My wife and I strongly believe in open communication with our daughter about sexuality and over the years we’ve had many opportunities to do sex education at home.
Just the other day, the Spawn asked Mrs. Kyle to explain exactly where the baby was going to exit her body. We’ve been talking about the whole process of pregnancy and childbirth since the Spawn became aware of her mama’s pregnancy. Mrs. Kyle grabbed a pen and paper and did a quick line drawing of the vagina and neighboring external features and explained where the baby would come out vs. where pee and poop came out. The Spawn listened and asked a couple of clarifying questions and then, “What about the bump? the one near the top? What’s that called?”
Mrs. Kyle went back over the drawing trying to ascertain which bump she was referring to. The Spawn volunteered to try her hand at drawing. The result was two concentric half circles with a triangular point near the upper part of the drawing — a sideways view of the labia and clit, rather well rendered.
“That’s your clitoris,” Mrs. Kyle explained. The Spawn nodded and repeated the name.
Mrs. Kyle, sensing a teachable moment, asked a follow-on question, “Do you ever touch yours?” The Spawn nodded in the affirmative. “Does it feel good?”
The Spawn responded with a big, smuggish grin, “It feels good and it’s very stretchy.” I exchanged raised eyebrow looks with Mrs. Kyle when she said ’stretchy.’
My wife continued, “Yes, it does feel good. It’s perfectly alright to touch it and feel good, but it’s something to do in private, do you understand?”
“Yes, I like to do it in my room sometimes.” The Spawn still sported a smile that spoke volumes about the number of times she had experimented, and the success of those explorations.
“Exactly. It’s something we do in private, that’s absolutely right.”
And with that conversation turned to something much more mundane, like getting computer time and cleaning her room. I was proud, once again, at the way my wife and I handled such conversations: matter of fact, informative, responsive to the child’s actual questions.
I had another teaching opportunity in June during our local Pride celebration. Two of the groups represented in the parade and at the park were trans-oriented: the New Boyz Club and the Gender Alliance. The Spawn and I were traversing the park, booth to booth, and she pointed to the New Boyz Club sign and asked what it meant, “What are ‘New Boyz,’ Mommy?”
I explained to her that sometimes people are born with bodies that don’t feel right to them. “For example, some people born with girl bodies feel like they should have been born with a boy body.” At this point she looked sharply up at me, “There are ways to change your body to be more like the one you wanted to be born with.”
I started to say something more about people getting surgeries to change their bodies, but at that point I’d lost her. Now she was moving on to the next booth, which featured lots of rainbow items. It may be that I’d gotten too explicit or that she wasn’t interested anymore. I’ve been slipping in information on gender, gender queerness, anything related whenever I can. These discussions often start with some observation she makes about me — my facial hair, my boyish haircuts, the way I dress. Little by little the information is accumulating and at some point, I hope we’ll be able to talk more about it.
I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and, whenever that is, I’m confident that we’ll have a great conversation.
One sunny spring morning I was helping my mother with the dishes while a soap opera played in the background. I was six or so, and for some reason kept running between the rooms.
At one point, a woman was straining to have a baby. Her brow was moist. Her hair messy, but still pretty. She was wearing an ugly hospital gown and screaming. AND screaming. Pan to a shot of giant open mouth, cut to a shot of squalling, screaming baby.
Well I thought…I know a secret!
I ran back to the kitchen, and tugged on my mother’s wet sleeve.
“Mom!” I proudly crowed, “I know how BABIES are made!!!”
There was a pause. A moment later,
“Really?” This came out slightly strangled.
“Uh-huh. That lady was screaming and the baby, it came out of her mouth! Then she stopped yelling.”
I don’t remember my mother’s face, but I do seem to recall her hands gripping the counter tightly.
A week or so later, I was messing around in the area we called “the library”, really just eight shelves of books and a giant eight-track player. Sitting on top of the eight-track was a very pink, and very cutesy book, the name of which escapes me at the moment. I do remember that it was clear on one thing-when a man and a woman love each other, they become VERY close, and nine months later, a baby comes. Through the vagina.
Reading the book alone, I didn’t really get it. I sorta knew the parts, but really, I didn’t. But the pictures were fun.
