Grandma gave me a kids' science book that included the info (featuring, interestingly, anatomically correct line drawings of small children) when I was 7 or so. It was never clear to me whether this was intentional - it seemed unlikely, but she was a nurse.
I found the pages because I was looking up Sperm in the index - as in Whale.
Same here. The book was called "The Science Book" by Sara Stein.
It also had a bunch of other interesting chapters including one about how to make ginger beer. We went through the whole procedure before my parents told me that it would be alcoholic and therefore I couldn't drink it. Thanks a lot, Sara Stein, I'm sure a lot of adults are reading your stupid book.
We had a home medical encyclopedia, dating from the forties, with some articles about wedding nights, Swedish trial marriages and so forth. My father had a couple of marriage manuals in his dresser drawer, but I didn't know that.
There was no "talk;" when we showed knowledge it was taken as a matter of course we had learned it by some normal process and not questioned. I think my parents honestly thought the schools taught it.
Church-sponsored class, taught by the minister. A little late (I already knew the basics) but also combined with a kind of 'relationship' primer -- this is why people date, this is what we think about marriage, etc.
My mother claims that soon after giving me The Talk, she overheard my brother saying to me: "I don't care what you say, nobody ever did that to my Mom!"
No talk, no books, no sex ed in school.
I may still be a little hazy on the details.
I found a 'facts of life' book illustrated with cartoons somewhere in the classroom, or maybe I was left alone in a teacher's office, when I was in kindergarten -- I think they weren't expecting the kids to be literate and poking around for stuff to read. The teacher, oddly, was kind of pissed off at me and brought my mother in to complain about it.
My mom gave me a book to read, and then said we'd talk it about it in a few days. She had a special tone of voice she'd use for those 'important' conversations. Everything would have been fine without that awful voice.
All I remember about the book was that it said a sperm was very small, as small as the tip of a pencil. There was a picture of a sharp pencil making a dot on a piece of paper.
I remember getting a talk after this incident, but that sort of thing was already discussed pretty openly in my house, as I recall.
We had a home medical encyclopedia, dating from the forties, with some articles about wedding nights, Swedish trial marriages and so forth. My father had a couple of marriage manuals in his dresser drawer, but I didn't know that.
Same here, except for the Swedish bit (cool!). The Readers Digest Family Medical Guide. Nothing about fisting, but you can always pick that up elsewhere.
Ned, how do you remember that book so well? I mean, I recall a lot about it (and suspected it had such a generic name), but couldn't have come up with Sara Stein in a million years.
Paying things forward, we've already explained everything but the actual Tab A => Slot B part to our 3 yr old. But she knows about sperm and eggs, and just Sunday we enthusiastically pointed out a pairing pair of ladybugs.
I never had The Talk so I still don't know much about that stuff. That notwithstanding I had to have The Talk with my son (7) last week after he complained loudly to everyone that the teenage brothers next door weren't coming out of their room because they were having sex. With each other. (As it happened, they were playing on the Playstation).
My son was horrified by the explanation of sex and says no girl is ever getting anywhere near his willy.
A tediously formal talk, administered many years in advance of the time when any of the matters touched upon (sic) would become at all recognizable, much less relevant, and also in retrospect poisoned by my parents' seethingly unhappy marriage. Also, some books. I learned more from the traditional amateur doctoring with the girl next door.
In fairness I believe I learned a great deal from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I don't recall a talk or any books, and sex ed wasn't until junior high or maybe even later. I do remember asking a friend around second or third grade what a vagina looks like, and he drew me a picture, but of course I didn't believe it. A triangular thing with a line down the middle? As if. So his sister and her friend put on a strip show for us (ah, education). Sure enough, the drawing had been pretty good, and one of the girls went on to become a Laker Girl.
No talk, no books, no sex ed in school.
Same here. In sixth grade the girls, only the girls, were called to assembly for 'the film;' some of us boys did our best to get a peek, but unsuccessfully. Their special knowledge gave them an aura of mystery, while we were left to try to piece together from dirty jokes and found back issues of Playboy whatever details we were unclear about.
On preview, 15 is awesome.
I had a children's encyclopedia that explained eggs and sperm and suchlike, complete with Snoopy pointing at a blackboard and grinning. Germination was never a secret in my house, not with my mom always bringing in kitchen herbs.
My folks gave me "the talk" more formally when I was ten or so, but I had already figured out most of its content from a combination of art museums (specifically, a Magritte retrospective) for the anatomy and Dave Barry columns for the social-attitudinal stuff.
I actually had a moderately embarrassing incident with Sally and Newt -- Sally asked something last year along the lines of 'But how does the baby get into the mommy's tummy?' and I gave her a barebones but accurate rundown of the facts, with Newt listening.
About three days later, a mother of another kid in the building Newt's age told me that Newt had explained the facts to her son. I didn't really know what to say other than "Did he get them pretty much right?" But she was fine with it, so no harm done.
I watched alot of PBS as a child, and Mom was good enough to record "The Miracle of Life" on our first ever VCR. I was fascinated by the science of it, though the parents of my grade school friends were apparently less thrilled with the science when the video provided the educational component of a fourth grade sleepover.
I picked up the some of the less scientific aspects from Mom's copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear in junior high. Got an A on the book report, incidentally, and the teacher enthusiastically advised that the sequel was even better. Indeed, it was.
When my family lived in Indiana I was about 6, 7 years old and I received the timeless tome "What's Happening To Me". I also read my mom's dog-eared copy of "Our Bodies, Our Selves" for countless hours (or at least looked at pictures - childbirth WHA?).
When the movers came to haul our stuff away to NY, I was intently perusing OBOS. My mother came up to me and gently removed the book, saying we'd look at it later on the road and that Roger (one of the moving guys) probably would have too many questions about it. I was about to say that I could explain things to Roger, but my mom put a stop to that line of conversation with a quickness.
Later around 9-10 years old I got the "don't put anything inside yourself except fingers" masturbation talk, which apparently not all parents got around to discussing: I heard of friends into their late teens and early 20s sticking things like drum sticks in their rear. Flared bases, people, FLARED BASES!!!
