TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a high school senior, I was sitting in my room and my mother walked in with a newspaper clipping from The New York Times about a new disease called GRID. This was, I read in our family’s newspaper of record, a disease that was impacting gay men. A few weeks later, she came in with a second article on the same subject. It was a while before the name was changed to AIDS, or that any heterosexuals figured out they might have a stake in the issue.
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My mother, Camille, was the source of most of my sex education, at least the face-to-face part, covering the technical issues. This had started some years earlier.
Her theory was it was easier to talk about sex to little kids than to teenagers, so the discussions must have started when I was about 10 and when my brother was about 7. She was at the time an ESL teacher — English as a second language — teaching English to people from Haiti and Puerto Rico. At the time, during the supposedly wild and irresponsible 1970s, educational programs funded by New York City included basic information about birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
When she told me the stories of grown women in her class (i.e., even older than her) thinking a 7-Up douche after sex could prevent pregnancy (apparently a rumor in the times before Snopes), I got it on the spot that you just had to teach this stuff. My brother and I got a kick out of the story, too. We had 7-Up in the refrigerator. It now had an erotic connotation.
One night after dinner, she dumped the contents of an envelope onto the kitchen table, revealing all kinds of little gadgets: diaphragms and various IUDs, condoms and tubes full of spermicide and little pamphlets. After that night, I was probably the only kid except my brother for 75 miles around who could tell you the difference between a Copper 7 and a Lippes Loop. (Both are intra-uterine devices. The Copper 7 was later the subject of a serious medical scandal and subsequent lawsuit, because it sterilized a lot of women.)
To her credit, there was no moral message whatsoever: she assumed that her sons would be sexually active, and the obvious choice for her as a parent was to make sure we began that journey from the standpoint of awareness and not ignorance, making choices about family planning instead of playing in the casino of life. She did not want any unplanned grandchildren, either.
We also got a full rundown on STDs. They were not considered a big deal at the time (since they could, in theory, all be cured), but I was aware of the dangers of Chlamydia, pelvic inflammatory disease, fallopian tube scarring and a diversity of other issues. In essence, we were being taught how to take care of women’s bodies, and also our own.
As much as I knew about sex by the time I got to high school, I was completely clueless that the subject was controversial. I continued my education in books that I found around the house: The Hite Report, The Joy of Sex, and others. Sex seemed to me like a normal part of culture and of life.
My senior year, I was editor of the social science journal of my high school (John Dewey High School in Brooklyn), called Gadfly. In one edition, we ran a full-page birth control ad provided by Planned Parenthood, featuring photos of condoms and diaphragms. It was a progressive high school, but there were some relics laying about. My typing teacher was a conservative Catholic woman and objected to the fact that Gadfly had published this ad. She let me know this one day when I showed up for class.
At 16 this was already an issue I cared about deeply, so I stood by my decision as an editor, and I was happy to debate the point with her — and she failed me. In Dewey, it was really hard to fail a class, since the school was on a pass-fail system. If you showed up and did the work, which I did, you passed.
I explained this to the department chairman, and after a meeting with the teacher, they agreed to reverse my failing grade if I passed Speed Typing the next cycle. So today, my impressive typing speed is a testament to my position on sex education, and I remember this as I breeze along the Macintosh keyboard. Some things work together for good. Some things never change.
Fast-forward two years, to the spring of 1983. I was a sophomore at SUNY Buffalo, exploring my options for getting involved in the campus community. I learned that there was a Sexuality Education Center on the campus. Staffed by students, it was a form of peer counseling, and the program was run by a professional named Ellen Christiansen. After an interview, I was accepted as a trainee in the program, and began going to the workshops.
Everything was going well, and I was eager to begin working as a peer counselor. At the very end of the program, we had a special session with men visiting from the Buffalo Sexually Transmitted Disease Center, two supposed experts in the field, and after a presentation, we were invited to ask anything we wanted. At some point in this part of the session, I raised my hand and said I had read an article in the Times two years ago about a new disease called GRID, which they had not mentioned in their presentation. Could they tell us anything about it?
I remember the silence in the room.
They didn’t know what I was talking about.
Nobody did.
I was not trying to catch them off-guard; I could hardly have imagined doing so. I was really curious. And it seemed obvious to me that if something on this subject was in the Times two years earlier, they’d heard about it; and that we needed to know about it, if we were going to be counseling students, including gay students, about sex. I was puzzled that they didn’t know anything, and puzzled that they didn’t even say they would look into the subject — but I let it drop.
