Album Reviews

Mrs. Willke does not perform the first version of "#9" on the second album of the two LP set How To Teach Children The Wonder of Sex. However, both she and Dr. Willke make a lot of sense on the second album of this two LP set.

Yes, LP 1 is prudish and "bat-shit crazy" but LP 2 makes complete sense. It's difficult to argue with what the two say here and some of it might surprise you as it did me, given the wackiness on LP 1.

It begins with "We live in the most breast-happy country in the world" and "there's a message to children..propaganda that breasts are for fun!"

But just as you think "uh-oh, here we go again," the couple suggests quite rightly that women start breast feeding again. By 1966 that had just about stopped in America, replaced by formula. But now we're seeing a return to what the Willkes suggest doing in 1966.

And then they say "Are you ashamed to eat in public? What's shameful about eating? Feed the baby at the dinner table...not on the bus or in the ball park, but perhaps at the bridge club. Let's nurse again and do it in front of children."

They suggest mothers talk to daughters about menstruation at about ten and fathers talk to sons about 'wet dreams'. They get into masturbation and leave that to parents but are very careful to say don't tell your kid he'll go crazy if he does it (or get hairy palms, etc.). Willke says "Teach your moral code but don't overload it."

The subject of female masturbation does not come up because back then the concept of the female libido simply did not register among these folks. It could not possibly exist, nor could the female orgasm. It's difficult to believe today that the female orgasm was the subject of mass debate and dismissed as outrageous—other than among a small group of lusty women known then as "nymphomaniacs" and today referred to as "horny women."

They talk about the disaster of teenage marriages and suggest that for the most part teens should not marry because of pregnancy and that babies should be given up for adoption. Again, not bad advice because statistics show that most teen marriages end in divorce and unhappiness. And here they don't make fire and brimstone moral judgements, just common sense ones especially the part of the message that discusses the disaster of kids leaving school to get menial jobs to support the new child.

Willke's discussion of unemployment and of it no longer being possible to get a good job without an education as it once was because of automation is the same discussion we're having now in this era of high unemployment. The jobs lost over the past few years are not coming back.

Their opinion is that premarital intimacy is "... barely of benefit to a happy marriage and is almost always destructive. 'I love you let me destroy you spiritually, socially, physically and perhaps martially' is what they say it means when a guy asks for sex from his girlfriend (outside of marriage). Again fair enough—not that I agree with it! If having sex does that to the girl, why does it not also do it to the boy? It actually doesn't inherently do it to either of them. It depends on the individual not the sex of the individual. And the Willkes speak about this back of the car dilemma as if the female is a passive part of the duo, but then that's how women were looked upon then and indeed now by uber-Christians.

They suggest that Christians, unlike Jews have been caught up in a "prudishness" that's not healthy and that people use the real words for body parts and functions and that when kids begin to ask questions about where babies come from the answer honestly with a degree of specificity that seems appropriate for the age."

Really, there's very little to fault on the second LP even if there's more Bible and God talk than some might wish to hear in such a discussion, but that's okay too.

Their real goal though is to take the lust and passion out of sex outside of marriage and they also seem to wish to turn down the heat and make it mostly about procreation and about above the neck feelings couples have for one another. They really don't discuss pleasure at all. They take the pleasure out of sex as if that's somehow either sinful or just a lower order sensation.

Their concern for teen marriages, the unreliability of contraceptives (in 1966), unhappy people fed overly sexual messages and overheated advertising and the rest were all reasonable then and now.

But ironically, where they thought things were heading, while true in the short run, seems to have run out of gas. They worried about teen marriages and about the ever lowering age at which couples married. That's subsided as people choose to marry (if at all) at a later age. Their call for more breast feeding has been met.

Whether or not single parenthood and/or cohabitation is leading to social disaster is still in question but what's not in question is that the titillating heat around sex has subsided, particularly on college campuses where co-ed dorms and a sense that the "forbidden" and the guilt and shame once associated with sex no longer exists or exists in much smaller doses.

It's why sex in pop music has been reduced to a cartoon and sex in indie rock is almost non-existent compared to '60s music. And why the subject matter of blues, with its "she done him wrong" and epic moaning and groaning about lost love no longer resonates.

The sex message is still prevalent wherever you turn, but so much so that we're numb to it. So maybe in many ways we've gotten to where Dr. and Mrs. Willke were hoping we'd get, minus the Bible thumping, though the gay thing and the abortion thing still have them all thumping.

It would have been more fun had LP 2 been as wacked out as LP 1 but really, much of what's said on LP 2 makes a good deal of sense and probably would be helpful to some shy and/or guilt ridden couples in trying to teach their kids about the mechanics of sex. And their message rejecting prudishness seems much needed in today's Evangelical world.