So his sister and her friend put on a strip show for us
This is a story. Although "traditional amateur doctoring" is based on the same mutual curiosity, and we certainly did that.
I have no idea where the dividing line between innocence and knowledge fell, but I do remember being given a copy of Where Did I Come From?, which in memory seems pretty good: mommies and daddies love each other so much that they hug closer than anyone else. How close? See the illustrations. There was also an I'll-show-you-mine show that I tried to chicken out of after she-showed-me-hers.
Books and so on, around age 13, but also long, well-intentioned but excruciating monologues from Dad about life, morality and sex when I was "asked" to bike alongside him on one of his evening runs. I yell involuntarily at the memory even now.
I got info from books long before it ever would have occurred to me to ask, so my parents got to give me answers to questions of clarification instead of any monolithic Talk. My all-girl elementary school, though, gave us some version of The Talk in fourth grade, I think. I don't remember much about it except that they gathered us all in a circle sitting on the floor, and sternly and frequently said, "This is no laughing matter!" When I got home and reported this to my mother, she said, "If that's not a laughing matter, I don't know what is."
Coming from a Catholic family, my Talk was not much more than: "when people love each other, they do a special hug, and then a baby is made."
I should add that the boy who showed us all what vaginas looked like with the hand-folding trick was pretty popular for a few days.
Wildlife observation (toads, anyone?) and younger siblings (prenatal visits! Realistic plastic models of the Fallopian tubes!) are remarkably effective.
In other news, the writer notwithstanding, the study described here is somewhat intriguing:
After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons -- everything from "I wanted to feel closer to God" to "I was drunk."
showed us all what vaginas looked like with the hand-folding trick
??
21: Mutuality being something that one (i.e., I) appreciated as much as the anatomy lesson. The girl next door was as enthusiastically curious as I was.
I was given this book at a very early age (three or four).
I never got a formal Talk, although a couple years ago my parents insisted that they had given me one. I saw some statistic that a large number of parents claim to have Talked to their kids while a much lower number of kids claim to have received said Talk.
I seem to remember that the sequel to Clan of the Cave Bear features a hysterical scene early on in which our traveling Sapiens hero drops in on an unenlightened tribe, is shanghaied into performing some deflowering ceremony, and uses the opportunity to introduce the object of the deflowering to the delights of oral pleasuring and the female orgasm. What a sensitive new Stone-Age guy!
There was also an I'll-show-you-mine show that I tried to chicken out of after she-showed-me-hers.
"There's no way I can top that. I fold."
27 is going to need a demonstration at the next meetup.
27: Put your hands together, flat and horizontal; get a partner to do the same, flat and vertical. Lock them together, open your hands, and look.
I remember being genuinely puzzled hearing about "the birds and the bees", because my Talk didn't have anything at all to do with birds or bees. I thought maybe my mom didn't know the whole story. And I was very curious, because I liked bees.
And if you both open your hands at the same time, it's like childbirth!
Many people have come out of the 'birds and the bees' talks with extremely painful fetishes.
I saw some statistic that a large number of parents claim to have Talked to their kids while a much lower number of kids claim to have received said Talk.
I don't doubt that. Library patrons (when not appalled by the very fact that the library has scientifically accurate books) often labor under the delusion that they have been clear as can be to their kids, while the kids are gratefully seizing on to any scrap of real information they can track down.
31: I remember that scene as well. Seemed somehow much more interesting than fallopian tubes and ovulation. But, you know, that stuff is just fiction...
6th grade as a big, organized, formalized, no-holds-barred school curriculum. Parents were notified that it was about to happen; mine remained silent until one day on the way home from a trumpet lesson my mother blurted out, "You know, gay men really mess up their rectums." All I could do was stare in mute horror. We never discussed sex again.
When I was seventeen and a week or so away from leaving for my freshman year of college my father strode ponderously into the kitchen as I ate lunch, sat down, stuffed a wad of Red Man into his cheek and said, after long moments, "Son, I want you to know I think it's only natural for a young man of your age to sow a few wild oats." Then he got back up and walked back out, the sum total of his contribution to an education later completed by Usenet and trial-and-error.
I have no idea what the actions described in 35 are supposed to be. Lock them together?
42: by opening the middle and ring fingers, IIRC.
Man, I remember when I asked my parents how people have children, and my dad was like "well, God decides to send you one when he thinks you're ready." That was when I was 4. Then, at 7, my dad told me about how I was a surprise, that they had "decided not to have any more children" and I was like "wait! But how could you decide if it's God who makes you have children!" He was a bit flummoxed, mumbled something. The next year after having had the "library" tour in my 3rd-grade class, I used the card catalog to look up "sex", and sat in the stacks for a couple days after school figuring the whole thing out. There was never any talk, nor any books judiciously placed. Lame!
39: Well, sure. I mean, I've had a Talk with my two, but I'm not expecting them to remember it as a big event, or to remember what the details were (not that I gave a whole bunch of details). Mostly, I just wanted to make it clear that it wasn't off limits to ask about.
But if it never comes up again, I'd bet that they wouldn't remember that as having been a Talk.
Oh the film - there was a film, in 5th grade. I was the only one whose parents opted out of me having to see it (because they knew I knew, and why bother with school filmstrips?). It made me a minor go-to celebrity for about 2 days. Then the boys (who saw a separate filmstrip) started going around complaining about their wet dreams, and the other girls knew they had seen 2 different films and felt cheated.
gay men really mess up their rectums
Yeah, that fiber-based your-body-is-a-temple diet is a BITCH.
I'm still befuddled about the hands. But fortunately, I already know what a vagina and indeed an entire vulva looks like, so that's okay.
31 reminds me of a review of some spy novel, where the reviewer makes fun of how the protagonist is portrayed as the only man in 1940s Europe who is aware of the concept of cunnilingus, giving him a superhuman ability to seduce women and make them defect to the West or something.