The conversation went on, but a few moments later, Ellen called me outside the room and said that I needed to leave the program, since I was obviously better suited to be a journalist: in other words, I had asked a question that was too difficult for public health officials to answer. As you can see, this is not a difficult feat.
So, let the search engines and the Akashic record reflect that in 1983 I was thrown out of the Sexuality Education Center training program at the State University of New York at Buffalo — a major, indeed, world-renowned, health sciences center — for asking sexual disease experts about AIDS — a disease that would soon ravage our city’s gay community.
And cut a swath through the gay community of every other city in the world. And nearly all creative industries, which lost many of their most talented people, including Patric Walker, the horoscope columnist whose daily column showed me that astrology is real. And many heterosexuals, who died in droves first from contaminated blood products, then from IV drugs, and also from sexual contact.
And the entire African continent, apropos of the holocaust that AIDS is when you don’t deal with it.
I took Ellen’s backhanded advice and pursued journalism a bit more assertively. A year later, I founded a campus magazine called Generation, and one of the first weekly features I implemented was a sex-ed column called “Just Between Us.” The writer handled the subject with humor, intelligence and no inhibitions. Every week, in Q & A format, the column covered a new subject or two. Nobody complained, indeed, it was one of the most popular features we ran. But I quietly stood guard over the column, knowing that at least we were doing our part to put information into the hands of the 28,000 students we reached each week. (I also wrote an April Fool’s parody of the column, called “Just Between the Sheets.”)
What I did not know was that right around the time my mother was handing me the first clipping about GRID/AIDS, Ronnie Reagan was collaborating with the Heritage Foundation working to ban sex education in schools.
The program they were creating and lobbying congress to fund was called Abstinence Only Sex Education, and the drift of this program is that abstinence is the only answer to every question about sex, reproduction or pleasure in existence. Kind of like holding your breath is the answer to air pollution. Various forms of the program teach (for example) that condoms are ineffective at preventing disease or pregnancy. Homosexuality and masturbation are banned from the discussion, and asking about them may get a student referred to counseling.
Today, all across our great nation, graduating class after class enters the world clueless about sex, and it’s cluelessness by design. The federal government attempts, sometimes successfully, to exert pressure on foreign governments to implement abstinence indoctrination programs, on threat of losing foreign aid. Countries like France and The Netherlands, where sex education is valued and considered common sense, think we’re smoking crank.
Unfortunately, most American parents are not like my mother, with her envelope, news reports and common sense.
Some are: some refuse to play games with their kids’ lives, and have straightforward discussions even over the objections of spouses and school officials. (If a child comes into school knowing too much about sex, in today’s political climate, that can be considered a form of sexual abuse by the parents who provide the information.) But for most young people, if they don’t hear about sex in class, they hear about it from porno films (which are abundant in many households), where, for example, boys “learn” that you can have sex with lots of people without condoms, and that the usual thing to do is ejaculate on a woman’s face. Imagine the shock of a teenage girl who unexpectedly experiences that, maybe having sex for the first time.
I have been sexually active for 27 years, and I’ve noticed one particular trend in these three decades that I find extremely disturbing: I meet more and more women who do nothing about preventing pregnancy. Many don’t believe in the pill; I am not a big fan of hormone disruption, either. But for most women these days it’s either the pill, condoms or nothing. Condoms alone are not enough; there are other options, but nobody besides me seems to have heard of them anymore. No, they are not all good, but the options need to be considered, including natural options. But this all really takes knowing something, and that takes finding out. Things seem to be going a bit backwards lately. Maybe this trend has something to do with Abstinence Only sex “education.”
A few years ago, when I began studying to be a Hakomi therapist, I was stunned to learn that there was no discussion whatsoever of sex in the training program. Hakomi is supposed to be an elegant and enlightened form of therapy; but there was no discussion in the program of how to handle sexual subject matter, no information about how to handle sexual feelings, sexual trauma, nothing — the subject was not mentioned, and the trainers objected to mentioning it. They were adamant.
You could, and many people do, become a practicing therapist and hang up a shingle and take on the public and all its pain, yet have no experience discussing sex whatsoever — even though many people need to talk about this subject more than any other.
