Sex education was simpler when I was a girl. There were only two sexes back then, and the word gender had not yet leaped from the declension of nouns to an identity.
Sr. Edmund Marie, the biology teacher in the girls’ department of our parish high school, visited the grammar school every year. She spent a day talking to us about plant biology and brought a black portfolio of oversized botanical posters. One was a standard line drawing for classroom use, the rudimentary kind that appears in countless textbooks.
But she toted other more engaging ones: enlargements of antique cross-cut illustrations of plant anatomy. Delicately drawn and colored, these old prints testified to the beauty inherent in the function of nature’s designs. That is why Edmund Marie went to the extra trouble of bringing them. She loved her subject and wanted to elicit a response that went deeper than bare information.
Without the benefit of previous instruction from a learned source, we all understood — who knows how — that Sister’s botany lessons were proxy for sex-ed. Long before she arrived, we all knew who the pistil people were in the room. And there was not a single doubt about which classmates had stamens.
Brother James from the high school boys’ department would drop by to add a few notes to Sister’s presentation of floral reproductive processes. A strapping Marist, he carried a distinct masculine gravitas — daunting, really — that dampened inclinations to snickering from any of the boys.