I think it was a book by Martin Cruz Smith.
18--
'But how does the baby get into the mommy's tummy?'
despite having several decades of relevant experience, and despite having played a direct causal role, this was still exactly my reaction on watching our children come out of my wife.
Totally bizarre. It never stops being utterly weird to see a fully-formed human infant come *out of* a woman's body.
My folks kept a copy of "The Joy of Sex" on the bookshelf.
I'm not following 35 at all, and I'm now realizing that this is not only a valuable childhood experience that I somehow missed, but also a giant whole in my understanding of basic human anatomy.
This has to be available on the internet somewhere. The real trick, I think, will be creating a work-safe google search that locates it.
RFTS: a Jewish day school? We don't have much collective lore from those.
Some of you may be the right age for Show Me!
37: I believe it was Carol Burnett who, when trying to get men to understand the experience of childbirth, described it as "hold your upper lip, stretch it gently at first, then pull it over your head."
I never had the Talk, either. I learned by some combination of growing up next to a farm, reading a human sexuality textbook I found in my Dad's library, and watching "My Mom's Having a Baby".
one day on the way home from a trumpet lesson my mother blurted out, "You know, gay men really mess up their rectums."
Love it.
Dad the biologist explained all that stuff really early on with Gray's Anatomy. He'd show us stages of fetal development and such as well. Our place was kind of a mini farm when I was growing up, so we were always seeing goats, rabbits, or ponies being born, finding half developed chicks in an egg, etc.
And I was very curious, because I liked bees.
Good thing we don't refer to it as "The Birds and the Black Widows".
I'm still surprised that I never got the talk. My parents are real tree hugging granola heads, and so are not the uptight repressed types that you would normally think too reserved to broach the subject.
giving him a superhuman ability to seduce women and make them defect to the West or something
I was going to ask how this is supposed to work prospectively, but then I realized: word-of-mouth.
Guy tells us Jack refers to "vagina" as "China,"
That would explain China's one child only policy...
It was Wales. We had a farm.
Really, dsquared, it's not very nice to keep propagating that "all Welsh are sheepfuckers" stereotype.
51: I so badly want to infer from your emphasis that you're used to seeing fully formed infants *go into* a woman's body.
I grew up reading everything in the house. This included Where Did I Come From and What's Happening To Me, found in my older sisters' rooms, which covered the clinical technical details, and The Joy Of Sex, found on a lower shelf in the living room bookcase (!) and The Happy Hooker, found in a cupboard in my parents' bathroom (!!) which between them covered enough variations to keep most people busy for a lifetime.
When I came out to my parents as bisexual, my dad freaked out and essentially said that bisexuality didn't exist and that homosexuality was wrong wrong wrong. Now I kind of understand why that pissed me off so much: this had not been mentioned in any of the above-listed educational material.
We had a kid-appropriate cartoon book on the Facts of Life around the house, so we got a bit of info from that. My sister and I also got information from illicit readings of my parents' hidden copy of The Joy of Sex. Then my mom at some point offered to have The Talk, said offer declined on the grounds that most of the information we might garner from it was already in our possession, the other questions were unaskable, and it would be embarassing for all and sundry anyway.
"Dad, I already know that stuff. What do you think school is for?"
My dad tried to give me the talk when I was home from college which was a little bit late, and I brushed him home, which was maybe mean since he was very embarrassed to bring it up.
My kids are getting a couple of Peaches albums and a Cecily Brown catalog.
Like Tim, my parents left it way too late. I declined because I didn't want to embarrass them.
Did anyone else watch a sex ed video that prominently featured a supposedly in-penis camera, capturing live footage of an ejaculation from the inside?
To this day, I've wondered whether that was fake or not.
destroyer, that was Woody Allen.
Oh yeah, The Happy Hooker. I still remember the German shepherd.
Let's see - most of this matches with other experiences people have listed. "The Science Book", surreptitiously educating children everywhere; parents' copy of "The Joy of Sex", carefully purloined and then returned; a copy of What We Told Our Kids About Sex, given to me on my 13th birthday, which was an interesting way of cutting out the middleman; public high school sex ed that was standard-issue biology-and-disease lameness; and a brief remark from my mother that one should be sure not to marry anybody without having slept with them first.
Destroyer, why are you quoting Richard Nixon?
73 - that was "The Miracle of Life" referenced in 19. They showed us that in high school biology class.
73:I think the PBS thing Di referred to had a scene like that, obviously simulated (please don't s/b that). "Gun" goes off, "white smoke" fills screen. Sam Fuller framing.
anticipated by 80
Surprised no one has mentioned this: novels. I read novels that I found in my parents' room, and especially at my grandparents' house where there was absolutely NOTHING else to do. Sometimes I would be going through a nice novel and suddenly, a sex scene.
Other times I would just skim them looking for examples of what adults really thought about sex as opposed to scientific depictions. Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys almost scarred me for life.
77: The last segment of this. It probably doesn't age very well, but it was quite funny in its day.
Judy Blume, Wifey. Don't remember where I found it, but I brought it to the Poconos and read it aloud to my cousin, my little sister, and my friend Lori. I think my parents suggested that maybe I could have waited until my sister was otherwise occupied.
Oh yeah: The Mists Of Avalon. Although that wasn't so much informative as it was, "Woah! There's sex in my Arthurian legends!"
My parents? Talk about sex? Ha! I was forbidden to read Dashiell Hammett when I was in junior high because it was too mature; forbidden to read Bleak House until I was fifteen because I "wouldn't appreciate it"...and had the (admittedly smutty) Dorthy Allison short story collection Trash taken away from me when I was seventeen. Granted, I would have been horrified to receive any kind of talk from them. I won't even go into some of the more horrifying aspects of not-discussing-anything-related-to-the-body, even though it's rather comic in retrospect. Of course, as a constant reader and library-user I, er, probably had more extensive and baroque knowledge than they did.
83, I would in fact posit that it has aged less well than any film comedy ever made.