Flash forward to my own daughters. By three each knew the proper terms for their “equipment,” and boys’. And it’s not a big deal-as I explained to my eldest, you wouldn’t give your elbow some silly name, so why your vulva or penis?
One day, rooting in the book bins at my favorite thrift store, I found a new copy of A Child is Born and immediately snatched it. It was exactly what I would have wanted to have, and wanted my daughters to see. Exactly how a baby is made, created, and birthed.
Showing them was not traumatic. Uncomfortable yes, especially for my husband at the page with the erect, infrared penis. Sitting with my girls, and showing them, exactly what their bodies can do if they want, and how they do them, was freeing. No more soap opera babies or white knuckle conversations. Just glorious pictures of the miracle of our bodies.
I remember when my mother gave me the sex talk. I was seven years old. It was 1975.
She dispatched me and my two younger sisters, ages five and three, to the kitchen to “discuss something important.” Before she went about the business of making dinner, she instructed the three of us to sit together with our backs against the fridge. I remember its motor a gentle, lulling resonance as we all wondered what could be so pressing an issue as to pull us away from our Barbie dolls.
I don’t remember her exact words, just that they carried much weight, as if she had a burden to unload but was afraid to overwhelm us. I do remember that after she was done talking she showed the three of us a book. It was a hulking coffee-table book that was chock-full of graphic, 12 x 16 images; black and white photographs depicting people naked. I thought the pictures were fascinating, wondrous, and inherently beautiful. Inside the pages were artful photographs of nude, long-haired hippie women nursing their naked babies. In some pictures the father appeared beatifically peering over the shoulder of the mother, he too, free from the constraints of clothing. The second section of the book depicted children, also in the nude, and in various stages of explorative body play; a tweak at a child’s nipple by a curious four year-old or a point at a penis by an inquisitive toddler.
Many years later Mom learned that the (apparently) titillating tome had been banned from reproduction and distribution on the grounds that it constituted child pornography. However, I was not distressed at all by any of the pictures I witnessed. Nor was she. She was sure it was an appropriate introduction into the world of sex. What child would not be curious? In fact I was in awe. And it was an admiration that I would carry with me for many years.
I remember clearly during the summer break of the 3rd grade, while my mother was at work, babysitter planted in front of the television, my sisters and I making our way, quickly and quietly to Mom’s closet and unearthing that book hidden under clothing on a shelf. We would surreptitiously thumb through the pages, admiring curiously the candid, naked shots of these fascinating people. The last sections of the book were all pictures of men and women making love. On one page, the shot was a close-up of the shaft of a man’s penis, testicles dangling. Its girth filled the woman’s vagina, its glory masked in black, soft, bushy pubic fur. Other photos were less graphic, but they were still photos of men and women fucking.
And in the very last pages, there were pictures of babies. Babies being born, vaginas opening up, tiny heads crowning. And finally, couples looking into the eyes of their newborns and each other as if to say, “It was all worth it.” And, I remember that in all of the pictures in that book of photography, in the faces of the people who were literally laying themselves out there for the sake of sexual education and perhaps art, I saw something that I now, as an adult, equate with having sex. I saw ecstasy.
My mother showed us that book because she was adamant that my sisters and I be educated about sex. She herself was NOT and she paid for that lack of knowledge dearly. Mom had, before I was born, relinquished not one, but two babies for adoption.
The summer after I turned 21, and after my parents divorce was final, my mother sat the three of us down one afternoon at the kitchen table, much like she did the day she gave us the sex talk. She told us her story.
They were full siblings. My father’s children too; a baby boy and a baby girl, just one year apart.
I always knew I had a brother. From a very young age I could feel it in my soul. A charcoal drawing of me when I was three years old, with my bowl haircut and cable knit turtleneck could have been a portrait of a boy. I told everyone that inquired about it that it was my brother. Similarly, my imaginary friend, Tom, was my brother. In my mind, my brother had died. But, as I sat there that afternoon at the kitchen table as my mother told her story, I realized he was alive. The four of us decided that we needed to find him. We also needed to find her.
Mom wasn’t completely keen on the idea initially. She hated to disrupt their lives and she feared the rejection that was potentially imminent. But, after some persuasion by the three of us, aligned in solidarity by the notion that we had been denied their presence for so long already, she conceded. How could she possibly stand in the way of us getting to know them?
