The modern world views the past through the lens of Victorianism, the frumpish bustles and black mourning clothes of an era that separates us from the history that came before it. We don’t think anyone in history did a bawdy thing or even knew the word sex unless they were maybe in Shakespeare’s day or way back in Roman times. The revisions of the Victorians on history tried to scrub it clean. The attempted to sanitize its more embarrassing human elements.

I’ve been studying a great deal about colonial life in America, leading into our war of independence, and I’ve unearthed some things that you would have never thought of. To set the record straight on some things before the hilarious and weird ensues, let’s kill the myth of the stern chaperone. I don’t know about Europe of the 1700’s, but in America, chaperones were not a requirement for an outing as they became in later years, or may have been in centuries previous. The colonials had a much more provincial method, it consisted of knowing who your daughter was with, and if she turned up pregnant, as many did, taking her and the responsible male to the church and having them banded in holy wedlock.

If you were over twenty-one things got slightly more tricky. While the parents of a frolicsome young maid of age would no doubt want to protect her from disrepute, she no longer required their consent to wed. In fact the only people who had to consent to the marriage was herself and the man she planned to be landed with. Of course men could use this to their advantage by professing love and marriage, getting their way and then getting out of dodge or denying they had done any such thing when the woman they had misled came demanding her rights as wife. This lead to interesting techniques to keep one’s virtue above insult. One such technique was to sequester a friend, sister, or someone trustworthy in the closet, or the room next door, or inside the linens chest while the troth was plighted and then if the man decided to renege later, there was a witness to testify he had in fact married the maligned lady who was seeking her position as his wife to be honored.

Another method employed as an early sort of paternity test and energy conservation in one was the bundling board. A couple could be allowed to spend the night together in the chilly days of say autumn or winter, provided the place they were staying equipped them with a bundling board; which was, just as it sounds to be, a plank of wood. This plank was placed between the two members of this pair to prevent any premarital hanky-panky. Now of course any but the most naive parents would know that as a promoter of abstinence this piece of timber was about as effective as a plow would be on a boat. But having allowed the young duo their freedom, should the girl turn up pregnant, they knew just who to point their fingers at. The young amorous adults could only be expected to understand this unspoken contract, which is why even with less restraint than would be seen for the next 150 years, men understood that taking a lady to bed had serious repercussions, you could end up with an empty-headed big-bosomed wife who couldn’t tie a knot just because you’d got her with child or her parents had discovered the two of you had been together in a prohibited kind of way.

Things were in such a state of moral decay that just a few decades before war broke out against Britain some ministers were allowing a two month grace period for couples to get their butts to the altar before the bun in the oven became labeled a bastard, and had to live with that stigma for the rest of their life.

So why did I just give you a history of hanky-panky in the colonial world, well for context. Immorality is nothing new, teenagers have been fooling around for as long as man has existed, but what is new, and what is terrifying to the morally minded person is that for the first time in human history there are no repercussions to one’s illicit actions. There is no risk of a child coming to be when we live a world so degraded that for the sake of satisfying her lust without inconvenience a woman can slaughter her unborn children. There is less social ramifications than ever before, “ho” and “slut” are still insults applied to a loose woman, but sometimes they’re viewed as a badge of achievement as well. The responsibility of a father is all but vanished. Providing a portion of your pay once a month from far away is NOT the same as having a father to help raise the child. The distant father paying child support is only covering one of the many functions needed for a cohesive parent duo. It’s an easy way out for the men of the 21st century. They have to provide money, but beyond that society doesn’t care if they never show their face. There is no expectation that unlawful unions will end in marriage if a child appears. Men can go off and impregnate as many women as they choose so long as they have the cash, and nevermind the gutter the girl ends up.

Not to say that women are not to hold their fair share of the blame too, if it was consensual then the fault rests with her for not saying no. But it goes deeper, it rests with the generation that raised her, and sometimes even the generation before that. Parents who didn’t teach their daughters the importance of chastity, or their sons the responsibility that goes with the power to impregnate. We have parents who have thrown in the towel without even trying to persuade their children to keep to the moral path. They resign themselves to their children doing whatever immoral acts they might have the urge to commit without so much as giving them talks about abstinence or responsibility. Telling children to just “be safe” is not enough if you expect them to carry on successful relationships and be worth their two cents in the world Lessons in personal responsibility, whether about sex or anything else, have gone out the window these days. And that is something that the folk of yore with their bundling boards and their Bibles could never be accused of.