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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.

I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.

The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:

'A Chastitute is a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman . . . rustic celibate by force of circumstance.' John Bosco, who 'hasn't the makings of a dacent sin in him', is a chastitute, a bachelor farmer and all he is searching for is a plain decent woman to share his life. He nearly got there a thousand times but nearly never bulled a cow'. This play tells of his many endeavours to find a mate and the end result.