#11: Sex education
When kids at school are more informative about sex than your parents, then you know they SUCK at explaining things.
My sex education was strange. Other than this situation with my grandmother that I’m about to describe, I can’t even recall anyone ever sitting down with me and discussing the birds and the bees. No diagrams, no drawings, no bananas with condoms on it, nothing. I sort of discovered things on my own…and considering the only source I had at the time for information, that was probably the more responsible choice.
The more old fashioned your parents are the more stranger and vague they speak about sex education, and this is also true of my grandmother. I think one day I approached her with the question of what “sex” was. I don’t even recall where I heard the word, funny how that is. She put her book down and went into the most awful explanation that anyone could give a child.
“The man….and woman….get on top of one another. She lays on him” I remember her saying. Uh……that’s it? I was confused.
“My friends and I roll, push and toss each around and play fight all the time…..so we’re having sex?” I asked.
By the end of that conversation, her explanation was so awful that I was under the impression that sex was when the man stuck his penis straight up the girl’s butt. Not in the rectum but just in between the cheeks. I thought that way for a while, too.
Granted yes, that is a different kind of sex…but geez. If I ever become a parent and have to illustrate the birds and the bees, I’m not using any crappy innuendos, bananas or drawings. Wife buys a dildo, I buy a fleshlight or one of those fake female vaginas and we use this in our explanation. I might even film my own documentary with professional production. Maybe I’ll get those guys from Wong Fu to film it or something.
I’m totally serious. My kid is NOT growing up stupid.
Another 20y/o Virgin Says:
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:32 am
Our society is just so sex-negative. Even most new mothers/fathers in our generation, if you ask them, they’ll tell you they wouldn’t feel comfortable telling their children everything they should know about sex if they ask.
I’m not saying you should lecture them when they’re in elementary school on every part of their body, but it’s one thing to answer a question your child asks of you, and another to flat out lie to them in hopes they never have to find out from you or until their older (when’s older anyways?)
I remember I was 11 or 12, and I had a friend who happened to be a girl and she invited me to watch Sleepy Hollow, play some video games, and eat and drink junk food all while spending that night on Halloween. The day I was going, my mom hands me a full-page article that happened to be printed in the newspaper that day that was just entitled, “Sex”, and listed sex-negative things. She didn’t even say anything, just handed it to me as if this was somehow going to save me from something during my “night at a girls house.”
I remember shaving my pubic hair for the first time a few days before then too and she found out and doesn’t ask me if I shaved pubic hair, but “Is there anywhere you’ve been shaving beside your face?” I was completely honest about it, and she sharply tells me I should never do that, and when I ask why its even there she tells me “It’s baby hair, it’ll go away soon”…
It’s this sex-negative mindset that needs to avoided when raising children in my opinion.