Lovesick

"Making out is one thing that won't change even if civilization fizzles and humanity is reduced to two people." Caroline George, "The Vestige"


In a New York Review of Books essay titled “Lovesick,” 86-year-old Janet Malcolm, who emigrated to the U.S. at age 5, discussed a 1942 best-selling young adult romance novel dealing with a girl’s first crush, Maureen Daly’s “Seventeenth Summer,” a tale of careful love that, to Janet Malcolm, symbolized the repressiveness of mid-twentieth-century America. Malcolm labeled the book “a tract for the sexual ideology of the time, whereby nice girls didn’t ‘go all the way’ and nice boys hardly expected or wanted them to, given their own nervous-making sexual experience.  It encouraged uninformed teenaged girls like myself in our longings for sexless romance.”  Despite the drastically changed sexual practices among young people, “Seventeenth Summer” remains in print, causing one Amazon reviewer to write: “For an 11-year-old girl that daydreams about kissing boys, she’d probably like it.  For an 11-year-old girl that’s already had sex, the book may seem lame.”

 

Janet Malcolm

Former 1990s student Rachel Stevens wrote about being a shy sixth grader at Yost Elementary in Porter when she developed a crush on Mike, “an adorable boy who was in choir with me.” One day they took a walk to a swing set in the park.  Rachel wrote:

  I gave him a hug and he kissed me on the lips.  It was my first one.  I was so shocked and amazed I just stood there weak in the knees from puppy love.  Later I sat in my room in a complete daze.  But soon enough he broke up with me.  I was doubly devastated because he started “going out” with my close friend Christina.  My other friends and I began plotting against her.

 

In 1993 former student Sandra Avila was an eighth grader at Hammond Eggers.  Her closest friend was Amelia, “like me Mexican.” In February she began dating Daniel and Amelia started dating Phil. Sandra wrote (Steel Shavings, volume 31, 2001):

    We were constantly getting in trouble because of them.  One time I turned off all the ringers in my house and my dad called the phone company.  Another time I was at Amelia’s house when Phil came over on his scooter and her mom came out.  We told her he was the paper boy.  On Valentine’s Day Daniel bought me a dozen roses and some balloons.  I had to pop all the balloons and squeeze the flowers in my back pack to avoid getting into trouble.  Daniel was my first love and Phil Amelia’s first love.

 

A Gary teenager during the 1990s, Esther Lewis wrote that her first love, Michael, was her best friend’s brother.  She recalled:

    He’d ask my advice about girls.  We’d talk for hours.  One day I swallowed my pride and told him I liked him.  He told me he didn’t want to cheat on his girl.  He stopped calling me but then out of the blue we started going together.  My friends thought I was above him, but I was most definitely in love; and he and I were sprung.

 

While living in the small town of Roselawn Elizabeth Grzych’s classmates began calling her a “wigger” when she befriended Mackenzie, one of the few black kids in the school.  Elizabeth wrote:

    We’d dance together at school dances and it was no big thing, but kissing was a whole different story.  The first time, we were slow dancing to the Guns N Roses song “November Rain.”  He put his hands in my back pockets and kissed me.  Although only 13, I knew he’d be someone very special in my life.  At first me family didn’t take it very well; but all through the subsequent bullshit, they stuck by me.

 

Candice Bigott met her first love, Chris, at a party; he called the following day after getting her phone number.  Before long, they seemed inseparable. Candice wrote: “We spent the next few weeks in complete bliss.  Then, all of a sudden, Chris had less time for me.  On Valentine’s Day we broke up.  For the next six months, I cried every day.”

 

Interviewed by Jason Hasha, Sam Barnett reveled that his first date occurred when he was in tenth grade at Merrillville High School and she was a senior.  He met her at a dance and recalled:

    I was just standing around the stag line talking and asked this girl if she wanted to dance.  They were playing a crappy song by Journey, but we danced and the whole way home we talked.  I got her phone number.  Next time we got together we just rented a movie, stayed at my house, and made out.  That’s the best because there’s no guilt or responsibility; with sex, you gotta call the next day.  You gotta worry about kids and diseases and what they will think of you.

 

Sexual habits and attitudes have certainly changed since my teen years when “making out” rather than “going all the way” consumed most guys’ desires and fantasies. As a former student wrote in an early Steel Shavings on relationships between the sexes during the 1950s, petting involved simulating sex with one’s clothes on (“dry humping”) and striving to “touch the bases” with little hope of reaching home but hoping to steal a feel at second and third.  Jennifer Long recalled: “Terms like heavy petting and copping a feel were in vogue.”  Brian Gerike wrote: “Virginity was the norm at Gary Emerson, and people gossiped about girls suspected of having sex.”  Frank wrote about parking with a girl at Miller Beach: “After some preliminaries I managed to begin touching the girl’s breasts.  She seemed not to mind, so I took it as a green light and tried to touch her private parts below the belt line.  The next thing I knew, I was getting slapped across the face.”

 

Drive-in theaters, called “passion pits,” were a popular place for making out.  Ray Ballestero told Amy Powers that working at a drive-in, he knew couple were going hot and heavy if the windows started steaming up and the car started shaking slightly.  Linda told John Gibbs that her date at the drive-in tried to get his hand under her blouse and when she rebuffed his advances was such a jerk about it that on their next date she feigned passion and told him to take his pants off and three friends took a picture of his bare ass.

 

Most so-called good girls didn’t engage in heavy petting until they were “going steady.” John Broelman wrote: “Monogamy was the rule; and if sex was occurring, marriage should not be far behind.  Before Helen lost here virginity, she and her boyfriend talked about it for weeks. She was deflowered in a park near their homes.  Six months later they decided to get married.”  Girls who went all the way worried about late periods and unwanted pregnancies that could lead to “shotgun weddings.”  Tim Trzeciak wrote: “Barbara’s older sister got pregnant and married soon after.  Her father’s initial reaction was, ‘Boys will be boys but a girl is damn stupid if she lets him.’ He wasn’t happy about the solution but didn’t make his daughter an outcast.” On the other and, Alice McIlree recalled that a girl at Brunswick Baptist Church was forced to apologize to the entire congregation for becoming pregnant.  It was so humiliating Alice felt ashamed to belong to such a church.

 

Looking back on my generation’s Fifties teen experiences, for the most part, I don’t think we were sexually repressed.  We had access to Playboy magazines and “Peyton Place” and took parental admonitions with a grain of salt.  If many of us remained “technical virgins,” as the saying went, throughout high school and beyond, that didn’t mean we didn’t find as much pleasure in practices short of intercourse as I suspect the present generation of teens and tweens might get exchanging graphic selfies or receiving oral sex. I learned about the latter in eleventh grade from a deck of cards a friend showed me and at Bucknell when a freshman in the communal dorm bathroom showed off bite marks on his dick and joked that his date got carried away.  It took the Monica Lewinsky scandal to familiarize the nation about what my brother-in-law, a long-distance trucker, referred to as lube jobs.