We have come full circle, back to the 7-Up douche; back to sex “experts” who are clueless about the most important issues of their day; back to locker-room talk providing more information than health education class; to therapists who skip over everything learned about sex from Freud on forward.
I am aware there are Planet Waves readers who have a craw stuck in their throats over the fact that I will not shut up about sex. Please, get over it. Someone once wrote to me and said that it was ridiculous that I suggested that couples need to talk in advance about what to do if their sexual experiences create a pregnancy. She suggested that nobody would have sex, if people tried to have that discussion first.
Please: get a clue. Learn to say “penis” and “vagina” without getting embarrassed.
We need to talk about this stuff. We absolutely have to. We need to know about it, and act on what we know. We also need to accept the fact that all sex is risky. Women 80 years old who have not had sex since they were 55 can and do develop primary genital herpes (i.e., have a first outbreak). Why? Well how about because 90% of the population has herpes antibodies. Herpes was old news in Caesar’s day, but few people know about this.
Under most circumstances (there are exceptions) herpes is a relatively minor problem, if you can get it under control. Not everyone can, and some people end up in herpes hell. Women who are on the pill, who have multiple partners, and do not insist on condom use are flirting not just with HIV but also with infertility caused by subtle infections that can do their damage in the year between gynecological examinations.
If we take care about AIDS, we’re also taking care about a lot of other problems, at least partly or mostly. With disease prevention, a little goes a long way; a little is better than none; and the more care and attention we take, and give, the better. If we use condoms and have a brief sexual history discussion, we’ve crossed a lot of important territory. If we take STD tests regularly, we at least know where we stand, more or less.
People who have been reading my sex articles for a long time know that I don’t dwell on the disease issue. I have chosen to take a different approach, putting most of my energy into communicating ideas about pleasure, working through shame and jealousy, and writing generously about the most maligned sexual subject still very much in existence: masturbation.
Rather than preaching the doctrine of “safe sex,” I would much prefer to offer ideas about how you can talk about sex at all.
If you can talk about sex, then you can talk about any related subject, including safer sex. If you’re embarrassed and don’t have the words, or if you’re afraid to say them because you might be judged, it’s a lot harder to have any discussion at all. And consider this: jealousy prevents people from having honest sexual discussions, or revealing their actual conduct. If something makes your partner jealous, you’re likely to keep quiet about it.
There is another point. Being real with people with whom we’re sexual gives them the power to make an informed decision about whether they want to be with us. Often, the fear of jealousy is an excuse; it’s a ruse that covers the fear of abandonment. Giving people sexual information about us is another way of giving them power, including handing them what they need to make up their own minds. And this is often the occasion for a chilling silence on the theme of sex and sexual history.
Rise above this stuff we must, and learn to speak, and to listen, particularly with and to our children, and with the adults with whom we are sexual, or plan to be sexual. As my first male lover George said to me, the answer to AIDS is not using condoms. The answer is whole relationships. Maybe that sounds a little like marriage, but I don’t view it that way: I think a whole relationship is any one in which you’re able to speak intimately about intimate subject matter.
With the flood waters of shame, ignorance and moralism somehow creeping up to our chins even at this rather late date in world history, we do indeed have a few things to talk about here beside the rising tide. And hey if you can’t talk about sex, you’re missing some of the best sex there is, since those discussions can really heat up that plump, juicy sex organ known as your brain.
I do have a suggestion, though: for the sex discussions that require cool, calm reason, talk in the kitchen, over a nice refreshing glass of 7-Up. ++
Lorelei, your post pleased me to no end.
Your story caused me to remember the youth group of my teens (which was sans anything to do with sex or sexuality or even self, for that matter). To know that organized parents are giving important life-lessons to their kids in this environment is wonderful to hear!
Thank you for sharing!
Just a thought…..
A local Unitarian church has a program for 7-8th graders called OWL (Our Whole Lives), an 18-week, comprehensive sex-ed program dedicated to a co-ed learning experience for 12-and-13-year olds. A few years back I had the distinct pleasure of carpooling a group of OWL teen participants to an after-the-course party at an instructor’s home.
As a captive audience, I was both forced to listen to and entertained by the adolescent conversation, ranging from a standard fare of pubescence to the absurdly comical. What struck me, though, as we road along, was the slogan the kids would unleash every once in a while: “MASTURBATION IS YOUR FRIEND!” one of the kids would shout, and the rest would fall out laughing. Of course, they had learned this useful piece of info at an OWL session. Aha, I thought… how wonderful, a playful way for the pre-teens to “get” that sexuality begins with knowing oneself sexually and also that responsible sexuality begins with the self.
