When I was a kid, nobody did much chatting about what the birds were up to. Last year sex education was made compulsory in the Republic of Ireland, but in the early sixties, Irish-American families like mine left the subject mostly to a girl\u2019s imagination. In fairness, the matter was a quandary. How would a mom go about discussing body parts her daughter was forbidden to use?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back then, the Roman Catholic Church\u2014whose clergy were already masters at keeping dirty secrets\u2014had strict rules about sex and the proper place for it in a girl\u2019s life. And more than a few Catholics took them seriously. For women, sex was to be employed only as needed to fruitfully multiply. It took another decade\u2014and a little help from the pill\u2014for the girls in my generation to let them stuff that worldview where the sun don\u2019t shine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But at eleven years old, I was truly at a loss to explain the trick Mother Nature was playing on me, because information about it\u2014and what other indignities might be in store\u2014was kept under wraps. I revisit the twisted assumptions that secrecy conjured in \u201cThe Facts of Life, Irish and Unabridged,\u201d now in Brevity<\/em>: https:\/\/brevitymag.com\/current-issue\/irish-and-unabridged\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a kid, nobody did much chatting about what the birds were up to. Last year sex education was made compulsory in the Republic of Ireland, but in the early sixties, Irish-American families like mine left the subject mostly to a girl\u2019s imagination. In fairness, the matter was a quandary. How would a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1076,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}