By Hartley NeitaI grew my early years at a time when having sex before marriage was considered a "no-no" in middle-class Jamaica.
There was, however, nothing wrong about having sex with girls who could not be altar dates.
There were fathers, it is said, who encouraged their sons to visit the helper's room at nights.
There were also the gentlemen of St. Andrew who took their sons to the famous House of Strolley on Hanover Street where they arranged for their personal prostitute to initiate the youngsters into the glory of wanton sex.
Sex, then, was discussed in whispers. It was very private. The human body became fully clothed from the time of puberty in young girls when buds began to appear just before their full flowering, and when boys graduated from pee-pee hole pants to button holes and later zips.
Girls who did it in those Victorian days were called "bad girls", while boys who said they did it were considered "lions".
There were, of course, boys who boasted of virginal conquests which took place only in their dreams. Magazines then, idealised romance through publications such as Seventeen and Photoplay.
Photographs of women were in one-piece bathing suits. Women were pictured as pure and virginal.
Awakening
The sexual awakening which began in the 1950s saw married couples being seen on the screen sharing the same double bed.
Before, their beds were separated by a walkway of at least two feet, and a chaste goodnight kiss ended each day before they entered their own beds to go to sleep.
Girls in the audience at cinemas shuddered when in the first movie in which she starred, Bridget Bardot bared all her glory at The Carib.
Young men carefully folded Playboy magazines when they handed them to the cashiers so that other customers would not see the title.
By the time of the 1960s, when the Oracabessa Playboy Club brought its "bunnies" to Jamaica, church leaders were preaching about the Sodom and Gomorra which Jamaica had become.
Those who went there were doomed and quietly warned they could become pillars of salt.
Times and moralities have changed. Girls of age twelve are mothering their own babies instead of Shirley Temple and Barbie dolls.
Young men do not bother to ask fathers for the hand of their daughters in marriage. They impregnate them first, and then the daughter weepingly tells her parents she did it. A white and virginal wedding follows.
Nude bathing on the beaches of hotels was introduced to Jamaica during the 1970s. This was followed by weddings on beaches, with calypso bands massacring the Wedding March and Ave Maria, and which were considered exotic.
Return to innocence
Now it seems we are going back in time to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve became a couple.
A nude couple will say, "I do" on one of our beaches. This could well be televised in living colour to the world, with appropriate music rising to a crescendo when the marriage officer says: "You may now kiss the bride."
My friend James Samuels, the very respectable president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association wonders how much of a moral issue is the whole question of nudity.
"What is an issue," he moralises, "is where nudity is being used as erotica to titillate and tease people; that is questionable and out of taste."
But just to get married in the nude, he sees nothing wrong with it. There is, I think.
I am no prude. I enjoy nudity in private. I also believe we should not contaminate our tourism product with sexual fads. So, why not go the whole way?
Let's hope there are no sand flies on the beach, and let's have the entire wedding party in the nude - the bridesmaids, bestman, the musicians, the little flower girls, the guests at the reception, and Mr. Samuels's waiters and waitresses.
And when the tourist couples, including same sex pairs, ask the hoteliers for the marriage officer to be similarly unrobed, what will Mr. Samuels and his friends tell them?
"Deux, oui; trois non".