To my way of thinking this is a far better slogan for our youth to be shouting, sharing, understanding– and experimenting with– than something more insidiously dangerous, like clattering on about valueless drivel, like “Lucky Charms are magically delicious.” Ewww….
Thank you, Eric, and everyone else who continues to remind us that we are all (with very few exceptions) sexual beings. Nature loves variation; why would we be so arrogant as to view humanity as an organic entity of sexual sameness? We don’t all like the same foods, drinks, smells or sounds, how could we all possibly conduct our sexual lives in exactly the same way?
Please keep talking about sexuality and its relationship to EVERYTHING.
Thank you, thank you….
Lorelei
Eric,
Haven’t been around for a few days due to life issues but, I swear, as I was hanging out the washing this lunchtime, I was thinking on this very subject matter and wondering what you’d have to say about it ..;-)
The sex ed (or PHSE – personal, health, social education) in primary schools over here and in community programmes for adults (speakeasy is one course designed to teach adults how to talk with their kids about phse issues) make it a policy issue that bodily parts are talked about by their ‘proper’ anatomical names. (Lemon, fairy, willy, tail are positively discouraged).
Awsome article Eric..
My own mother was also very open about sex education with me and my 3 younger brothers -she was also a very sexualy active woman who enjoyed sex had many partners but played up 2 very different mixed message roles.
1. She talked openly about sex as if she were an empowered sexual being.
2. She played the role of the innocent and naive in front of her own mother and to the men she was involved with.
This duality I think screwed with my head as a young girl.
She is a pisces that has always had severe boundarie issues, a sex addict and narcisisist.
My brothers and I thought she was a slut and a liar.
She would flirt with all my guy friends and say I was a prude at 17 because I didn’t have sex.
I did not have sex with a man until almost 20.
I had a fear that she would steal my boyfriends (she openly flirted with them) and later when I did mary she openly flirted and would make sexual inuendos toward my my now ex-husband who later came on to her. When I found out about it she played the innocent again and a victim. I don’t know and will never know if they did have an affair.
I have gone through a lot and healed a lot – have a very reserved attitude toward my mother and anything she says.
I am 43 and feel good about myself and my own sexuality but it was a long road.
I have some young woman friends in mid 20s who do not use condoms or birth control-
and think masterbation is sick- and they are not christian – this is a product of the abstinance sex education.-So fucked up….how can this be?
This is a wonderful article. I agree 100% with us bringing the topic of sex out of the closet and into warm sunlight. It is also great to have a clearer handle on some of the life experiences that shaped your stance on the subject Eric. Your wonderfully free spirited Mother, your liberal thinking HS (with the odd catholic thrown in to spice things up) etc. To think now that even your typing is suffused with life-affirming sexual energy! It all makes sense.
I had sexual hangups galore from my childhood but I was determined not to pass them on to my child, so I sat him down when he was around seven and introduced the subject of sex and procreation. This was to ensure that he got a healthier introduction to sex versus the one covertly whispered about in the cruel confines of the elementary school playground. I made sure the topic was not too scientific but more about pleasure, release and expression of one’s soul. I know it helped create the fertile ground for my child to grow his identity and free his soul to find his place on this planet.
I also prefer to follow a natural birth control method and encourage those interested in implementing one to follow through on their research. I don’t have the relevant material at hand to pass on but I do know the information is out there, and that it worked for me and my husband on so many levels. I really don’t like to take pharmaceuticals, which was the primary reason for my choice, but the empowerment that flows from knowing your body’s cycles is fantastic and the resulting sex amazing. Because of that awareness, I was tuned into the moment when I became pregnant and will never forget the rush of joy that coursed through my body.
Just to finish. My Mother had many sexual hangups but one thing she did will live with me forever. When she realized that one of her children was gay, she turned her Church’s fund-raising efforts to focus on fighting AIDS, which for our rural Irish Catholic village would have stirred many a hornets nests. At the risk of a barrage of personal attacks, she showed amazing courage to do what she did and I am very proud of her stance and efforts to both lovingly affirm her son while at the same time attempt to educate her neighbours about AIDS.
Pass the 7up — HA!
