That's men for you Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's healthI don't know what boys in school are told about girls today, but back in the 1960s, the official version could be somewhat daunting.
I have never forgotten the religious doctrine class in which Brother O'Grady informed us that if a boy had sex with a girl, he would have committed two sins. First, he would have endangered his own immortal soul; second, he would have destroyed a temple of the Holy Ghost.
I should add that a phrase such as "had sex with" would have been considered far too extreme for the classroom at the time - the phrase used was probably something like "committed a mortal sin with". This, after all, was the era when the lines
'O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!' were censored out of our edition of Hamlet.
We only knew about them because our English teacher had an uncensored edition and read them out.
As for the temple of the Holy Ghost, we were Catholic lads, so we had a Da Vinci Code-like ability to decipher religious references. Therefore, it was understood by all of us that the temples of the Holy Ghost were, well, girls.
We had never thought of girls that way before and I wish Brother O'Grady hadn't come up with that particular way of looking at them. It puts you off, it does, until you manage to consign it to the mental scrap heap.
That said, the view of women imparted to us in Naas CBS was probably more favourable than what is normally regarded as the traditional Church view.
That view was put to us when we were sent up to a Jesuit retreat house. There, we spent three days in silence, an experience enlivened by an apoplectic description of a girl in a mini-skirt by one of the priests.
I think he was a man who took life too seriously. When he entered the room to lecture us, we stood politely, just like we had been taught by the Christian Brothers.
He stopped and stared at us. "When I come into the room, boys, you do not stand," he intoned. "You kneel."
He followed that one by recounting his experience of taking a city bus and finding himself sitting opposite a girl in a mini-skirt. Did she have no regard for the temptation she was putting before young Catholic boys? His voice rose as he asked this.
If she had no regard for the immortal souls of the boys to whom she was an occasion of sin, did she not have some regard at least for her own immortal soul? What of the Virgin? he cried. What indeed, we asked ourselves as we mentally contemplated the image of the girl in the mini-skirt.
This girl, he declared, his face now red with rage, may as well have slapped the Virgin in the face as dress in this immoral way. Having thus thoroughly unsettled us, he then led us in prayer.
These incidents illustrate the dilemma growing boys and, I suppose, girls found themselves in at the time.
We were caught in two worlds. In one world, a girl was a temple of the Holy Ghost. In the other she was a mini-skirted occasion of sin. Sometimes the worlds collided: the mini-skirted girl who got pregnant outside marriage could find herself on her knees scrubbing a convent floor for two years, waiting for her baby to be adopted by Americans.
If the father wanted to contact her, no such contact was allowed: letters were read on the way in and the way out and there was no possibility of surreptitious phone calls.
But here we are in the 21st century and most of us have, by now, shaken off the idea of the female as either the austere temple of the Holy Ghost or the dangerous temptress, destroyer of men's souls.
I suppose the priest is pushing up daisies. And the girl in the mini-skirt is, perhaps, a respectable reader of The Irish Times who occasionally shakes her head at the carry-on of young wans nowadays.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
pomorain@irish-times.ie