That's what the magazine ads say. You've probably seen them.
Buy a couple of videotapes and - Whoa! - you're in the back seat of your '55 Chevy with Mary Lou at the drive-in movie, popcorn everywhere and the windows steamed.
Remember?
Doris and Rock would be engaging in some pillow talk on screen, or maybe it was Jimmy and June. Didn't matter. Who cared about the show?
On the big screen, sex was coyly suggestive at best. In the '50s the word "pillow" could bring blushes, on-screen married couples slept in twin beds, and the word "virgin" was banned from all screens by the Catholic church.
Weren't those the days?
To hear some folks talk today, the 1950s were as close to Utopia as this great nation ever reached. Talk about selective memory!
Want to know about actual sex during that golden age? I may be the only guy in America who didn't go all the way in the back seat of his car. But I doubt it. It wasn't for lack of trying.
First, consider that back seat. Unless you had a Nash, with its pull-down, make-into-a-bed seats, there was little room in the back to do anything but grope and cramp, not unlike pretzels unable to untwine. I never knew anyone who actually owned a Nash, but you can bet that no father of the '50s would permit his daughter within 20 feet of that car. Not that they needed to worry. The ever-present girdle put a stop to thoughts of hanky-panky before they started.
How any girl got herself into one of those bastions of virginity baffled every guy who dated during the '50s. So tight and sturdy was the elastic, it was impossible to get so much as a dark fantasy beyond that diabolical barrier.
You'd be at the drive-in, rolling around in your musty old back seat, hormones raging. The two of you were wrapped in positions only contortionists attained, wanting to, but too cautious to extend your feet and legs out the window, while attempting the impossible: Peeling off a girdle that was cunningly contrived to resist.
It was absolutely the best birth-control method ever devised - and you didn't have to whisper embarrassments to a druggist to get one.
Take it from the millions of us who still reminisce: No medieval chastity belt was as effective. That was not the girdle's purpose, of course: It held up stockings too.
If all that is what those ads mean by having "sex like you did 50 years ago," I think I'll pass.
If my wife and I ever do find ourselves getting nostalgic for those good old days, we can always attend an antique auto show, sneak into the back seat of a '55 Chevy and renew old memories.
Now, if I can just get her to wear a girdle.
- Frank Kaiser is a nationally syndicated columnist living in Clearwater. His Web site, www.suddenlysenior.com includes nostalgia, trivia, senior humor and Best Senior Links. Write Frank c/o Seniority, the St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or e-mail features@sptimes.com