JM described finding the Victorian pron classic The Pearl in her parents' bedroom. I don't know how old she was but not old enough in her recollection.
For a moment I thought this was the video in question, but I was wrong. Good twist ending, though.
I was forbidden to read Dashiell Hammett when I was in junior high because it was too mature
The Thin Man gets a little snappy in places, but I think I could handle my jr-high kid's asking me about it. "Why does he ask her to bring the little whips next time, Dad?"
I recall from fifth grade or so a book called The Cybernetic Samurai, perpetually rented out from the school library, its spine cracked permanently so that it opened to the page with a goofy sex scene.
87: As a kid, I would read anything I could get my hands on. I remember finding a copy of Erica Jongs `fear of flying' somewhere when I was maybe 10 and reading it... talk about lacking context for a book!
The interesting problem for me, thinking about this as a male parent of a female child, is not the Talk about the clinical or bodily details. I don't really feel all that shy or bothered about explaining that if there are questions.
But I think when my daughter's a teenager, if she seems hetero-oriented or at least hetero-interested, I want to explain to her that teenage boys are: a) really, really horny and b) generally willing to say anything and/or be emotionally manipulative if that might lead to sex; without also c) seeming to endorse the view that young men can't help or control their sexual desire and aren't responsible for what they do. Plus including the information that there are indeed nice men, without sounding out that cliched granola "respect your body" thing that's way too unreal to the actual experience of adolescence. That Talk involves a complicated balancing act of personal perspective, fatherly distance and clinical honesty, I think. Kind of C. Everett Koop + Atticus Finch + memoirist.
89: Seriously, I remember staying home "sick" from junior high school and reading all the Contintental OP stories, which struck me as pretty much on the same power-politics-and-fear lines as junior high school. Of course, I read almost everything they forbade me. Then again, these were the same parents who started a screaming fight with me because I wore a purple shirt and a black skirt to school and "looked like a witch, which made your Mother very upset!"
But I'm much better now, really.
That so many of us learned so much about sex by digging for every tantalizing scrap of information in books gathered around our houses or in the local library really does make me scared shitless for the internet generation.
84: Oh, yeah, Wifey. I found that one in my aunt's apartment when I was visiting once. Very informative.
Plus including the information that there are indeed nice men
Teenagers? No, not really, there aren't.
93: A reasonable amount of reading pretty much revealed all these things to me, I felt. It might be that only a brief and tangential Talk would be needed if there were a lot of reading accompanying it...it always seems to me that the main point of the Talk/Talks is to show both parents' while-you-live-under-my-roof expectations and their support for their child/openness to talk as needed.
93: It's not something I've remotely faced, but it occurs to me that a) the worst way to screw up `the talk' is by leaving it too late (cf above comments) and b) there is a natural tendency for parents to underestimate too late.
Maybe my perspective is skewed (sexually active at 14) but I would think if you are going to do this, the time to do it is the earliest you judge your children able to understand it, not the earliest you judge them able/willing/likely to put it to practice.
Well, teenagers that will eventually be nice men once their raging hormones calm down a little.
Oh god. First off, Mom is always too graphic about her and my dad, and biological details, and where tampons come from, and on and on and on.
Second, anyone raised Unitarian? Anyone remember AYS, "About Your Sexuality"? It's supposed to be a course for 13-14 year olds, but our fellowship was so small that there were only three of us in middle school, so as an 11-year-old, me and a pair of brothers took this semester-long unbelievably hippy-earnest-honest intro to sexuality. Complete with videos of how different people masturbate. Complete with a posterboard showing 100 different penises, so we could see how different they all look. I remember one that curved down when erect, and not understanding how he would have sex.
Every single goddamn week was something new and even more embarrassing. Going back and forth between the catty social hierarchy of middle school and the hippiness of earnest biological approaches to one's clitoris nearly fried my brain.
Only three kids in the room with a hippy instructor. Me and two dippy brothers. I wanted to die from embarrassment. I was only 11.
95 has a good point. These days, you'll pretty much have to assume your kids have seen anything they cared to (and probably a fair bit they didn't) well before they would think about putting it into practice. But that doesn't put any context on anything --- and if the best information you son/daughter has is easily available internet porn they probably haven't got an exactly optimal picture of sexuality.
Tim, our daughter is 17. We've never had the talk with her, but we've both been given confidential information and reacted calmly to it. I know you're talking about an earlier age, but my daughter knows everything in your syllabus and is quite sophisticated about it. I would stay open and not sweat it.
Charley Carp's got a grown daughter, maybe he could add something; Emerson and DominEdtrix have sons. Anybody I'm forgetting?
The question is, who's that in 23 whose father also reads the site?
It's not like you can't obtain the idea that teenage boys are raging horndogs from the general culture. I spent my mid-teenage years quite bitter about the disconnect between their supposed willingness to boink anything on legs and my own unsatisfied horniness.
This is OT but anyone wanna help me find a comment? It was probably two months ago maybe, with AWB talking about how there's a "window" in which you can tell a dude to step off you, and how it's often easily missed. I can't find it!
Ok, but the problem is that stuff designed to communicate to teenagers an optimal view of sexuality is so unreal to the actual, awkward, complicated existing culture of adolescence and young adulthood that most canny adolescents will dismiss it properly as a bunch of hippy bullshit propaganda. I especially think this is true of misguidedly demystifying stuff like what heebie-geebie describes in 101. Even optimal sexuality includes some mystery, some confusion, some awkwardness, some inexplicable triggers for arousal, and so on. Granted that pron is not optimal, I don't know what would be. It's probably no worse than furtive readings of Wifey, The Joy of Sex, the Cheryl Tiegs fishnet-bathing-suit picture issue of Sports Illustrated that the middle school library inexplicably had available for two months, and so on. And in some ways, that kind of furtive investigation of scraps of text and images is probably better than some perfectly designed manual intended to communicate the Optimal Sex Life to teenagers.
As I remember it, "The Talk" consisted of my father asking "Do you do know about it?" I of course said "Yes" and then tried to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
We had many-to-the-max reference books around, I'm sure I knew within minutes of the question crossing my mind.
