"And then Mommy puts her finger in Daddy's..."

A little while back, Steff at the Cunting Linguist wrote an interesting post about kids and sex education, related to how schools tend to focus strictly on the biological facts of sex rather than also include education on all the important emotional issues and other relationship skills that surround sexuality.

She certainly has a good point—maybe if we stopped teaching kids that sex was just about insertion, pregnancy (avoidance of), and STDs, and taught them how to actually have healthy relationships with people, there would actually BE less inappropriate insertion, pregnancy, STDs, and who knows—even fewer bad marriages/relationships and/or divorces later on.

But the point of this post is not about that, actually. Steff also stressed that these relationship skills also don’t get taught outside of school; and often, in fact, even the biological stuff doesn’t get touched by most family members and other responsible adults in kids’ life.

Right around the time she wrote this, I ended up in a group discussion where people were all sharing their childhood models of intimacy and their parents’ attitudes about sexuality when they were growing up. It's not the first time I've been in such a scenario, and it’s always weird for me. I sit there, and everyone talks about how they rarely ever saw their parents kiss or hug or tell each other they loved each other. They talk about how their parents never told them anything about sex, or one of their parents told them sex was terrible and at best just something to be endured until it was over. They talk about how they never even WANTED to see their parents as sexual beings, that it was too weird. They talk about the funny (but on another level, sad) myths they learned through friends or other faulty sources. They talk about some of the damaging mistakes they made because no one gave them any information.

And then it comes around to me and I have to share my experience. And I tell them how my parents taught me about sex before I’d entered kindergarten. How they’d read me this very comforting and age-appropriate book called “How Babies are Made” that showed how flowers, and chickens, and doggies, and humans have sex and reproduce (with images of paper cut-out art—hard to describe, but this allowed for the depiction of nudity without too much in-your-face detail). I explain how at every stage of my childhood, my parents were open to questions about sexuality and had reading material prepared and at the ready for when I would ask those questions. About how they didn’t make nudity a big deal or anything to feel ashamed about, and so I actually sometimes saw my parents naked when I was a kid. How saying "I love you" was standard at my house. How my dad used to grab my mom and kiss her in the middle of cleaning up after dinner. How as a teenager, when we were on vacations, my parents would ask me to watch my younger sister so they could go back to the hotel room and “have some privacy together” (“...And if you come back, don't knock or come in unless you see the shades are back up”). How when I was getting older, my mom told me that she thought I shouldn’t have sex until I was married, but if I ever decided I was going to, I should come to her so she could help me get good birth control. How I knew what kind of birth control my parents used, and that my dad actually showed me what my mom’s diaphragm looked like when I asked to see it. That my mom bought my dad a subscription to Playboy for a birthday gift--and they let us kids look at the magazines if we wanted to, because “the human body is nothing to be ashamed of.” How my parents insisted I take a full semester of sex education as an elective in high school.

All this is true. And when I tell this story, I usually get one of two reactions:

1. Horror (“You saw your parents NAKED? You knew when your parents were having SEX? Your mom bought your dad a subscription to PLAYBOY?”) -OR-


2. Envy (“I wish my parents had been able to be so straightforward about sexuality—that sounds so healthy.”)
   

In either case, before these verbal responses, it usually results in people staring at me like I’m a freak. Which shows me my experience is pretty damn rare.

I was always comfortable and proud of my parent’s age-appropriate openness about sexuality. I feel in many ways it saved me from a number of sex-related mistakes many of my friends made growing up.

Of course, in other ways, it’s created other problems. Being someone raised with healthy sexual/relationship models in a world of people raised with dysfunctional ones still creates clashes for me. People don’t have my experience, so they can’t relate to me on that level.

But anyway, more to the point: In reading Steff’s post, I got to thinking. My parents certainly did better than most, if my discussions with others on the topic have been any guideline. I’m happy about that, and I give them real kudos for this. Most especialy, I give them kudos for letting me know I could ask them about anything and actually meaning it. They never made me feel ashamed or embarassed when I did ask them something.

From them, I learned about intercourse and love and menstruation and reproduction and birth control and shame-free desire. And for this, I truly thank them.

But after reading Steff's post, I thought about it some more. And after thinking about it, I realize that despite all of the above, there was still a lot of stuff they left out, or never said specifically, which I had to absorb for myself. For instance, they never told me specifically that:

1. People had sex for other reasons than having babies. As the title of the book they read to me at five pretty much implies, they taught me sex was something that “mommies and daddies” do when they “are in love with each other” and want to create a baby. This made sense at the time they read it to me--my mother was pregnant, and they wanted me to understand what was going on with her. They did make me understand that they had sex together as an expression of their love for each other. But there was never any clear discussion of the fact that people had sex all the time, whether they wanted babies or not. This became clear as I got older, and there was the implication my parents had sex and enjoyed it a lot despite being past wanting more kids, but it was never “taught” to me as a truism early on that sex was, well...just plain fun.
   


