Before the “Age of Aquarius” and free love, it was well known that only “bad girls” had sexual experience before they were married. “Good girls” waited and were virgins on their wedding night. At least that’s what my mother told me all those decades ago.
I assume most of my girlfriends heard the same from their mothers. Sex wasn’t a topic discussed in detail at my home nor was it something my friends and I talked about.
“If you have sex with a man before marriage you’ll only remain a good girl if you marry him.” That’s precisely why I got married the first time even though I knew I was making a mistake. Marrying the man I gave my virginity to was the only way to remain a “good girl.”
I don’t know where that list of names, divided by “good girls” and “bad girls,” is stored. There must be one somewhere from the conversations my mother had with me.
So, let’s fast forward 15 or 20 or 30 years. What happens when that sexually naive “good girl” ends up divorced?
Being married for all those years may not have given her much sexual “experience.” Along with the “good girls don’t” she may have been told there were certain things women didn’t allow in the bedroom.
Maybe her mother, grandmother, or spinster aunt simply said sex was something a woman had to endure in order to fulfill her wifely obligations. She didn’t have to enjoy it. Perhaps she was taught that sex was for procreation only and any other reason was a sin.
She may have been too scared or shy or sexually inhibited to explore the full potential of marital sex. Perhaps her husband was equally inhibited.
Today, sex is not such a big deal, unless your husband or wife is having it with someone else and you don’t have an “open” marriage.
Times have most certainly changed. Sexuality of all kinds is discussed, as well as displayed in graphic detail, in the media. Video games are sexually graphic, many music videos are little more than soft porn set to music. Teenagers are routinely having oral sex and anal sex (“not really sex”), and intercourse. Teen pregnancy is very much a fact of life.
The sex act is a normal, natural part of life when it is between consenting adults. Sex should never be forced or an obligation.