Going back and forth between the catty social hierarchy of middle school and the hippiness of earnest biological approaches to one's clitoris nearly fried my brain.
101: A friend of mine was raised Unitarian and had the same course. He noted that various of the presentations were interrupted by his (first-timer) teacher exclaiming, "Uh... not everyone does that!" and turning purple at various bits.
But I think when my daughter's a teenager, if she seems hetero-oriented or at least hetero-interested, I want to explain to her that teenage boys are: a) really, really horny and b) generally willing to say anything and/or be emotionally manipulative if that might lead to sex;
This might be something for you to discuss with her mother, who may be somewhat more personally attuned to the fact that teenage girls are also, often, really really horny. And that a good rule of thumb, therefore, is that while this is by no means a sufficient means of telling when doing something sexual is a good idea, that if you're doing it for reasons that don't include being horny and really really wanting to, that makes it a bad idea.
Right, I agree--I also don't want to do the "boys are horny and girls are not" thing by implication.
teenage girls are also, often, really really horny
As long as teenage boys don't figure this out, all is well.
I also got the Gray's Anatomy treatment, when I was about 5. A fair bit of general discussion as a lad, as my mom and dad kept makin' more siblings for me.
Then, in high school: "If you get a girl pregnant, we'll kill you."
That was about it.
I really was not a horny teenager. I really, really wanted to kiss and cuddle, and that's about it. I had sex years before I was interested in it. I wasn't pressured or embarrassed, and it wasn't a negative experience. But yeah. I mostly liked kissing and cuddling. Oh, and drugs. I really liked drugs.
107: I'm certainly not trying to suggest that it's completely solvable, or even easy. All I meant about the pr0n is that it is going to present a pretty one-sided view of gender roles etc. I agree you can't go about handing out a manual of `optimal sexuality', and some attempts at even very forthright discussion of adult sexuality are likely to look pretty alien to an adolescent.
But I do think if you are going to talk about it, talk about it early. And there is no reason that you can't discuss the pretty unavoidable fact that especially teenage (or indeed any beginning) sexual relationships are going to be awkward and confusing. It seems to me that it would be ok to discuss the fact that this never completely goes away, and there is going to be some mystery.
#107: if I were you I would use more adjectives and adverbs, longer sentences and more fifty cent words like "optimal", "appropriate" and similar. Lots of commas. That's the way to grab a teenager's attention. Basically think of Al Gore explaining the case for a national sales tax.
Does anyone use the "just invite the kid in and have them watch mommy and daddy" approach to sex ed? With a post-coital Q&A? Or is sort of thing generally frowned upon?
Or you could just ship them to Wales to practice on sheep.
120 is the same technique that Borat uses to get people to admit all kinds of outrageous things
I was somewhat relieved when my daughter indicated one day (unsolicited) that she thought she should be at least 16 before dating. My relief was cut short, however, when she clarified that this was because she needed to be old enough to drive to the airport, because they would be going to Bermuda.
When I was a teenage boy my impression was that maybe 10% of girls had the capacity for horniness, and if you happened to have one of them as your girlfriend you were very lucky.
Why not just show them a load of porn films and "Girls Gone Wild" videos and say that while you are, of course, of course on the same side as all those people, you believe that much more can be achieved in the medium term by keeping one's tweed jacket on and taking care to draw a clear distinction between oneself and the irresponsible, have-sex-all-the-time people who really aren't connecting with real Americanzzzzzzzzzz.
Montana. Wales is mythical, the place where King Arthur lived. Narnia isn't real either, no matter what Wife X says.
120: I think a fair number of couples use that approach --- they just don't do it intentionally.
much more can be achieved in the medium term by keeping one's tweed jacket on
Kinky, but whatever floats your boat.
120: Such a good idea at first glance, and yet so horribly, horribly wrong.
For what it's worth, a friend in mine in high school found herself in that position inadvertently*, and her overall approach to sex and love seems to have been a pretty unhealthy one. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and there were other unhealthy factors as well, but still.
* Go on, see how many double entendres you can find in this sentence. I dare you.
there's a "window" in which you can tell a dude to step off you, and how it's often easily missed
Shouldn't that be a right at any time? At any point?
I'm not being pollyannish; that seems pretty basic to me.
My parents had baby and child development books around. I read them when I was six or so. When I was ten we went to a Wonder of Wonders presentation with school which sketches over how the babies are made and gets into how fetuses grow. My parents never spoke of it beyond vague 'wait until you're married' sorts of speeches at 'teaching moments', i.e., whenever something inappropriate was on TV.
Sex ed in high school was classic. We learned all about diseases that could kill us, and where the fallopian tubes were, but not much else.
I got a talk at like age 5, and a hippie illustrated kid's book on the subject. I seem to recall that my main question for my father was, "Where does the sperm go if you don't have sex?" There's probably something to be said for having the Talk at an age when the kid has not yet cottoned on to the embarrassment factor.
What you have a right to do, and what you feel socially or emotionally pressured to do, are two different things.
A friend of mine had parents who were divorced, and had both married new people. Then he walked in on them having sex.
136: what, all four?
135 is dead on.
135: I know, but that seems continuous throughout the encounter. That there are mileposts you yourself recognise as significant is what I'm questioning. There'll be grief for sure, I've been on both sides.
Sex ed in high school was classic. We learned all about diseases that could kill us, and where the fallopian tubes were, but not much else.
First of all, I never had a class that came anywhere close to being called "sex ed". We had "Health" classes one after the other, each of which was about half about drugs, and half about sex.
My 9th-grade Health class was built around a nonsensical list of the "Nine types of sexual behavior", which I honestly think my teacher made up. It was a weird exercise in improper parallel structure, with the nine types being something like "Intercourse, masturbation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, abstinence"...you know, these are not comparable concepts.
In my HS the sex ed was conducted in terms of crawdads. Seriously. They have sex front to fron much like people.
