The Consequences of Physical Intimacy

I remember the teenage romance comics. When I saw April and the “Sweet 16 and never been kissed” phrase, I was reminded of an old romance comic I saw a long time ago where the straight-laced boy, wearing the letter sweater walked by a girl lying in the grass kissing a boy and thinking, “And she told me she’d never been kissed!” And there was the title of the story blazing “Never Been Kissed.” I can make fun of it now, but I remember clearly my mother, who was born in 1939, telling me when she was growing up in the 1950s, a lot of girls were so ignorant about sex, they did honestly believe that being caught kissing a boy was a shameful act. Of course, my mom’s dad was a Southern Baptist minister, so that might have had something to do with my mother’s perception.

As I understand it, Lynn Johnston turns 60 this year, which means her teenage years were from 1960 – 1966, not in the 1950s. Of course, what this really means is that Lynn wants April to have some comeuppance for what she did with Gerald, and this idiotic storyline is what she came up with. Lynn wants April to be bad, but not so bad we don’t like her, and yet bad enough to deserve a punishment. Too bad she didn’t come with any way to do that, which would make sense in the 21st century.