Georgia Straight
for January 1994, Article 4

The issue of condom machines in schools keeps popping up and down, so to speak.

I first learned about condoms at age about 8. No, I was not a precocious early breeder - our private school football field was surrounded on three sides by woods, the fourth being the road. (It was wartime and I was at St Georges - lest that seem to be too rich for my more leftist readers, please note that it is also Moe Sihota's Alma Mammy) There was a lane through the trees to about midfield and on this road any given day, though Monday was by far the best, could be seen spent "Frenchies" as we used to call them.

This was cause for great schoolboy mirth and being chased by a particularly unsavoury lad who was swinging one aloft in the manner of David's sling was one of the risks of the Monday game of Rugby. To this day I cannot hear the word "sheik" mentioned without suppressing a giggle. One of my mates when asked by a "master" his ambition in life, replied, wisely if somewhat impudently, "to be president of Julius Schmid and Co., Sir". The master, a rare Catholic in an Anglican School blushed and stammered that he had never heard of the company which pioneered the manufacture of what is the indelicate subject of today's essay.

How, we asked older boys, do you get these strange sheaths about which there is such mystery in the adult world?

The best way, we were told, was to take a fifty cent piece (yes, those were bygone days!) and press them with the index and second fingers, right hand, into the druggists hand who would immediately recognize this secret sign and give you a pack of three. One of our intrepid lads tried it at the drug store at 41st and Dunbar and the druggist simply said, "what the devil do you want?"

I will now surprise younger readers. We did indeed find out about sex, in my day, and roughly the same way and at the same time you did. And a hell of a lot of girls got pregnant and had to "go away" for awhile. If you were over 19, marriage at the figurative point of the shotgun was the inevitable result. There's no doubt in my mind that the high breakdown rate of '50s marriages resulted from the number of them provoked by the impending birth of "love children".

What I find so astonishing about the resistance of so many parents to condom machines in schools is that these same people grew up in such sexually liberated times, most being the products of the 60s. Perhaps that's the key - in their day sex, drugs and irresponsibility were the fashion and they don't want their kids to be the same. They wish to restore for their children the times when Grampa and Grandma grew up - to give them the morality and safety of the 40s and 50s.

I hate to disillusion, but there was no morality or safety in the 50s. The family unit, which looks so wonderful in retrospect, especially if you watch the movies of the day, was in reality a hotbed of suppression. Wives accepted the husband's authority which was often administered physically. Alcoholism and, yes, other drug abuse were common. What was different was that women put up with it because society insisted upon it. Divorce details for the Friday "divorce day" at the courthouse were published in the weekend papers for all to see and cluck about. Social pressure to maintain marriage was enormous and was mainly on the wife.

Untrained abortionists abounded. The Salvation Army did a land office business helping unmarried women. Today's adoption reunions provide a very good glimpse of this society, as adult adoptees learn of the enormous social pressures on their unmarried mothers and dads.

There isn't a particle of evidence to prove that the availability of condoms increases sexuality. Parents, if you want to know why your kids are sexually active the answers are two in number - they have the same hopping hormones you had, and you should take a look at their videos.

It is argued, by the same people who used to vote in droves for Bill Vander Zalm, that we should return to the family unit - that Mom and Dad should look after these "sex things" and leave the schools out of it.

The trouble is, the "family" those people remember probably never was, but it certainly does not exist today for the majority of kids.

Perhaps we would be wiser to be practical and understand that preventing pregnancies, and disease, is a much better idea than preaching and living in a past that scarcely existed, if it existed at all.