They were called Health classes, and you could be removed from them if your parents were squeamish on the days they talked about sex.
Do not ever do this to your child.
what, all four?
No, just his parents. Each cheating on their new spouse with their old spouse.
Second, anyone raised Unitarian? Anyone remember AYS, "About Your Sexuality"?
H-G, my wife was raised UU, and always tells the horror story of how her dad volunteered to teach AYS the year she was to take it. Luckily, her mom talked him out of it.
the horror story of how her dad volunteered to teach AYS the year she was to take it
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
The next time someone asks for help with a pseudonym, I'm going to suggest AYS.
I read my first Daniel Steel book at ten. Mom had taken away all of my books as punishment, so I read what was left. At 13 I was hand the James Dobson book and told there'd be a quiz next weekend. There was no quiz. Which was a good thing because the book was boring.
If kmsqrd and dsquared got together, they'd have kids to the fourth power.
By age 7 I had read the Childcraft books including the Guide to Parents and it explained about the sperm and the egg. I didn't understand how the sperm actually got to the egg and wondered if the couple just lay side by side ... but how would the sperm know where to go? Weirdly it was a magazine article explaining that to prove the offence of rape it must be shown that the penis entered the vagina that finally clued me in, at about age 8. I wasn't remotely affected by the context so I can only assume I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the article. My mother went to have "the talk" with me soon after but I told her I already knew.
There was a bit of show-me-yours with a cousin but since I had two brothers I was more fascinated by his outie belly-button.
148: speaking of pseuds: mine is going away, today.
everything but the actual Tab A => Slot B part
Heh. Yeah, no Talk from my parents, and high school "Health" classes didn't quite get into details.
I found out about the Tabs and Slots at, oh, 11 or so? From a rather explicit magazine my friends and I found in the woods. My friends lorded my ignorance over me.
I could not believe it. He does what? He puts what where? Ewwwww.
Within a week, of course, I was at the library.
speaking of pseuds: mine is going away, today.
Wait, what? Details, please! You're going away? Or you're just changing names? (In which case I have a delightful suggestion.)
I have told this story before. The house had a lot of obstretrics and gynecology books laying around, and I knew how to shave a pubis in prep for childbirth before I hit puberty. 4 smooth strokes IIRC, point being speed.
As to be expected, much of the content focused on pathologies, diagnoses & traumas with full color photographs. Don't remember it affecting me at all, except for removing some mystery.
Never had a talk.
I'm going to miss my mind's ear hearing a whispered "soupbiscuit".
We all call you soup biscuit, anyway.
You know, RFTS mocked them early in this thread, but I think kids could do much, much worse than learn about sex from reading the Clan of the Cave Bear novels. When I was in 4th grade, they were in one of those wire book-racks in my homeroom class, and I like to think I'm a better person for it.
154: is your suggestions AYS?
I'm going away (net holiday, mostly) for a bit. I suspect I'll come back here ... but a couple of external things have me thinking I should kill off this pseud, if I do. Apologies for any confusion this causes, if it doesn. A couple of you have my email, anyway.....
Don't hear soup biscuit; actually hear Soob-ris-kay, which probably isn't right either.
"soupbiscuit"
You two couldn't have planned that much better. I read it as "soob risque."
the funny thing is I thought it was an obvious one, but several people have asked me what the hell it means. must be the archaic spelling.
I've known the sperm-and-egg stuff as far back as I can remember, but I didn't know any more than that until I was in first grade. We were watching a documentary on PBS showing an egg being fertilized (possibly the same documentary mentioned upthread) and I said something like "What I don't understand is how the sperm gets to the egg in the first place." That night my mom gave me a book that explained it. No Talk.
Do come back when you can, whether under this name (which I don't mentally pronounce at all. I run aground on the 'bzr' and store it as 'longish name starting with a lowercase "s"', rather than as anything specific.) or another.
is your suggestions AYS?
YES!
Hmmm, well, we'll miss you. When you do come back, if you are differently named, be sure to connect the dots for us. It's much more fun when there's continuity of entities.
I should kill off this pseud
I believe "Matt Weiner" is available.
LB: Thanks. I'm going to shutdown this pseud because it has caused a little bit of somewhat indirect professional friction, which surprised me. If/when I do come back, I'll be a bit more circumspect, I think.
heebie-geebie: I'll leave some breadcrumbs. You know how to contact me if there is any more talk of a get together...
You know how to contact me if there is any more talk of a get together...
I certainly will! In fact, Magpie and Josh were talking about possibly visiting Austin in October. So maybe a meet-up then?
169: Really? I suppose that sort of thing is exactly what you can't talk about, but I'd love to know what happened if you can explain.
172: A couple of oblique comments I made here somehow made it back to people they really were not intended for, at all. Hardly the end of the world, but clearly someone has been reading/googling and made a connection. Now I feel constrained which I do not like. That, and things are a bit up in the air right now anyway and this has made me wonder about potential fallout. I dont' think I've ever said anything here I would regret, exactly, but I also don't feel like doing a lot of self-censoring. If I can make sense of a balance, I'll do that, or perhaps come back here in a more anonymous way (I haven't been particulary careful about that, of course)
170: We are definitely due for another Austin meet-up. And Sir Kraab was raised Unitarian too, so you two can swap stories, although I think she has a higher opinion / fonder memories of the sex education than you. Maybe she was just in a larger class.
And I always mentally pronounced it as "soup brisket" until soub told us in person how it's pronounced.
173: Well, we have the example of CFKAU (the
Commenter Formerly Known as U/r/p/l/e), who had to "disappear" and then reappeared with a new pseud. Everything seems to be working out okay for him, despite his not being funny and maybe even an idiot.
I pronounce it phonetically. That is, "Soob-zr-ik-wet".
I know there's a word "sobriquet", but he spells it different for some reason.
176: right. It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, which I ended up with somewhere else because of a name conflict.
I found out about it in dribs and drabs. I read about Mr. Sperm meeting Ms. Egg in an encyclopedia, and had my mom, a former nurse, explain external genital terminology to me after I asked her why my sister's dick was inside-out.
