My toilet seat tale is proof our children do need books on sex

I WAS only 13 or 14 years old when the tall doctor with the lined, kindly face called me into his consultation room.

As he was to discover, I had more on my mind than the sore throat and the temperature I was officially presenting with.

The doctor’s expression did not flicker when I eventually got around to putting The Terrible Question to him.

The Dreadful Thing I’d been worrying myself sick over since my friend had Told Me All About It.

I took a deep breath.

“Can you,” I asked nervously, “get pregnant from sitting on a toilet seat that a man might have sat on?”

Thing was, we’d been on a school-bus outing and at the break there had been the usual enormous queue outside the ladies’ toilets, while nobody was using the men’s.

I was at the end of our queue and bursting for a wee, so I’d dodged into the men’s when nobody was looking.

When I returned, relieved and grinning, my shocked, disapproving friend - still only halfway up the girls’ queue - issued The Great Warning. The Revelation.

I was now, frankly, terrified.

The doctor looked at me.

“No,” he said steadily. “You absolutely cannot get pregnant from sitting on a toilet seat.”

I slumped with relief.

A brief silence.

“Who told you that?” he asked expressionlessly.

“My friend,” I said.

There was a barely discernible sigh.

“Ah. All you have to worry about, my dear, is the flu.

“Home to bed with you now and get your Mammy to fill in that prescription.”

God, I was so relieved!

Back then, there was a dead silence about topics like sex, pregnancy, contraception or the menopause. People muttered out of the sides of their mouths and used euphemisms, if they mentioned these things at all.

There were no books around to explain sex to you then.

Contraception wouldn’t be legalised in Ireland for another two or three years.

The last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland (in Sawmill Street in Cork) wouldn’t close for another two decades.

All the same, we vaguely intuited that if you got pregnant, you’d end up in the place that Bold Women got sent to for Getting THEMSELVES Pregnant Outside Marriage. Especially pregnant teenagers.

Having been reliably informed that I was likely to be pregnant after sitting on a man’s toilet, I was, in my more terrified moments late at night, seriously considering running away.

I was a great reader. But practical books on sex, by people like Marie Stopes (who founded the first birth control clinic in Britain and edited a newsletter which gave practical advice about sex and birth control) were banned in this country.

The Lonely Girl by Edna O’Brien was banned after Archbishop John Charles McQuaid complained to the then Minister for Justice, one Charles Haughey, that the novel was “particularly bad”.

So were novels by Maura Laverty, Frank O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Walter Macken, Aldous Huxley, and of course the utterly marvellous The Tailor And Ansty. Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was banned.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was technically never banned in Ireland, but that was because it never went on sale here for fear of the veto.

J.D Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye got the boot. So did John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, D.H Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh. All suppressed, because, in one way or another, they mentioned the Great Taboo. Sex.

Time passed, however. Ireland eventually joined the real world and grew the hell up.

Until, alas and alack, The Year of Our Lord 2023, when a campaign of protest, unfortunately marked by incidents of harassment and abuse against librarians - LIBRARIANS of all people - began in Cork city.

For several months, employees at Cork City Library have been subjected to protests from deeply conservative activists, some of whom are believed to be linked to British far-right groups.

They have apparently taken issue with books which explain LGBTQ issues to young people.

They remind me of the Committee on Evil Literature, which was appointed in 1926 and reported to the Department of Justice.

Today’s literary zealots, though, don’t even have the support of a repressive, backward government, let alone that of the general public or experts on child psychology or children’s literature.

All the same, they consider themselves such upstanding arbiters of rightness and moral judgement that some have travelled from Dublin and elsewhere around the country to join this Holy War, this Jihad of the Righteous, against Cork City Library.

A few of the righteous have even reportedly flown over from England to add their two-and-sixpence to a small, local campaign against library staff, some of whom have been filmed, insulted, and defamed on social media.

These geniuses have torn up material on LGBTQ literature in the library, including Juno Dawson’s best-selling young adult non-fiction book on sexuality and gender, This Book Is Gay.

They have engaged in threatening, intimidating behaviour because they oppose books that deal with… well, sexuality in terms of lesbianism, homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender (a phrase which refers to someone whose gender identity differs from the gender they were assigned at birth), and intersex (when a person is born with a combination of male and female biological traits).

In fact, some of these protesters are so agitated about it all that not only did they tear up This Book Is Gay, they even reportedly visited bookshops requesting it be removed. (While at the same time, I notice, they seem to be making no fuss at all about young children watching the hardest of hard-core violent porn on smartphones bought for them by their parents.)

Tánaiste Micheál Martin has commented that this is about some people wanting notoriety.

I figure he has a point.

What this comes down to is a few very misguided people who are trying to create a bottle of smoke to get themselves noticed.