I’VE HEARD IT SAID THAT THE generations that came after get fed up with the alleged solipsism of baby boomers. There are plenty of put-downs. Like, if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there—meaning, I think, that if you dabbled in the drug scenes of the sixties then your memory would have been fried. An exaggeration of course. There was more than one way to participate in the sixties.
Indeed, it is perfectly possible to have gone through the postwar period as an adolescent and still have fairly accurate memories. One such person is Don Aitkin, who has written a book about his generation. His descriptions of how things used to be back then give us an inkling of how things were back then.
One domain that stands out is sexual mores. Referring to how they were introduced to sex education, both formally and informally, he writes:
There was no formal sex education for that generation. Their parents, products themselves of a strict and repressed generation, were quite unequal to the task. One of the girls remembers being presented with an orange-coloured book by her mother with the injunction ‘Read this!’ Another was given a diagram of the female reproductive system. One mother discreetly left a book nearby for her son . . . During their final year at school, the local cinema showed a film about sexual reproduction to which entry was permitted if parents had given their approval. Some were refused approval; others were too embarrassed to seek it.
Aitkin paints a picture of a tight-lipped, behind-closed-doors, head-in-the-sand culture. It’s no wonder that expressions relating to sexuality were indirect and evasive. It stands to reason really. If people are uncomfortable with a topic, they look for ways of getting around it, rather than tackling it head on. If attitudes towards sexuality had been less convoluted, the result would have been neutral language.
One of the stories Aitkin tells is of a twelve-year-old boy sailing to Australia, presumably as a new immigrant, who one day up on deck was asked by his mother, ‘Do you know about sex?’ He thought the best thing to say was, ‘Yes,’ to which she responded, ‘Thank God! I’ll go down and have another drink.’
C.S. Lewis once commented that, ‘we lack a language to comfortably talk about sex.’ And he’s right, of course, though the way he put it rather implies this was all an unfortunate accident. But it’s far from being an accident. Rather, it’s a giant conspiracy born of the taboo itself. Because the point of the original taboo was to make it difficult to raise such topics in public. There’s no better way to enforce a taboo than to remove any polite options. Nothing in the cornucopia of sexual slang and vulgar expressions, or the clinical terms reserved for clinical contexts, serves to resource the polite, public venue. In fact, any explicit reference to sexuality reduces one to select from three bounded sources—the gutter, the nursery or the anatomy class—and each of these is unsatisfactory outside and beyond its own context. It’s for this reason that English has such a healthy supply of evasive terms. Euphemisms come in very handy when nothing else will do but, almost by definition, they’re all beating around the bush.
As a result, if you wanted to avoid the language of the gutter, nursery or anatomy class, you needed to draw on a term from the bank of euphemisms, a ready and rich supply of alternative ways of saying things that weren’t supposed to be said. The language was often coy. It sent its message more by what wasn’t said than by what was. Terms for sexual organs, functions, processes and products proliferated, but the coy reference to ‘down there’ was often sufficient. Anything outside of coy was likely to be over the top.
Maybe it was to mask embarrassment or perhaps to create a diversion through bravado. Whatever the reason, much of the language called on metaphor, making it indirect, if also graphic. But whether coy or graphic, the subtext was always, nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? Know what I mean? The ‘nudge nudge’ line grew legs when an advertising campaign for a peanut chocolate bar, tried to inject a bit of sex into their marketing by rather randomly using ‘Nudge nudge, wink wink’ as their product tag line.
Much of the language was sexist and male-centric—like ‘dip the wick’ and ‘dunk the love muscle’—and remains an enduring testimony to male one-track-mindedness. The female perspective was ignored completely. Just consider the agenda of those who came up with ‘spunk’, ‘fox’, ‘goer’, as much as with ‘slag’, ‘slut’, ‘mole’, ‘thing’. None of this is surprising, of course, because whoever’s in charge of the metaphors is usually in possession of the power.
Many of the old expressions for the act of sexual intercourse owe their origins to British slang. Like ‘how’s your father’, used as a noun phrase, as in, ‘I wouldn’t go in the front room at the moment, I suspect your brother’s having a bit of how’s your father with his new girlfriend.’ It roughly means casual sex, or rough and tumble, or a roll in the hay, or slap and tickle. The origins are murky. There seems to be some agreement about its associations with the British music-hall comedian Harry Tate (1872–1940), who was known to exclaim the phrase as a way of changing from an awkward subject. Subsequently, the phrase took on a life of its own, a stand-in like ‘thingummy’ or anything the speaker did not wish to name. Soon after, it became a euphemism for sexual activity.