A few years later, my aunt (also a former nurse) asked me if I knew what happened "when a man lays on top of a woman", and I hazarded a guess that it had something to do with the sperm-egg thing. I guess that she was flummoxed by my use of terms like "embryo", because she accused me of looking at her obstetric nursing textbook in the bookshelf in the basement, and forbade me from looking at it "again". No points for guessing what I did at the next available opportunity. I had an experience similar to Bob McManus'--double vaginas! Supernumerary nipples! Anencephalic babies! Lovecraft never did better.
I found out about Tab A/Slot B from a classmate who had to explain a joke to me, and found out about menstruation from reading Carrie. Then I discovered the library's sex ed books, and they filled in the rest of the gaps, as well as cluing me in on a little thing that they liked to call "masturbation" that I might want to check out.
I read about Mr. Sperm meeting Ms. Egg in an encyclopedia
A library is one thing. This sounds less comfortable.
Fret not, h-g. In s's absence (I too skip right past that mangle of consonants) we can simply ask any new commenter, "Are You Soupbiscuit?" in acronym form.
Like, "Are you my mother?" There's a backhoe just outside on the street. I'll go up to it right now and find out if it's Soup Brisket.
why my sister's dick was inside-out
Hee!
double vaginas!
That's nothing. I hear Martha Washington had, like, thirty goddamn vaginas.
OT: Jesus, do I hate being micromanaged. On a freaking pro-bono matter, would you think the goddamn partner could accept that the goddamn Court of Appeals cases I've found mean what they say in plain language, and we can take the position I want to take, rather than holding off on letting me get back to opposing counsel until he's had a junior associate do an exhaustive memo of every case in NYS that mentions this concept?
If I'd needed help doing the research, I'd have asked for it. If I was in doubt about the results, I'd have said so. If you'd look at the damn cases yourself, you'd see the answer was clear. But now I'm stuck waiting for this all to get done on someone else's schedule rather than just being able to take care of the stupid thing, and I'd really rather not go back to opposing counsel and ask for an extension.
I should have known better than to tell the guy what I was doing, whatever his instructions were. Trying to get anything done with these people is like drowning in Jello.
180: "A/Y/S?" is the new "A/S/L?".
Montessori, bitches!
IIRC, my school had a non-awkward session sometime in grades 1-3, far from AYS-style, which went into biology, mechanics, etc. in a measured and informative way. I remember one classmate asking about how possible it was for sperm to penetrate a condom without it breaking. The teacher cheerfully answered, while reminding him not to speak so freely about these issues at, say, a dinner party.
OTOH, my parents, while approving of this, were usually reticent to talk about it personally.
184: That sucks LB. Just try to focus on the technique you will use for gloating when the junior associate comes back with the memo reading, "Uh, what LB said."
184: (On the flip side, nice to see BigLaw willing to invest that much attorney time on something they're not getting paid for... )
My dad gave me one installment of the Talk to explain why my parents weren't letting me go to the sex-ed presentation in 5th grade (separated by gender): it was masturbation-positive, and my Mormon parents were masturbation-negative. To explain that, he went into a fair amount of detail that actually did clear up a few questions I still had. I sat on my bedroom floor trying to build Lego stuff and avoid eye contact. I have to give my dad credit for having that Talk, as uncomfortable as it was, and following it up with one or two more in later years (always including warnings against self-abuse). It was pretty mortifying not to be allowed to go to that 5th-grade presentation, though, and I long wondered if I'd missed any big secrets. I continued my quest for knowledge in the pages of trashy detective and sci-fi novels and a few key medical-type books in our local library.
Oh my goodness I just found a partner for the hand vagina... wow! Who needs pornography when you've got this?
I have a 17-year-old daughter. I don't think she ever got a talk: the policy was to answer questions as and when they arose when she was small, and somehow the knowledge sort of dribbled out. But by now she has an awe-inspiring theoretical knowledge, simply from reading everything around the house, hanging around on fanfic net and -- of course -- talking in school. So far as I know she's got no practical knowledge but at least one of her contemporaries has already had a baby. Her view is basically that teenage boys are too horrible to bother with. Seems sensible enough to me.
oh -- and since dsquared deserves a straight line, what is it that Welsh people accuse the English of having sex with?
straight lines?
You know, copunchlines.
191: I think that's pretty much the appropriate point of view for teenage girls to have. They know how, but who would want to with a teenage boy?
Parent's copy of The Joy of Sex for me. I vividly remember the description of a kinky little bit of bondage and slow masturbation in the copy I read that I'm convinced is partly responsible for my current state of high switchiness.
195 is funny in the opposite category.
Has anybody heard from Labs recently?
196.1: After all, it's essential to keep the field clear for thirtysomething pervs. (Or is that "perves"?)
Has anybody heard from Labs recently?
Labs only wears designer jeans, but that guy looks like absolutely nothing could keep him from enjoying himself.
I don't remember A Talk, about either sex or menstruation; my parents would have been too mortified to talk about it and my grandmother probably wanted the sex information withheld until I was, like, 30. The period info I must have picked up from my friends. Sex info was from purloined copies of The Joy of Sex at friends' houses and Fear of Flying at home, supplemented by a 7th-grade health class that should have happened years earlier. So 70s-tastic.
My 12-year-old son is having sex-segregated lessons on Puberty at school. He claims to find it all terribly tiresome but I think he's more interested than he lets on. It's quite disconcerting when he comes home and announces "today we did wet dreams" or whatever. How different from the dignified reticence of my own school days.
FL better get back here before all we post on is fonts.
Not to wander off topic again, but as promised I'm (at least this incarnation of I'm) bowing out now. Have fun all!
As I've mentioned before, my sex ed consisted of: 1) the Church telling me "no until marriage, yay hott monkey-sex afterwards," but with fewer details; 2) Victorian pr0n from my mother's underwear drawer; 3) the 70s Joy of Sex I found hidden (badly) behind my parents' bed; 4) the wonderfully loopy Latvian psychoanalyst who taught a very frank drugs n' sex course for freshmen at my high school. Parents? Nada.