This is a great piece!!! Brings back so many shameful memories of my horny youth. Just so happened while at my mothers yesterday, munchin on some peanutbutter crackers, I looked over at her tv to find one of the afternoon soaps on, getting down and dirty on the screen! I found it amusing, however when my mother realized I was watching(I’m 43) she stated ” this is when I turn it off”! I said “Ma” sex is normal, to which she replied “not this! This is pornographic! Oh sweet memories of my youth, when my mother covered my eyes in the theater while seeing “animal house” and the part where the girl showed her tits…..are you fucking shitting me…..come on Ma
Peace
I have always loved–and, as a mother, taken to heart–your story about how your mother discussed sexuality with you. Keep writing about sex, because, as you help us to remember always, it is vital to our lives, and it is also a powerful source of problems if not honored and understood. We now have at least a generation and a half of young people who have likely been blatantly misinformed about sex and sexuality–and there needs to be open and honest conversation about how to correct this issue in the future, not to mention how to “correct” the damage already done. Anyone who thinks that I’m waxing hyperbolic about this should simply google the terms “abstinence only” and “clown” to see what for some has passed as education in the recent past.
“Condoms alone are not enough; there are other options, but nobody besides me seems to have heard of them anymore. No, they are not all good, but the options need to be considered, including natural options.”
THANK YOU!
I recently went through a really frustrating time because I have been wanting to stay away from hormonal birth control and shift to a more natural approach. I wanted to be able to leap into it with the information I had and start having fun with my darling again. I had been tracking my cycle and getting pretty confident about the thing, but the problem is that when I finally did jump into it and take it by the horns I got totally freaked! I felt like I was in an abyss of misinformation, and all I could find online outside of NFP sites were quote’s like “a woman can get pregnant at any time!” and “pre-cum HAS sperm in it!”.
It was like I couldn’t trust anything. I had asked my doctor (this is in Europe) to help me out, and they had nothing really to say. It was like, the only time a doctor would help me understand my fertility was if I was having a hard time getting pregnant! I just wanted some facts. Online there are sites that tell me I am fine if I stay within certain days, there is even a product called cyclebeads that I can by to help me keep track. Others tell me that pre-cum has no sperm in it, and withdrawal has only a 4% failure rate, and that’s on it’s own! but most sites, simply feature this screaming insanity that tells me that sperm is everywhere and I can get pregnant anytime. I mean it’s amazing to see some of the things kids are posting “we were making out and my BF got an erection, could I be pregnant!?” (okay that was a bit extreme but you get the point)
I went to go and get a ECP because I just felt too terrified, and had some time constraints, if I would be needing an abortion, by the time I knew, I would be in the wrong country for it! And my frustration and fear lead to some serious talking with my BF and him FINALLY taking it upon himself to do some research about this thing called the Natural Method. There are tons of products out there to help a person monitor their cycle, but for me the possibility of becoming pregnant is too real with all of this fear of my body in play. We came to the conclusion that we would wait to experiment with the natural method when I was comfortable with the idea of getting pregnant, and/or having an abortion.
I wish there was more concrete information out there though, rather than having to go into this NFP enclave to find it. I wasn’t raised in a community that was silent around sex, but natural methods of birth control are still taboo. I never got any information until I really started to ask my mom, my sister, and my friends, how they prevented pregnancy. I was really surprised when I was told that many of them are doing it in natural ways!
Thanks for a great article Eric, keep writing about sex!
Why is it so much more verboten to show male genitals in mainstream culture than to show naked ladies?
Because, according to the cultural script, we’re not supposed to see a man’s penis because we might find it stimulating to look at it. Especially if the man is excited and he gets an erection.
If that were to happen and we were to see it publicly — heaven forbid! — we would run the risk that men could become sexual objects, ie passive symbols of pleasure instead of the dominant sexual actors.
When you are dealing with public displays of sexuality and as in this article, public discussions about sexuality — even in the refined context of sex education — you can’t stay honest about the topic if you avoid the fact that men and women are not equal sexual actors in this wacked out civilization of ours.
ALL of our thinking about sex is colored by the imbalance of power between men and women. And all of our inhibitions and fears are colored by it too.
Part of the reason public institutions are sqeamish about sex education is that when you start to talk honestly about sex — even in dry academic terms — you begin to peel away the lies that disguise this core imbalance of power.