There’s another version of the ‘how’s your father?’ story which dates from World War II, with English soldiers in France joking about expecting to be asked the question by an old French lady with fond memories of gallant young English soldiers over in the Great War.
Then again, the role of the father is sometimes seen differently—as the protector of his daughter’s honour rather than the agent in the actual tawdry action. In this version, dating back to the Victorian era, any man with a daughter’s virtue to safeguard was expected to go to extraordinary measures to protect her. Daughters were watched vigilantly and rarely let out of the house unchaperoned. On the rare occasions when a young girl might meet a suitor alone, the question ‘How’s your father?’ served as a code to confirm that the coast was clear for a little, um, hanky-panky.
Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of synonyms for ‘how’s your father?’ Consider ‘get your leg over’ as in ‘Did you get your leg over with that girl last night?’ Or ‘giving the dog a bone’. They’re the kind that enjoyed popularity with English comedians of Carry On Gang vintage. And for in-your-face-while-stepping-sideways, I’ll never forget the two beefy blue-T-shirted removalists who carried the double bed up the front stairs of our new house, puffing when they got to the stairs, one of them stopping to ask my then husband, ‘So, mate, where do you want the work bench?’
Descriptions of potential partners, objects of sexual desire, might be called ‘hot to trot’, ‘hot for it’, ‘dishy’, ‘a looker’. You might go up to the pub to ‘check out the talent’, or see if there was anyone who ‘caught your fancy’. Teenage boys carved up the world of the opposite sex into ‘good girls’ and ‘nice girls’. Nice girls had the same thing on their mind as the boys— they didn’t ‘tease’ or leave you ‘high and dry’; if you were lucky, they’d ‘put out’ and you’d ‘score’. There was no doubt which girls—the good or the nice—the boys preferred. There was plenty of time to find and marry a good girl. Meanwhile, it was all about being nice.
Teenagers going out were often told by brow-furrowed parents as a parting line—‘Be good. If you can’t be good, be careful.’ But what did ‘being careful’ mean? The phrase was so broad, so blunt, that who knew what it entailed? Perhaps it was, choose a boy who’s carrying a condom. Or make sure the creased-up condom that’s been in his wallet since who-knows-when is good to go. Ironically, with close to zero sex education in terms of hard-core information, formal or informal, ‘being careful’ was a hit-and-miss affair that had in it more fingers-crossed prayer than common (or uncommon) sense.
As ultimately it was all about scoring (the girls might’ve said ‘going all the way’ or ‘having a naughty’), the boys had their own system of measuring success in the fumbling encounters that were variously called ‘necking’, ‘making out’, ‘pashing’, ‘carrying on’, ‘canoodling’, ‘fooling around’, ‘getting some hanky-panky’. Aitkin elaborates on how the count was made ‘with the boy as the scorer, the girl the scoree’: ‘Two for a kiss, four for a feel of the breasts outside clothing, six ditto inside, eight for a feel lower down and outside, ten ditto inside; twelve was “Bingo!”’
Apparently such coded language enabled boys to boast the day after the night before by raising the number of fingers to indicate the score, to the chortling envy or hooting denial of their peers. Of course, exaggeration was the order of the day; a girl’s reputation could be sullied in a second and the news would spread like a fire across dry leaves on a hot summer’s day.
These days, it’s different. What once was private is now public. The careful language is fast fading. Magazines sport nudity, give advice on oral sex and have totally removed the wink-and-nudge from sexuality. Take the brand of clothes called FCUK (French Connection United Kingdom) which always looks like ‘fuck’ till you realise it’s ‘fcuk’. Of course the dyslexic double take is no accident; it’s programmed in, hot-wired into the take-home message which at the very least is a thumb-nosing to the old literacies.
There’s a fashion label for a line of T-shirts called ‘How’s Ya Father?’ This is an instance of the old language being imported into a contemporary brand, a postmodern appropriation that is typically tongue-in-cheek, a sure-stroked, knowledged, ironic, winking use of language that is confidently, cheekily intertextual. They have titillating slogans designed to forge a nexus between the personal and the political, and, supposedly, to make people think—that is, after they’ve parted with their money (they wouldn’t want them thinking before then).
One line of undies in the same brand has on the back the words ‘crack of dawn’. Say no more.