2. People had sex when they weren’t married. My parents didn’t believe in sex before marriage. I’m fairly certain based on things I’ve heard them say that they were both virgins themselves when they got married. Of course, through media I absorbed fairly quickly that people did it even when they weren’t married, but my parents always explained this to me as being a “not-the-best-choice” scenario. I could tell they thought the people who did that were devaluing what they saw as the sacredness of loving sex. And there was some sense they gave off, though they never said it out loud exactly, that people who chose to engage in pre-marital sex were stupid, misguided, and asking for trouble—and that the sex was meaningless and probably not as good.


3. There were sensations involved with sex besides feeling love for each other. I had no idea that the word “orgasm” existed was until I was a pre-teen and read the phrase “I came, and then he came” in a book (Judy Blume’s Forever) and asked about it. To my mom’s credit, when I asked her what that meant, she told me immediately. But I remember how surprised I was that she hadn’t told me this kind of thing before. And I also remember asking her to describe to me what an orgasm felt like (poor Mom, what an impossible question to answer!) and her floundering around for a few minutes without words, and then just blurting out “Good!” in this frustrated, I-can’t-do-better-than-that way. Heh.


4. People had other kinds of sex other than coitus. I can’t even remember when I discovered people had oral, anal, etc. sex, but it wasn’t via my parents. I can’t remember asking them about it, either, once I knew.


5. People you knew could possibly attempt to sexually assault you, and how to recognize the signs of that, and what to do when faced with such a situaton. Obviously, given some of my previous posts, this would have been a good thing to be educated on.
   


6. That homosexuality existed. Sex was presented to me as a straight hetero thing. And at some point growing up, after I discovered homosexuality existed and then asked my mother about it, I remember her telling me it was a psychological condition, and implying “those people” were confused and messed up. It was a fairly common belief at the time, and even presented as "fact" in contemporary adult sex books back then, so I guess it’s not surprising she said this, though it’s disappointing. Nowadays, she swears up and down she NEVER said that, but I remember it very clearly. And in truth, even now, though they try their best to be open and nonjudgmental about the topic these days, my parents are at least to some degree closet homophobes.


7. Adults masturbated, and how. It’s funny. I remember learning fairly early on (before grade school was out) about boys having "wet dreams." But when teaching me about that, no one actually told me that boys could induce the same effect when NOT dreaming. My parents never denied the existence of masturbation, and as I got older I’m fairly sure they acknowledged its existence to me and never implied it was unhealthy, but they never taught me anything specific about it, either. Learning to masturbate was a self-taught thing for me, and I remember being concerned as a kid that I might not be doing it the “right way,” because I didn’t know what the “right way” was, and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to check.

So there were a few things left off the plate when I was getting taught the facts of life.

Honestly, none of this ever occurred to me before, because in comparison to everyone I knew, I’d always had the most information about sexuality, and my family had always been the most open. I guess I felt I couldn’t expect more if my parents’ level of openness already put me in the “freaky” category in a lot of people’s eyes. But looking at this list…well, yeah, even they could have done an even better job.

The one thing I will say is that they were always open for discussion of these things, which was great. But their way of judging age-appropriateness in many situations was to wait until the child had questions, and then be well prepared to answer them responsibly. It was a good method, but not foolproof, because some things you don’t know to ask until someone else tells you. And if no one tells you…well…

Most of the topics listed above I eventually got information on in that high school sex ed class my parents made me take. The teacher of that course was great and very open, and in retrospect I have to give her a lot of credit for what a terrific job she did. But even she didn't answer everything.

And Steff is right; though I had a fairly good model of a working relationship in my parents, no one at school OR at home gave me specific instruction on what makes for a healthy relationship. And that’s important information.

So now…what did your parents teach you? What did they leave out? Do you think parents should talk to kids, or is that just too uncomfortable a situation for kids, to be discussing sex with a parent? Did anyone have any good instruction beyond the biological aspects on things like how to build healthy relationships and handle the emotional aspects of sexuality? What do you think should be discussed with children when it comes to sex and relationships? At what age? Should you bring it up, or should they? How much information is too much? Too little?

And if you have kids, what do they think about/want from you in this arena? Have you ever asked?

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