During our quest to find them, which included various methods, including private investigators, lengthy telephone calls to adoption agencies and letters put in their adoption files with information on how to contact my mother should they so choose, it dawned on me for the very first time ever, that my mother was a sexual being. She had not planned to have those babies. She hadn’t planned to birth any of us, except my middle sister. She had become pregnant because she liked having sex with my dad but was completely uneducated to the fact that a child could be produced from her pleasure. It was a revelation to me, to realize this other part of my mother. And it is truly when our relationship changed and we became not just mother and daughter, but also friends.
We eventually found the two babies who of course were by then grown up adults. And the relationships we’ve had with them have been somewhat awkward, often sporadic, and occasionally tumultuous. Which, given the circumstances, is to be expected really.
But I am happy to say that my brother, the one that on a deeply subconscious level I always knew was there, is in my life. Again. Finally.
And for that I can thank my mother. My mother who, because she liked sex and assumed that her daughters might too, enlightened us early as to what it is, what it means and how it works.
With pictures and everything.
–Submitted by Sexy Sadie, from Confessions from My Open Marriage
So let’s be honest, ladies (and gents). Motherhood can do an absolute number on one’s sex drive. I’m not sure why this would have come as a surprise to anyone. Magazine covers shout it out, daytime television promises to teach us all how to rekindle the spark, and the postpartum sex books multiply like rabbits.
Why is this dip in libido so? After all, we spend lots and lots of time practicing for baby-making. And during pregnancy, well…you can’t get pregnant right? So couples are free to rut with abandon as the lush fertility hormones wash over us like a river.
But that tiny baby gets to town and man….
And frankly, it isn’t just the “right after the birth” part where the sex drive falls apart. In fact, I remember feeling entirely aroused the first few weeks after my children’s births. But I think, hormone drop and tiredness aside, there is something fundamental that shifts in a woman’s body.
Or at least mine. It was as if my body really and truly just didn’t belong to me, and as such, I felt no claim to it for pleasure. I was being drained, daily. Touched, constantly. Dripping fluids, without end. Pulled at, drooled on, needed.
Needed.
And all that need left very little tolerance for want of any kind, mine or Gander’s. My sexuality was hidden away like my skinny jeans. It didn’t fit me, not at all.
That was the physical merging into some kind of mind-bending space, and that was just the first year.
What was even more insidious, what sneaked in and ruined even more of my ability to feel sexual was this: the idea that to be a mother, meant to be not-sexual. Lemme tell you a story.
Gander and I had always had a rockin sex life. Vanilla, perhaps, but really good. And I suppose we both had toyed with more alternative fantasies, particularly when we got crushes on other folks. It so happened that around the time we conceived our first gosling, we met this very interesting couple. They were our age, but newly in love. They were gorgeous. They were passionate. They would be anyone’s fantasy of a swing night, to be quite honest. And we all got on quite well.
So this one night, not too terribly long after I’d found out I was with child, but not so far along that I looked it, we all went out to a club to go dancing. Everyone was drinking except me. The music was lovely. I was not nauseated.
At some point, Gander went off to find more liquor and I found myself being danced upon by two very hot, sexy people. The fellow in front, the lady behind. And I was all atwitter. Aflutter. Discombobulated. And aroused as all get out.
And the lady even went so far as to say to me…..I think Gander is really cute. And as Maude as my witness, all I could think was, “I’M PREGNANT FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” As if, in the 8 weeks it took to establish fetusness, all my sexuality had just been washed away by maternal glory.
I think I feigned nausea but quickly took Gander home to make the sweet sweet thinking of other people and feeling guilty about it love.
Somehow, the idea of being a mother trumped my sexuality.
I started listening, please forgive me, to Dr. L-She Who Will Not Be Named. I started thinking how much better it would be not to work. I totally lost myself in the cultural idea of Motherhood. And in that idea, there was no room for sex.
Which is ironic, come to think of it, as I feel far, far, more sensual, sexual and radical some ten years later.
But it was really being lost in the desert for a while there.
I’ll keep posting more about this….call it part three if you wish. But I think the influence of the maiden/mother/crone archetypes have been really fucked with (if you’ll pardon the pun) in America. More familiarly, Virgin/Whore or Sex Object/Mother. Unless you are a MILF. Which is a whole other issue.
