Butcher, baker, candlestick maker,
anyone can get VD,
including those you love.
Please see a doctor
if you think you’ve got it.
You’ll feel better afterwards
and so will those you love.
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker,
anyone can get VD,
including those you love.
Please see a doctor
if you think you’ve got it.
You’ll feel better afterwards
and so will those you love.
Richard Brautigan wrote the above poem, published in 1968, in one of many slim volumes of poetry and fiction. Brautigan was quite popular in the late sixties and early seventies. Some aspects of his worldview, as demonstrated in this poem, are taken for granted in contemporary culture. Other aspects seem antiquated, even quaint. Let’s examine this poem, as a Valentine’s Day exercise.
“Butcher, baker, candlestickmaker …” is lifted from a nursery rhyme, hence sets a tone of childlike innocence.
“Anyone can get VD.” VD is short for venereal disease, a disease of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Today we call these sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, a more accurate term, I think. Anyone can have an STD, no matter how clean and cute that person is; anyone who has engaged in sexual activity with an infected person, that is.
“Including those you love” contains two assumptions that need to be examined in the merciless harsh glare of truth. Brautigan is equating love with sex, and he is assuming that one will have sex with more than one person. (See the word “those,” plural?)
It’s difficult to convey just how shocking these assumptions were in the early 60s, though thoroughly celebrated and promulgated by our classic rock-n-roll bands, which explains in part why our parents hated our music so much. Another song of the day linked: “Love and marriage, love and marriage/ they go together like a horse and carriage.” Our parents vastly preferred that song to CSNY’s “Love the one you’re with.” But I digress.
Today premarital sex is taken for granted. Serial relationships are expected. Having sex with the one you love is assumed, though the equating of love and sex has becomes one-directional: love implies sex, but one can have sex without being in love. It may surprise the contemporary reader to learn that once there was a single word that meant “having sex with different people to whom one wasn’t married”: promiscuity.
There was also a single word that meant “remaining celibate until marriage and faithful to one’s spouse afterwards”: chastity. Chastity was once accepted, normal behavior. Nowadays premarital chastity is called abstinence by the small remnant of people who favor it, and impossible by those who don’t. Back to the poem.
“See a doctor if you think you’ve got it. You’ll feel better afterwards, and so will those you love.” Brautigan wrote at a time when there were only two STDs, syphillis and gonnorhea, both curable with antibiotics. Notice that he assumes that one will notice if one is infected, ie that one will have symptoms, and that a doctor will cure one, enabling one to return to one’s promiscuous lifestyle.
Now there are over 25 identified STDs. Some of them are not curable, such as herpes and AIDS, though they are treatable, in the sense that proper medical care will improve the sufferer’s quality of life and health. Many of them have no discernable symptoms: HPV, for example, which has no overt symptoms, and is directly connected to 99.7 percent of cervical cancers.
Pediatrician Meg Meeker has written a book called “Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing our Kids.” Her statistics are horrifying. One in five Americans over the age of 12 has genital herpes. Teenage girls have a 46 percent chance of contacting HPV at their first sexual encounter.
If her stats are horrifying, her anecdotes are heartbreaking. Dr. Meeker is a practicing pediatrician. She knows the popular teen who is considering suicide because of the pain and shame of his herpes. She knows the pretty girl who lost an ovary to an untreated infection, whose remaining ovary is so scarred that she may never be able to conceive a child.
And what does this have to do with Valentine’s Day?
It should have nothing to do with Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day should have everything to do with celebrating love, love being, first and foremost, a commitment. But as long as our culture pretends that promiscuous sex is normal and natural and consequence-free, the kids will be the ones who suffer most.
