The Prologue (1975-1983)

Written by Doug – the northlondonhippy

Setting the Scene – My Real Sexual Education

I think I had my first formal sexual education lessons in the 6th grade, when I was 12 years old, and our PhysEd/Health teacher told us how babies were made. When a man loves a woman, blah, blah, blah. Ovum, sperm, zygote, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t teach me much.

Around the same time, my mother gave me a children’s book, called “How Babies Are Made”. It said the same kind of thing, “when a man loves a woman…” blah, blah, blah. It had cartoons, including a man, and woman in bed together under the covers. I learned even less from that book, than in class.

My mother was uptight about sex. She was uptight about everything. She used to say that 25 should be the age for drinking, smoking, and sex. She didn’t exactly install a healthy attitude around any of it. There was a lot of shame.

My dad was only marginally better. When I was around 12 or so, he took me for my first real hair cut at a barbershop. Up till then, he was doing it with a pair of clippers at home. Now, he said I was old enough to have a proper cut. He took me along with him, when he was getting his hair cut. 

There were a few chairs, but only one barber, so my dad went first, and I sat in the waiting area. There were many magazines on the table, including “gentleman’s magazines”, and it was there I was allowed to read my first Playboy magazine. 

And by read, obviously I really mean that I looked at the photos. You may not know this, but the photos in Playboy Magazine were mostly of naked ladies. 

In the middle of the magazine, there was a foldout page, called the centrefold, which was a full length photograph of the Playmate of the Month. I glanced over at my dad, who saw me pull out the centrefold, and he just gave me a single nod of his head. 

Let’s look at this with our modern day eyes. At age 12, I was introduced to a world where women are objectified for male pleasure. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a Playboy, but it was the first time I was allowed, and encouraged to look. I was being indoctrinated. I had no idea of it at the time, it was just normal for the 70s. 

Around the same time, women’s rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment were having a moment. Women’s liberation was everywhere, so was Gloria Steinem, They all had their work cut out for them. Still do. 

Girlie magazines were a feature of my youth, and not just at the barbershop. When I was in high school, one of my classmates worked out when the local convenience stores disposed of the previous month’s unsold mags, and he used to dumpster dive to get them.  He did this monthly, for years, and would hand them out to all his friends. And not just Playboy, he would also get Penthouse, and Hustler magazines too. It is from these magazines that I got my real, yet less than ideal, sexual education.

This system went on for years, my friend supplied me, and most of my high school with dirty mags every month. The magazines had the covers ripped off, but the magazines themselves were still intact. 

I’m far more verbal, than visual, and as much as I liked looking at the photos, what I found more interesting were the stories. 

Playboy was a bit dull, and the photos were airbrushed to within an inch of their lives. This was well before Photoshop existed. For me, the best things in Playboy were the in-depth interviews. I know that’s a cliche, but it was actually true.

Hustler magazine was really downmarket, I could see that even at age 15. The articles were puerile, and poorly written, and seemed to be aimed at the low IQ side of the market. And the photos! They wouldn’t have been out of place in a medical journal. I do remember the founder, Larry Flynt, fought many freedom of speech battles, and he mostly won them. 

Penthouse was somewhere in between the other two. The photos were a bit more explicit than Playboy, but not quite as gynaecological as Hustler, and the writing could be hit, and miss. 

However, one section of Penthouse really caught my imagination. 

Specifically, I really got into reading Penthouse Forum letters. They were allegedly real life tales from the magazine’s readers, of their own interesting, or noteworthy sexual exploits. 

The letters followed a very simple format. The stories usually started with a line like this: “I never thought something like this would ever happen to me, but…”, and almost always ended with “needless to say…”.

Here’s an made-up example of what I mean:

“I never thought I something like this would ever happen to me, but I was in the laundry room of my apartment building, when this beautiful woman came in to wash her clothing too. She loaded up the washing machine, and then stripped down to her bra, and panties, and put the clothes she was wearing into the washing machine with the rest of her stuff, and started the cycle. And then she turned to me, and said “see anything you like?” I was game, so then we had amazing, god-tier sex right there, on the floor. It was fantastic, and needless to say, I will be looking forward to laundry nights every week from now on!”

The stories were usually far more graphic than my example, and I assumed most of them were made up. Sometimes, I really wanted them to be true, as they gave me hope that one day, I would have my own Penthouse Forum worthy experiences.  And “needless to say”, I looked forward to that day, very much.

There were stories about threesomes, stories about wife-swapping, and loads of stories about amazing sex with random strangers. If you can imagine it happening sexually, I probably read a Penthouse letter about it. 

Apparently, grownups were having sex all the time with each other, and behind each other’s backs too. Pretty much, whenever grownups were alone, they were banging. Sex was happening everywhere, and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to play along. 

Very few people were actually having sex in my high school, and I’m not just saying that just because I wasn’t. Sure, it happened, I can think of two kids born out of wedlock to students in my school. 