Bye, soubzriquet. (I'm betting on rendition.)
Back in the olden days, when I was about 13, my mother presented me with a copy of a book on the human body, told me to read the chapter on reproduction, and fled. Some time later, she returned and asked if I had any questions. In response to my "No", she looked relieved and left the room again, only to return once more and announce that "it" was one's duty during marriage, but otherwise it was dirty and immoral. [This explains why my father was banging his grad students...]
In school, Miss Ballard ['Miss, and proud of it!'], who was obsessed by the fact that her neighbour hung lacy unmentionables on a backyard clothesline, showed us pictures of syphilitic hearts and informed us that that was what happened if one "did it".
Fortunately, my father had an excellent collection of Victorian porn in his office, hidden behind the comic books [not allowed in the house due to the maunderings of one Fredric Wertham.] What with everybody spending copiously and enjoying themselves so much, I managed to figure out that my mother and Miss B were full of crap...
205: I know too many Catholic girls who were sorely disappointed when their first time was... that's it?
Re: Sex talks and the Offspring: Well, he knew the theory when he was fairly young - under 5, as I recall - mostly from asking questions of Mommy, especially when his daycare manager was pregnant. [I had to stop him from announcing to random strangers that she was having a baby because her "husband put his penis in her pagina!" He couldn't pronounce the "v" in vagina"...] He thought girl parts looked like flowers. I suspect that he and his friend Heather did some show-me-yours/I'll show you mine in the back yard. The last real question he came up with was when he was in 6th grade: One night at dinner, he asked 'Does butt-fucking hurt?' [He later would ask questions on behalf of friends, especially female ones. Evidently, frank talk about things sexual was not common from his cohort's parental units.]
My only really unsolicited caveat/advice was that sex was more personal than one would think, that using someone was a Bad Thing unless the consent/use was mutual - fuck buddy sort of thing - and that bright people used condoms. [He probably took a hundred of them to his high school prom, to give out to his friends.] I've also heard him talking to friends on the phone, echoing back some of that: 'He's just using you, Lupe, and that's not fair on you. You need to kick his ass out!'
He has told me that he is going to take care of giving The Talk to his sister, who's 11, as 'my Dad and Wife #2 are so uptight that they'll never tell her anything'.
209: that's it?
That was pretty much my [non-Catholic] reaction. It took me a while to grasp that 19 year old boys had no technique whatsoever. It all sounded so much better on paper...
"19 year old boys" s/b "19 year olds", please.
Yeah, but imagine the reaction if you'd had it built up as this mystical communion of a holily married couple or at least a really good college boyfriend.
My mom was trying to give Teh Talk to my 8-year-old brother, but he freaked out and went upstairs. I said I wanted to know, so she told me (I was six) that when a man and a woman get "excited," he puts his penis in her vagina and they have sex. Incidentally, okay, sometimes there's a baby, but it was an honest-to-God sex talk, not a how-babies-are-made talk. I was very curious. But the more I thought about it afterwards, I couldn't figure out how the penis (which I knew was soft and angled down) got in the vagina, which angled up. I envisioned all kinds of bizarre, uncomfortable positions trying to figure it out. I came back to Mom asking for an explanation, when she described the erection, which is what she meant by "excited." I wished she'd used a less-common word for it, as I began to think everyone using any form of the word "excite" meant "to get an erection." It was a little disturbing.
Then, of course, the entire Clan of the Cave Bear series at 10, and Florence King's lesbian coming-out novel Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady at 11. Mom lent it to me, forbidding me to read past page 100-something, when it gets "really gross and dirty." Thanks for the lesbian pr0n, Mom! She still regrets that, I think.
214--
you really think a parent would lend a kid a book that has pr0n after p. 100, tell them 'but you can't read past page 100-something', and not expect them to do just that?
i mean--the only question in the parent's mind would be 'will she bother to read anything *before* p.100, or just turn straight to the part i sent her to?"
you was set up, is what. i don't know why your mom wanted you reading lesbian pr0n, but she clearly did. take it from a parent.
I agree, KB, though she may not have been conscious of what she was doing. My mom's always been pretty obviously a repressed lesbian, at least to all my friends and to her family. She claims lesbians gross her out and that "Ladies don't have what I want" (thanx mom), but we all know.
I thought King's book was hilarious, but she became a Republican later.
she became a Republican later
True. Fantastically funny book, though.
Somebody mentioned Our Bodies Ourselves, but did anyone have Changing Bodies, Changing Lives by the same group. My girls school gave that out to everyone in the 8th grade.
The bit that I remember was the guy who got turned on listening to his mom run the vacuum cleaner.
219--
yes. i believe that people of that predilection are called 'linties'.
you would be unwise to diss them.
Changing Bodies, Changing Lives
Yep. The first edition came out when I was in junior high school.
<delurk>
My parents let my sister and I know that there were two copies of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex in the basement, and then never brought the subject up again.
This was supplemented for me by an 8th grade assembly where the girls went of to some other room to learn about menstruation, and the boys were lectured by a fertility doctor who didn't talk about sex at all, but showed us a video of him extracting spermatozoa from a man with a low sperm count by cutting part of his testicle out and extracting the spermatozoa from that after grinding it up, as I recall. Mostly I recall how much a scrotum bleeds when you cut it open with a scalpel (a lot).
<lurk>
217: Sad. It was an excellent book. Why do people do these things?
True story: I was walking home one evening from a restaurant while on vacation with Daughter One, age five. We walk past a tomcat mating with female. The tomcat has its teeth firmly planted in the nape of the female, and the female is whining and moaning.
"Why is that cat doing that to the other cat?" she asks. Seeing a teachable moment, I explain that the cats are making kittens, and that all animals make babies that way. "How do people make babies?" she asks. "More or less the same way," I tell her.
She reflects a while, then asks me, "So that's why you get so angry at [Daughter Two] when she bites?"