People don’t want to admit that our cultural status quo depends on keeping these lies intact — like the lie that men can’t be sexual objects.
It’s a house of cards, and once you peel off the disguise to one lie, many other lies could come crashing down. It’s dangerous to tell the truth!!!
ok, this WILL be my last comment …
there are SO many threads on this baby !
speaking of baby… my mom told me the same story about douching (sans 7-up , add vinegar) … me and my brother were both “vinegar douche babies” !!
Ha. then papa got fixed …
You had a good mom, Eric. : )
“and WTF, cant have a christmas play putting mr. umbrella on the banana? Where is Mr. Rogers when you need him?”
hahaha! hypnotic … made me laugh! thx!
Here’s to our grandchildren puttin’ on the pre-school play dressed as bananas and latex umbrellas! (Hm,,is that an oil based product? Maybe they’ll be dressed in goat membrane.
xo
“So, let the search engines and the Akashic record reflect that in 1983 I was thrown out of the Sexuality Education Center training program at the State University of New York at Buffalo — a major, indeed, world-renowned, health sciences center — for asking sexual disease experts about AIDS — a disease that would soon ravage our city’s gay community.”
that is a bitch of a cross…
that we WILL heal…
this point grabbed me by the throat and made me spit…. i just need to say again, powerful article.
and WTF, cant have a christmas play putting mr. umbrella on the banana? Where is Mr. Rogers when you need him?
Great article Eric!,
A couple thoughts came up while reading this…
I was working in the Corvallis, OR school district back in the early ’90’s. A theater group was putting on a sex education play for the school body and the big question posed to the teachers and administration was ‘there’s a scene with a banana and a condom – do we put the condom on the banana?’ The science teachers I worked with were livid when the administration told the theater group ‘No’.
There’s a book called ‘Passionate Marriage’ by David Schnarch – The author works with couples and integrates sexuality into the therapy – which is apparently rare. Seems like a natural combination to me…
(oh um, by “exactly” that’s me leapfrogging the conversation per normal.)
Condoms are useful for many things – but hardly necessarily for a rocking good time. Just get some. Any “some”. They’re fun and they all work – unless your partner has a very large penis. P.S. Use them on your toys, too…..
Havta say though, talking about sex then eating pizza doesn’t fall into my personal sex-satisfacction category….unless I’m busy discovering some very unusual places to put the pizza prior to eating (wheatless of course)……..sex is always creative playtime…..condoms not mandatory.
What’s mandatory is feeling free to communicate and experiment.
xo
Hypnotic,
Exactly – there are plenty of ways to play even when the condoms run out…..
This is such a great article. I hope it reaches a wide audience …
The condom conversation…yeah, that one usually puts a damper on things… I always get turned off by this: “but they don’t feel good” — yeah well neither do itchy burning warts…
As a female, Im really clueless about what kind of condoms to buy, there are just under a gazillion kinds, more varieties even than feminine hygiene products! which is a LOT! So, I just keep an assortment handy. I do need to be educated on the varieties of and preferences for trojans…
i have had lovers with whom very little sex actually transpired because by the time we finished talking about sex we were satisfied and ready to eat a pizza!
I told my lover the other night a memory I had from my teen years where a boy I had just met went down on me while I was fully clothed (up against the refrigerator, I timidly add). That was as far as it went, but it was one of the most erotic moments of my life ….
Hmmm. I always think it’s still too soon to tell if I did good by the offspring. Others tell me I have. I sense I did. But I suppose when they are in their 30s their therapy bills will tell the truth. (They are 22 and 19 now.) I can say, though, without a doubt, that they really don’t hesitate to call “bullshit” on me. I made my mistakes and have acknowledged them. While keeping my own boundaries. Sometimes I see a rosy picture and sometimes I think I’ve totally fucked them up. Things are a bit difficult at the moment… But it’s a huge transition time.
I do recall asking my son when he was younger if I should pull out a banana and condoms and go over it with him. He insisted he was good. Had a similar conversation with my daughter.
My kids are pretty independant and push back if I push too hard. SO I’ve always tried to say what I needed to say and have faith that they’ve known (after much repeating by me) that they can talk to me about anything.
For sure, nothing about sexuality and relationships is a closed topic. I guess that’s the best I can do. Considering everything else that needs to be discussed and encountered.
Great piece, though, Eric. Sounds like you had a pretty great mom.
