UK Edition
There was a brouhaha regarding sex and MPs last week. Forget Matt Hancock’s text messages. A different Tory MP presented the prime minister with a dossier regarding sex education in schools. Miriam Cates, mother of three and, rather magnificently, the MP for Penistone, is among a gaggle of MPs calling for an “urgent inquiry” into the matter: they’re worried that children are being taught radical and graphic ideas about gender, sex and certain sexual practices when they’re too young. We don’t need to go into details. Suffice to say, it makes you blind. (You see? I paid attention in my PSHE lessons.)
And yet, damaging though some of these teachers’ ideas might be, can they be any more alarming than the manner in which posh kids are often taught about the birds and the bees? It’s usually not done by a human being, but by watching a spaniel or whichever animal is closest. Much easier to point your children at a cockerel hopping on a chicken and hope for the best, rather than have a conversation.
When I was about eight, my mother carted my brother and me off to a Sussex stud farm to watch a stallion “cover” a mare. He clambered on her back (the stallion, not my brother), and grunted for a few moments before sliding off.
It did not look especially pleasurable and, after a long silence in the car on the way home, my brother braved a question. “But will we have to?” he checked. Another brother, inexplicably, was taught about contraception via a lesson about geldings being castrated with bricks. He had to have a little lie-down after that, apparently; but, happily, he has since married and is soon to welcome his first child. Thank heavens.
One friend developed an early phobia of marriage after asking what their dog was doing with a visiting dog in the garden. “Getting married,” came her mother’s swift reply. Another had a traumatic early introduction to the act while watching lions go at it during a safari holiday in Kenya. “Getting married” takes less than a minute for lions, apparently, but they do it every 15 minutes for four or five days – a detail they appear to have omitted from The Lion King. Still, perhaps my friend’s husband should be grateful that it was only mating lions that she witnessed on that trip, and not a female praying mantis who’d just had a tumble and felt a bit peckish.
Certain forms of culture have also been deployed by toffs trying to educate their offspring, although the word culture is used quite loosely here. One Tatler colleague’s father used to leave copies of Playboy strewn around the house, as if it were an instruction manual; another parent used to leave “entertaining” videos in the VHS player and simply hope that his children would study them and learn that way.
More highbrow was the mother who taught her daughter about sex by reciting John Donne’s “The Flea”, in which the speaker tries to seduce his lover by asking her to observe a flea that has bitten them both: “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,/ And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.” At the mention of the word “maidenhead”, the mother told her daughter: “This part is referring to the breaking of the hymen, which you can do riding a bicycle. I didn’t, of course.” My friend isn’t much of a poetry fan these days.
Nasty habits
More eyebrow-raising still was the habit of sending young sons to visit a prostitute. This may horrify in today’s more prudish age, but not so far back, in 2014, I wrote an article on the topic, having overheard two posh 20-something friends discuss it while playing chess beside the pool on holiday in France. “Didn’t your dad send you to see a hooker?” one asked. “He tried. Your move,” replied the other.
For one who was educated in the country, watching horses do it, this seemed mind-boggling. So, like a good cub reporter, I repeated the conversation when I returned to the Tatler office and subsequently interviewed various men whose fathers had offered the same. Or in some cases, older brothers. In the late 1960s, Nicholas Soames, the upstanding former MP and now Baron Soames of Fletching, tipped off his younger brother about a woman called Denise who coached inexperienced public-school boys from a room on Maddox Street.
Jeremy Soames duly slipped out of Eton one night with his friend Charlie Mortimer, author of Dear Lupin. “She had hairy armpits, that’s what I remember,” Charlie told me. Denise charged “£3 a go”, he added, but having arrived there, the boys realised they hadn’t brought any cash, and Denise shrewdly refused to accept a Coutts cheque.
Back they went to Eton, where, more unfortunately still, they learnt there’d been a fire drill, and their empty beds discovered. Both boys were flogged with a cane and Jeremy’s godfather, Field Marshal Montgomery, subsequently wrote a thundering letter, declaring him a disgrace to his family, his school and even his country.
What would be more confusing for an impressionable youth – this escapade with Denise, or sitting in a classroom today and being taught that there are 100 genders, as one mother reported in Miriam Cates’s recent dossier on sex education? On balance, I’d probably still take my lesson that day at the stud farm.
Startling, yes, but less coy and certainly less misleading than being taught by a teacher with funny ideas. Prince Harry, I was recently relieved to discover, clearly learnt via watching stallions, too, since he talked of “mounting” in his recent book, and it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm... does it?
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