For now though, don’t underestimate the impact the physical change has on women as they become mothers….and certainly don’t underestimate the psychic change being “a mother” has one women. Both those influences were double whammies on my sex life (and on Ganders).
–Submitted by Goose from Living In Outlaw Territory
My parents never told me anything. Learning about sex in the late 70s-early 80s was like taking an independent study course with a couple of professors who couldn’t be bothered to keep office hours.
I was a first-born, serious girl. I had spent my preschool years playing outdoors with my older male cousins. Sometimes our games were sexually charged: as a result, I knew what boy parts looked like and that they didn’t have to sit down on the toilet. I knew I liked being tied up as we re-enacted various Bugs Bunny cartoons, but I couldn’t say why. I had seen a medical textbook of my father’s when I was very young; the image of a cross-section of a woman’s abdomen with an upside-down baby inside was burned into my memory. I had seen big women like this and was able to conclude that babies come from inside women. But how did they get there? A man giving a woman “a special kind of hug,” as my mother explained it, seemed insanely vague.
When I was 11, Mom gave me a pamphlet called “Growing Up and Liking It,” which featured a dated photograph of a smiling blond teenage girl in a blue dress on the cover. The pamphlet described menstruation and really seemed to push Modess (“rhymes with oh yes!”) sanitary napkins. Included in the pamphlet was an insert about bras. This was lavishly illustrated with drawings of fabulous, impossibly-stacked women wearing various bullet bras and did little more than cause me to become fascinated with fabulous, impossibly-stacked women wearing various bullet bras. The menstruation information, however, was old news. They had already shown us The Film at school. And that, apparently, was all we needed to know about sex. Except they were skipping what seemed to be the most interesting part!
Being self-reliant, I set out to learn about sex via the only tools I had available to me: books. I knew the act was called sex, so I consulted Webster’s Student Dictionary, but looking up “sex” was a big disappointment to say the least.
I turned to fiction for help. Judy Blume seemed to know what was going on, and I pored over Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret (useful, but not about sex), Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (inscrutable at the time because it was a boy’s story, but I knew I was on to something), and Deenie, which described what I later understood to be the miracle of masturbation. Deenie talked about getting in the bathtub, rubbing herself somewhere–I don’t think she ever said exactly where–with a washcloth, and getting a “really nice feeling.” So, of course, I tried rubbing my body in various places such as my stomach and arms with a washcloth, but I never experienced a sensation beyond “washcloth feeling.” Eventually it occurred to me to try Down There, but I didn’t know what to do or how long to do it, giving up after possibly ten seconds. “It must be something weird that only Deenie does,” I concluded. I mean, the girl had problems.
Strangely, I didn’t connect this Deenie thing with what I sometimes did in bed to fall asleep. I would close my eyes and imagine some elaborate scenario in which I was tied to a chair, tree, or pole. Bad guys would be lurking around in a threatening kind of way, about to do something to me, whatever that might be. Some heroic man, usually faceless but probably also Christopher Reeve-ish (I had a crush on Superman), would rescue me. As I thought about this, my hand casually migrated south, not doing much beyond just being there, providing warmth. I never came close to having an orgasm and had never even heard of the word at the time.
Things continued like this until I entered high school. At age 14, I was in a hospital waiting room as my little sister was being born. Bored out of my mind, I started reading the hospital’s offerings from cover to cover. I came across a Redbook with an excerpt from a popular romance novel reprinted on pulpy, peach-colored paper. The story’s heroine described an encounter with her lover and said something about “how good it felt to have him inside me.” This concept was a complete revelation to me: the man has to be inside the woman! It all makes sense to me now!
–Submitted by K.
When I was about four, my parents explained the basic mechanics of where babies come from. Excited that I knew something the other kids didn’t know, but ever the informational egalitarian, I told the other kids at my preschool. This didn’t go over well in the conservative community where I was raised.
A few years later, I distributed my father’s Playboy collection to the neighborhood boys. I got in even more trouble for that one. I suppose I was just born to spread sex.
–Submitted by Furry Girl, agrimony photography: be the porn you want to see in the world
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