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From: paulb@hcrvx1.UUCP (Paul Bonneau)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: celebration
Message-ID: <1037@hcrvx1.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Dec-84 21:30:56 EST
Article-I.D.: hcrvx1.1037
Posted: Thu Dec 13 21:30:56 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Dec-84 01:35:02 EST
Organization: Human Computing Resources, Toronto
Lines: 48

[Out Vile Jelly!]

This is actually carried over from net.women.only but since I'm male I'm
replying here.

Sophie Quigley writes:

> When I was in high school, I had a friend whose parents celebrated with her
> the beginning of her womanhood by taking her out to a restaurant.  I thought
> that was rather nice.  If I get a daughter I plan to do something similar.
> It IS a very important event, and should definitely be celebrated!
> 
> I wonder when people start feeling ashamed of such things.  When I was in
> Junior high, we were all longing to get our periods, and those who "had it"
> had a special aura about them and were the envy of all the other little girls
> who were not so lucky.  I remember bragging about it when I "got mine".
> After a > while though, nobody was bragging anymore, just trying to hide it.

Boy! Sometimes the girls don't have it all that bad!

Consider the opposite case, ie. when a newly pubescent male has his first wet
dream.  For most of us it is a scary experience.  And nobody talks about it.
It doesn't seem to have the same public awareness that the female menarche
does.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that we (men) are not having the same degree
of physical change occurring as women do.  Nocturnal emissions are usually not
periodic, last but a short time, and require no special measures against
staining etc.

So as a result, you have your typical about-to-become-more-than-a-boy
experiencing this thing that no one has ever told him about and the
psychological reverberations are usually quite unpleasant.

If he is lucky to know what is happening to him (unlike me - woke up in the
middle of the night with this goo and thought that some important bodily fluid
was escaping somehow - scared shitless) then he is still not immune from a
false guilt that this thing that just happened is bad and evil.

To celebrate such a thing?  It seems equivalent to the femalee case - the boy
becomes a man, maturing, fulfilling his destiny, etc.  But it seems
doubtful that the stigma attached to this process will abate for a long time.

P.S.  For those of you who see the mad rantings of a pitifully uniformed child,
      flame on!, I like a bit of discussion now and then...
-- 
I'm a man!  I'm not a horse!		Paul Bonneau
					{decvax|ihnp4|watmath}!hcr!hcrvax