Warning, R-rated, mature audiences only. Not really. Pretty tame by today's standards, but, we ARE talking about the 1950's in a pretty prudish USA.
I grew up reading a lot, and attending Catholic schools, in Pensacola, Florida in a sexually repressed era... at least in the USA.
I read from one end of the Pensacola Public Library to the other.
I read a few things that might have appalled my parents, and the nuns, had they known.
Well, maybe not.
For all their strict moral code, the nuns were pretty open about life, sex, sensuality, and literature.
A nun once lifted up part of her habit and poked herself in the bottom of her breast (the left one - I was paying attention for once) so that we would understand a line more fully in "The Highwayman". Another once told a class that a woman in lingerie was more attractive and sexually appealing than a naked woman.
Yet another got frustrated with a girl reading Macbeth because she was embarrassed to read Lady Macbeth's line, "Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums...", and, don't get me started on sex education with nuns! The nun read it with "passion", and then had the hapless young girl try one more time. She kept saying "nimble".
Anyway, I did NOT start out to give a sex education class here, and that's sort of the point.
From the nuns, I actually learned how to accept life, sensuality, and sex, honestly, reviewing it openly, thinking and speaking frankly, and later, as a mature adult, about life, sex, death, love,, in its any alternate facades, in ways that may still make some uncomfortable.
Part of that lesson was from nuns, part from life (and a couple of youthful escapades), and, part from all the mysteries, westerns, historical novels, and sci-fi stories I read so avidly and copiously... which often included gratuitous scenes of... well, you know... that stuff...
I learned that there were different ways to look at things once you knew about them, but, that there were facts you had to face and faces that had to be kissed.
Thanks, nuns.
Donovan Baldwin