“The stork brings them,” was Mama’s reply when I asked where babies come from. She said that sometimes he dropped them down the chimney or left them under a big cabbage leaf.
I was a naive and gullible 10-year-old in the late 1920s and I believed her. I did not wonder what would happen if St. Nick and the long-legged bird had deliveries the same night. Were there rules about who dropped bundles first? Maybe they drew straws from the reindeers’ hay to decide.
The story also seemed flawed because cabbages did not grow year round. And what would happen if a leaf were too small to cover a large baby? Or if Mr. McGregor’s cottontails had eaten all the cabbages?
My mother said not to worry my head about such matters. By then, however, I’d begun to notice that some of the more savvy older neighborhood kids knew a lot of stuff that made them whisper and giggle.
I was determined to know the truth. I went to the old Civic Center library, walked upstairs to the adult section and wandered through the stacks until I found the biology books. I selected a couple of heavy tomes, carried them to a deserted oak table, and started reading and looking at pictures.
I was completely immersed in what I had found, comprehending – but scarcely believing – the cut-away drawings of pregnant women. Suddenly, a librarian slammed the book shut. She had seen what I had been studying.
“You are a bad girl,” she said. “You have no business looking at those books. Stay in the children’s department.”
I felt my face turn scarlet. But I had learned the answer. I knew where babies came from.
However, I still didn’t know what caused them.
When I was a teenager, few books were published expressly for us, but because it was a prudish world, adult books were equally innocuous. I can remember reading about lovers almost overcome by passion – and then the print stopped. One-half inch of blank space stretched from margin to margin. When the print and the plot resumed, time had passed. It was an hour or a week later. Everything that had happened in the white space was left to the reader’s imagination.
In today’s novels, descriptions of sexual encounters are extremely explicit. I’ve often felt that printing those purple-passion passages on colored paper would be a clever ploy. Easily shocked readers or those thinking, “Enough, already,” could easily skip them.
When I was young, hardly anyone swore around women or children. Instead, gentler terms like “gee” or “gosh” or “golly” were used.
In novels, when one character wanted to use strong language against a foe, the author wrote, “You are a ——-.” As the years passed, the sentence was altered to “You are a “—— —-,” and then to its next-to-last version, “You are a s– of a b—-.” I can’t remember seeing the “f” word in print until the late ’60s, but once writers got going, the “f” word multiplied like rabbits.
Becoming trite from repeated overuse, profanity has lost its shock value and is instantly forgettable. A well- phrased insult will linger longer. (Some of the worst slams I’ve ever suffered contained not a single cuss word – and I remember them vividly.)
Like books, movies have become increasingly profane, sexual and violent. To attract larger audiences, filmmakers have used sensationalism almost from the beginning. Almost as quickly, censorship efforts began: the Hayes Office; a national coalition of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; many PTAs; and numerous community groups. Their attempts to control language, blood and guts, nudity and bedhopping were minimally successful, perhaps resulting only in free advertising for producers breaking the purity rules.
Early censors reacted unfavorably to high skirts and low necklines, double entendres, excessive drinking, horizontal lovemaking (even when both participants were fully clothed), and words like “mistress” and “virgin.” Mae West must have given them apoplexy.
Earlier movie labels of “passed,” “objectionable in part” or “condemned” have been replaced by current tags. Some of yesterday’s “condemned” films would be rated G today; the others might warrant parental guidance inasmuch as 2005 PG films may include moderate violence and horror, brief nudity and limited crude humor. PG-13 movies contain stronger examples of the aforesaid. Those rated R and NC-17 include mayhem, obscenities, complete nudity, explicit sex, extreme cruelty, violence, perversion and molestation. Anything goes! Anything you can imagine – and some things you’d rather not.
I feel bad when I see toddlers viewing some PG and PG-13 films. I cringe when I hear pre-adolescents using four-letter words. I hate knowing that teenagers will witness thousands of murders and view many hours of explicit sex before they are old enough to comprehend them. (Is anyone ever really old enough for all the profanity, the gore and the pornograpy?)
Perhaps my being a naive child was not so bad after all. Far worse is that today’s youth knows much too much, much too soon. How tragic that childhood’s innocence is destroyed long before a child is through being a child.
Louise Turnbull, a Denver native and retired teacher who has written commercial film scripts and an animated TV special, dotes on her garden, her four children and eight grandchildren.