Do people still say “out of wedlock” or am I showing my age here?

Most of my friends weren’t having sex either, though it did somewhat improve in our senior year. 

There wasn’t much random shagging, or even drunken shagging, I would say most of the teen sex I was aware of was more traditional, and within monogamous relationships. 

A friend of my dad’s gave me some advice about sex when I was a teenager, maybe 15 or 16. The guy would have been in his 40s, and he was married, with kids. And he was a doctor, technically, because chiropractors count too. 

My dad’s friend told me that he was very worldly, because he served in the Navy. He had travelled all over the high seas, so I should listen to him. 

This was his advice, based on the antics of a sailor he allegedly served with for a while. He said this guy had a simple view, “If you randomly approached 100 women, and asked them if they wanted to fuck, you were likely to get slapped 99 times. But on that 100th time, boy oh boy, you were in for the time of your life!” 

Yes, an adult really told me this. And meant it. Getting laid is simply a numbers game. Even if there is a touch of truth to it, it is a horrible thing to tell a teenager. I just didn’t know any of that at the time. It is problematic advice to be giving a young man, but I was given it just the same. 

And here’s the thing, that sort of attitude was prevalent way back then, and quite frankly, I expect it still exists today. Women existed simply to please men, and it was man’s obligation to find as much pleasure as possible. While the opposite was true for women, and every women’s duty was to protect, and maintain their virtue. None of that was healthy, or made any sense. 

I juggled that sort of advice, while also admiring strong women I saw in the media, and believing in gender equality. Put it this way, my biggest celebrity crush of the 70s, and 80s, was Jane Fonda. And to be honest, she’s 85 years old now, and I still would. And I can promise you, whether then or now, she wouldn’t, with me anyway. 

One of the articles I read in Penthouse was about the Hite Report, written by Shere Hite. It was a groundbreaking, in-depth study of female sexuality, that built on the work of Alfred Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson. People doubted the female orgasm even existed, and Ms. Hite wished to set the record straight. 

Imagine thinking female orgasms were a myth? Many people did back then, and shockingly, some people still do. I remember learning the term ‘pre-orgasmic woman”, and wanting to go on a mission to help them all. Not really, but it sure sounded like a fun way to spend my summer break.

Even before I was sexually active, I liked sex, and had a healthy, and positive interest in it. What I lacked was the confidence, self esteem, and social skills required to find a willing partner.

I’ll end this section with one of my weirder, early near-sexual experiences. At the time, I didn’t think it could possibly be real, but a week later, I learned I should have trusted my instincts. 

It’s a bit like a poorly written teen comedy film from the early-80s. I might have been played by Judge Reinhold. He would have nailed my awkwardness perfectly. 

I was at a party towards the end of my senior year of high school, being held at a friend’s house. His parents were divorced, and he lived with his mother. It was a nice place, with a built-in pool, that I expect his dad was still paying for. 

There was a lot of drinking going on, and everyone was reasonably drunk, but my friend stayed relatively sober, because it was his party. Plus at the end of the night, he needed to drive his girlfriend home. 

I stayed late to help clear up, as my friend drove his girlfriend home. My friend’s mother, and I were left alone. I was 18 years old. 

It was a pool party, so my friend’s mother was in a one-piece bathing suit, and I was just wearing a pair of trunks. Once we were finished clearing up the empties, we sat down together, and had some more drinks. I knew my friend would be gone for a while, because he wanted to have car sex with his girlfriend, before dropping her off. 

My friend’s mother was extremely attractive, something I obviously had noticed before. She was probably 38, or 39 at the time, and more than a little tipsy. 

I thought I was imagining things, as she seemed to be openly flirting with me. I genuinely couldn’t believe that it was possible. 

I was a healthy, normal teenage boy, and I had a healthy, normal reaction to her flirtatious behaviour, especially when she kept brushing my leg with her fingers. 

I popped a boner. I pitched a tent. I had the mother of all erections. 

There is no way in the world that she couldn’t have noticed my arousal. And I was starting to have very impure thoughts about my friend’s mother that I knew were wrong, even though they felt oh, so right. 

I heard my friend’s car pull into the driveway, and the front door opened, and that was enough of a boner killer to bring me back to earth. Nothing happened with his mother, and I tried to convince myself that it was all in my imagination. I’d just had too much to drink, and had read too many Penthouse letters. Stupid me!

Around a week later, I was back at my friend’s place one evening after a night out. We were going to have a swim, or something, before I went home, only we heard laughter in the back yard. 

We walked around the side of house to investigate, and found my friend’s mother on top of a guy in the swimming pool, kissing him deeply. Awkward. 

We were both even more shocked when we worked out who he was. He was a guy who graduated high school the previous year. That would have made him 19 years old at the time, only a year older than me. He mowed my friend’s mother’s lawn for her, that’s how she knew him. And I could clearly see, she was getting to know him a whole lot better. 

