I don’t know how many of you got The Talk from your parents. I suppose that there’s more communication mother-to-daughter than father-to-son, if for no other reason than the beginning of the menstrual cycle.
I never got such a talk from my dad. In fact, my parents never said much of anything to me about sex. One of the benefits of this, I suppose, is that my information about it was so limited that I was not involved sexually at too young an age. But one of the drawbacks is that my parents simply trusted that my sexual education would take place in the classroom.
Which of course is stupid.
Like a lot of boys, I did not learn about sex from a teacher showing charts and slides. I learned about it – correct that, I learned something about it – from illicitly obtained materials circulated among my peers. I saw pictures, and R-rated movies like 10. This was junior-high; as the videocassette became popular, I was able to see videos in my later adolescence. I did not see a lot of them, but I knew enough to be able to carry on conversations about them, the way a casual sports fan could chat up a playoff race without seeming totally stupid.
Of course, what I learned was nonsense, fantasy. It had pretty much nothing to do with how people really relate to one another. And it certainly created certain ideas about women in our heads, ideas that again have little if anything to do with reality. There was a whole lot missing in this kind of learning; it was haphazard. Watching a film like Kids is frightening not simply because of the ages of these sexually active children, but because they seem to have such really bad information. Maybe some kids learned about things like condoms, or STDs. No one ever explained to me what a “wet dream” was; even when the Beatles made reference to the term on Let it Be, I did not know. And since there was never any playing with baby dolls for us boys, of course there was no concern about matters like pregnancy, at least not until the Health Ed classroom in 11th grade. Then we got the clinical talks about all this stuff, which I could not really connect to whatever was going on with me (which, in fact, at that point, was not much at all, nerd that I was).
Would The Talk have helped me? Not in and of itself. What would have helped was a more clearly open line of communication, one which would have allowed me to ask questions. I could not have even come up with any questions in those days, I was so clueless. Somehow the lines of communication that seemed pretty good when talking about the game of baseball (literally) simply broke down when it came to the metaphorical baseball game. Maybe it’s just what happens when you hit puberty; you stop talking to your parents. I am determined not to let that happen with my children, though of course, since they are daughters, they’ll turn to their mother first. And mom, well, she’s pretty direct about stuff, honest, clear.
The fantasies that have been spread to kids and sex have done a lot of harm, both fantasies that suggest pleasure and those that suggest pain (being turned into a toad or growing warts on your hands). The Talk has to be truthful. Would you rather have your child hear facts about sex from you or from a movie whose title makes puns of the female anatomy?