are carrying out the act on. This is Modern Ireland, after all.
If that is the case, then that is deeply dehumanising. It treats the person as little more than a sex toy, an instrument for your pleasure alone. It completely ignores the heart and soul of the other person. But we are all more than the sum of our body parts. (Body parts The Sexperts are so obsessed with that they like to make models using balloons, clay and crafts. This sounds juvenile to me.)
Now, Laura, come the objections, you are starting to sound very moralistic, you are a bit of a prude. I’ll take both labels, thanks very much. Teaching young people to be moral people is the most important thing parents and teachers can do – it is far, far more important than trigonometry or the causes of WWII. And if being a prude means having standards, then I’m a prude. If being a prude means objecting to the teaching of total degeneracy in the classroom, then I’m a prude. Print it on a t-shirt and send it to me in the post with the Reiss coat (which I am still waiting on by the way.)
And don’t bother telling me that this is all about teaching about consent and the problems of pornography. If that is what it was about, there wouldn’t be a problem. But the reason why the Department of Education is running around and screaming ‘misinformation’ is because they know they have been exposed as endorsing something all decent parents would be disgusted to see.
The line from the Department and The Sexperts seems to be – we are not teaching explicit materials, but there would be nothing wrong with teaching these explicit materials as the teenagers need to know and anyone who objects are ‘spreaders of misinformation.’
They’d want to get their argument straight – perhaps they could do that while they are making sexual organs out of play-doh.