I wasn’t imagining things the week before. She really was getting sexual around me. If I was a bit more clever, that could have been me with her in the swimming pool. 

That said, my friend was fuming that his mother was fooling around with this guy. He vandalised the guy’s pick-up truck. He keyed it. That’s how pissed off he was about his mother’s swimming pool romp. 

On balance, his friendship was more valuable to me than the handjob from his mom, that might have been. My regret isn’t that I missed the opportunity, it’s that I missed recognising it. I promised myself, I wouldn’t let that happen again. 

Infidelity

When I was 18-19 years old, I worked in a small office. Most of my colleagues were only a little bit older, but all of them were married, with children. And all of them were prolific cheaters. 

At first, I thought of them as role models, but in time I realised they were just jerks. Or, to use a more appropriate slur from back then in Jersey, they were total fucking douche-bags. 

They cheated on their wives with other colleagues. They cheated on their wives with women they picked up in bars. They cheated on their wives, whenever, and wherever they could. And they didn’t hide the fact that they were married, they all wore wedding rings. And some of the women they slept with from the office, had even met their wives at company parties.

This was a total mind fuck for me. Infidelity was something I really only knew about from the media. It’s a popular trope on soap operas, or in dramas, but I never expected to see it happening in front of me so blatantly. It made me question everything I thought I knew about marriage, and relationships. 

These were working class guys, who went to vocational school. Their wives were stay-at-home moms, and they kept blasting out more kids. They were all 25, or under. They used to drink, and take drugs all the time too.

These were the people who first gave me cocaine. They used to start drinking before work, and pound beers all day. Lunch was in a bar, and mostly liquid too. And they smoked loads of weed. They taught me how to be a hardcore party boy, and on that score, I was an eager student. 

In my head, I nicknamed the three of them “the Kowalskis”, as in Stanley, from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire”. I was pretentious, even back then, but I was also right. 

The company allowed me some flexibility in my hours, because they knew I was studying at Monmouth College at the time, but also because it suited them too. 

My supervisor came up with a great idea. She suggested I work later hours, so they could lengthen the the amount of the time the pricey equipment was used, so it was more productive throughout the day. It made good business sense for them, and made working around my classes even easier. 

So most days, I would start mid-afternoon, and work until late evening. I was usually done by between 11pm, and midnight. The company had a punch clock, and timecards, so my hours were tracked, and I was paid OT, if I did any. 

The thing about the late shift is I was usually the only person around the office after hours, except for the cleaners. And I was the only one around to answer the phone. 

I expect you can imagine who would often phone late in the evening. It was always my colleagues’ wives, looking for their husbands. I could hear the worry, and upset tones in their voices.

I was forced to cover, and lie for my colleagues. It was expected of me, like some sort of man, or “bro code”. 

It didn’t matter if I knew which local no-tell-motel they were using for their adventures, I certainly couldn’t tell their wives. And to be fair, I didn’t know what exactly which room they were in, so I could plausibly deny knowing their precise whereabouts. I wasn’t really comfortable with doing it, but I did it anyway. Did I even have a choice?

Remember, from reading Penthouse, I knew about things like open marriages, and partner swapping. In other words, there were more ethical ways of broadening your sexual horizons, than cheating on your wife. 

One day, when they were drunkenly bragging about their conquests in the bar, I said  a few things about divorce, and open marriages, and the hypocrisy of sleeping around. And it triggered all three of them.

They all said they would never, ever leave their wives, no matter what. They were adamant about it, and claimed they loved them.

Then, I suggested why not try swinging, if they wanted to sleep around. Why not have an open marriage, or do partner swapping. That was a step too far for all of them. 

The first one said, “No way would I let my wife be with another guy.”

And the second spluttered, “She is for me only, I don’t share!”

And the leader of the group said definitively, “If my wife ever fucked another guy, I’d kill her”. Well, that was settled. 

What’s good for the goose, ain’t good for the gander, eh?

I learned a few life lessons hanging around with these guys. The first was: Don’t get married young. It wasn’t something on my radar anyway, but spending time with them, hammered the point home. 

The second lesson wasn’t as significant, but it was still useful information. Most people, if given the chance, and think they can get away with it, will cheat. I would learn that it wasn’t always as black, and white as that, but it is still one of my takeaways at the time. 

Mainly I learned to disrespect marriage. It was a meaningless institution. It didn’t imply fidelity, or loyalty. Real commitment is better than marriage. Some religious mumbo-jumbo, and a piece of paper won’t magically change that.

And if someone doesn’t respect their own marriage, why should anyone else? Why should I?

In Part Two – Connecting, I finally get online, and the real fun begins!

(All words © Copyright 2023 – Doug – the northlondonhippy. All rights reserved)