Sex and Rejection
When I was a kid in Kalgoorlie, WA, and then in the Melbourne bay side suburb of Carrum I often went to the movies. Like everyone else, I was overwhelmed by films from Hollywood or England. All films seems to have a thread of romance. We boys just wanted everyone to just get on with the comedy routines, or gun fights, fist fights, car chases, plane crashes and what have you.
But there was always a woman involved, and the hero usually had this romantic entanglement. There’d be the physical contact - a squeeze, a hug, a hesitant kiss, often with appropriately syrupy music in the background. All the girls like that stuff, and most of the boys just started getting restless - rolling Jaffas along the lino floor, and so on - they wanted to see the action!
A very common scenario depicted in many of these films involved the hero smoodging up to the love interest, and then after a harmless kiss, she’d look shocked, dismayed, disgusted, and give him a slap on the face, or go off in a huff!
I really took on board that a girl would reject me if I approached her with romantic intent - not sex - just the cuddle and kiss bit. But I always assumed that girls, and later, women, would treat me the same as the Hollywood women on the big screen. ‘That’s what they all do!’, I thought. ‘Faced with the realities of the nefarious plans of men and boys, they all react with horror’. And that’s all because a kid wanted a girl to give him a harmless kiss and a hug. ‘there are things going on here that I just do not comprehend.’ (Even as a small boy I tended to use sophisticated language…)
That’s affected me all my life.
This fear complex didn’t even involve sex per se, although I certainly extrapolated it to the idea of sex. Anyway, in 1965 I got married and in due course we had 3 children, so something was working in my favour. But throughout my marriage, which is still happy and solid, at the age of seventy, the fear of rejection is still very potent.
That is because over those long years I did suffer a good deal of rejection, in bed and otherwise, and from my observations it’s a common thing in marriages - particularly as the years roll by. And even though I’m functionally impotent after a radical prostatectomy for cancer, it still hurts like hell. It’s dogged me all my life, and although I’d like to be tough and not let it matter, it still does!
A major source of this feeling has to be attributed to my mother’s attitude to sex and romance. My mother (and her sisters) always did two things.
Firstly, they evinced a very worldly-wise attitude, as though they’d been around and knew everything. but as the years rolled by and I learned more, it was clear that they were in fact quite ignorant of many aspects of sex and romance. An only child, I copped all that stuff by the bucket load, so I finished up pretty screwed up. Not really their fault, because they were children of their time, born in the early 1900s. Their stance was pretty well the norm in the 1950s. My dad didn’t do much at all either way - he just stayed neutral, but was certainly no help to me.
Secondly, my mother kept an eagle eye open for any sign of sexuality on my part. For example, sitting in the bath tub one night, I had an erection, which was pretty common for a fourteen-year old boy. At that age, the thing usually has a mind of its own. It (the erection) simply occurred spontaneously without any help from me. Mum, espying the offending phenomenon, said: ‘what’s that doing up?!’
I can’t for the life of me remember what I said, but I distinctly remember the wave of shame and embarrassment that rolled over me. If I could have crawled down the plug-hole I would have done so!
Today I remember that with a great sense of anger that she did that to me, tinged with compassion that she knew no better. For whatever reason, she simply had a jaundiced view of male sexual functioning. What was I supposed to do, hit it with a cold wet face washer saying ‘Oh my God! Where did that come from? Down, down, you monster!!’?
A year or so later, with the collusion of a school pal, I discovered how to masturbate to climax. ‘Wow! This is pretty good!’, I thought. So I did it, simply because I could. That resulted in yellowish stains in my pajamas that were hard to wash out! At the same time, I became enmeshed in the serpentine coils of a Pentecostal church, which, like all evangelical churches, was heavy on the sinfulness and guilt associated with sex.
And so I’d have a lovely old masturbate in bed, then fervently pray to God to be forgiven for what I’d just done (and basically intended to do again and again!) And then on wash-day, my mother would peg out the pajamas with the steadily expanding indelibly yellowish zone around the fly for all to see up on the clothes line for the world to see, like a banner that read: ‘This dirty, filthy, depraved, hypocritical little born-again Christian pulls himself off every night and will go to Hell!!’
About 13 years later I did get out from under the baleful spell of churches and all their guilt-laden crap, and moved out of home as soon as I was married. But, would you believe, when we got married we were still both virgins! Even though we had plenty of opportunities, we ’stayed pure’, regardless of all the lascivious thoughts going on with us both. That was due to the guilt and ignorance induced in us both by our parents and by the churches. Neither of us ever got rid of the psychologically crippling effect of those powerful forces in our lives.
Consequently, the erotic side of our marriage remained very problematical up to this very day. Whose fault is that? Probably no-one’s: it’s just the way it turned out - Sigh!