“It seems that sexual repression is part of this greater fear of emotional responses not fitting on a smaller scale of ‘normal’. But for fuck’s sake – THINGS ARE NOT NORMAL! And young people have a finely tuned bull shitmeter and it’s ringing LOUDLY these days. Even more loudly than it did in the 60’s.”
Yep you got it. And reading this I know my beloved therapist Joe Trusso would agree. It’s the whole spectrum that’s getting shut down — not just sex. And we are not far from thinking that a brain regulating implant is going to help.
and then there’s the odd parent like my mother, who seriously-honestly-truly has not tried *any* drugs (doesn’t even like the taste of alcohol) and did not have sex before she married my father (i think she once mentioned some “petting,” but i’d be willing to bet it was over-the-clothes). what experience would she have had to speak from? she must have talked to me about something, but damned if i can remember anything other than the warnings before i went to college not to be in a guy’s dorm room alone with him, lest i get raped.
Knowing the USA has taken a left turn in this area is sad since they led the way in the 60s with Planned Parenthood and the ‘2 for 2’ population slogan. In Australia, the kids still receive sex ed. We’ve had a lot of teenagers at our place over the years – it’s a warehouse in an abandoned area near the inner city and perfect for loud music and hanging out – and there’s a medicine cabinet by the front door that’s kept stocked with all types of handy items like bandages, arnica, rescue remedy and condoms. And things do get used.
Looking from an even larger and more disturbing context is the trend of prescribing anti-depressants and Ritalin to our children and teenagers.
One night last month I made a point to chat to the 8 young women at our place (18 to 19 year olds) and all but one took prescribed anti depressants. Some even had parents who were medical doctors who prescribed them.
Why are we medicating our children? What is influencing parents to believe their children need to take a pill when they are not happy? I ask this having been a teenager myself. I recall crying for days on end but in the 60’s, this was OK. Kids were allowed to feel a greater spectrum of emotion without worrying they would fall off the edge.
It seems that sexual repression is part of this greater fear of emotional responses not fitting on a smaller scale of ‘normal’. But for fuck’s sake – THINGS ARE NOT NORMAL! And young people have a finely tuned bull shitmeter and it’s ringing LOUDLY these days. Even more loudly than it did in the 60’s.
But if we keep numbing them down – who’s going to be present in the decades to come for the the challenges we will face as a species?
This flowed out my fingers spontaneously – thanks for being there to read it.
L
How to use a condom…that’s good…and how to have the condom conversation.
There is that negotiation aspect. And there are STI questions that even professionals have a hard time answering. Try discussing that kind of thing…
What really impresses me is the polarization between hyper responsibility absolutely “clean” and “pure” opposed to the who gives a hoot, go on Depo and have unprotected sex.
There is so little middle ground because there is so little context for a real conversation. Most people simply cannot talk about this stuff without considerable embarrassment.
As for drugs, a real conversation with a kid would, I think, include the parent being honest about what they did.
My kids get kind of tired of it (me initiating sex-and relatlinship-health conversation) – but I know no one else is talking to them about anything substantial. Not like I hammer them with it either. Overabundance of subject is not good parent-conversation technique.
BTW, YouTube has great “how to use condom” videos.
And of course, the poverty of healthy-adult-sexual-relationship examples is perverse and pervasive.
My personal plan is to continue to be the best example I can be (of being a sexual being) within any momentary constraints, and to un-constrain as I can….which parellells the path of my kids growing up (and the very very real threats of the “ex” and the judicual system going away) as well as me overriding my own fears.
xo
At a time when a free lancer for the Rolling Stone is publishing the stuff that MSM entirely ignores, I may get bored by the sexual discussions but I admire your commitment to speaking out about it and perhaps opening up the minds of people who aren’t aware of the connections between power, abuse and sex in our society. Knowledge is power, people.
Your mother did a great job. It’s probably impossible to talk too many times to your children about making thoughtful sexual decisions. Even fewer parents practice the sort of discussions that come up for a couple who are contemplating sex, whatever the age. I can’t figure out why anyone would willingly send their child out into such situations without practice and preparation for a situation they will encounter throughout their life. Sex education in too many families ends at “inappropriate touching” for young children. Helpful hint: talking meaningfully to your children about illegal drugs also takes far more than one conversation. Of course, if you haven’t treated your children with respect and courtesy when they were younger, they probably aren’t talking to you by the time they are teens.