I knew before my children were born that I wanted to be the kind of mother that they could trust would tell them the truth. I never talked “baby talk” to them and always tried to judge what age appropriate information for them was. I also never would assume that, “Not MY child! My daughter/son would NEVER do that!” Parents like that are just fooling themselves. Why do they think their kids won’t do the same or worse than they did?
Sometimes my philosophy worked very well. When my daughter was about the age when she was figuring out Santa and the Easter Bunny weren’t real guys, I told her that when children become a certain age that Santa and the Easter Bunny let mom, dad, older brothers and sisters, take over the duties that they performed for the smaller children. I further told her that was the way we could always keep the magic of Christmas and the fun of Easter going forever. Now that she was getting older it was a big responsibility to keep the secret going and help Santa and company. She LOVED it! She talks about it to this day. I was Queen Mom with that pearl of wisdom.
I treated my son the same way. I did request that his father take over the actual “sex” talks with him. My son became aware of his penis very early in his life and like all men, it became his BEST friend. Since my son was five years old, he has never let me see him naked. I sent his father in a couple times over the years to question him and make sure his junk was okay, in proper order, etc. His father did this with much anguish and I think the last time I did this, my son was about fifteen. After his father had asked him the torturous questions, my son stormed out of his room and told me that his plumbing was fine, did what it was supposed to, and worked correctly and to STOP HAVING HIS FATHER CHECK ON HIM!!! He further informed me he knew about sex and how to protect himself and any future girlfriends. “Jeez, MOM!” Those were his last words on the subject.
So, I let them come to me with questions. I answered honestly and as the years went by, the questions about sex became less and less. They still come to me with questions about a variety of subjects but never sex. My job on that topic was over. They both had been told about birth control, pre-marital sex, virginity, oral sex and so on. Whew!
Now that you know I was always up-front with my children about everything. And I do mean everything, imagine my surprise when I found out *I* didn’t want to know EVERYTHING about them!
On a recent evening, his father and I were going out to dinner. My son was in his room. He usually has the door closed and locked. I went out to the car while his father went to ask him if he wanted to join us. When his father came out, he was laughing. I wanted to know what was so funny. His father, bless his sick little heart, told me. Apparently our son, my sweet little baby boy, was jerking off to internet porn! His door was locked but not closed tightly and when he knocked, the door opened. His father (I would have paid money to see the look on his face) was confronted by the sight of wild monkey sex on the computer and his son wanking away blissfully.
My appetite was gone. Some things a mother doesn’t want or need to know.
Sex was never discussed in the house where I grew up. If asked directly, my mother would send me to the towering front room bookcase where The Life Cycle Library waited politely on the topmost shelf, respectable and rich with answers. My parents worked in education all of their professional lives yet neither of them ever spoke to their children about love, sex, relationships, our bodies or self-esteem.
My first exposure to sexual behaviour was being compelled to watch my brother and sister engage in various kinds of sex play. They were young adolescents (I was very young) and were adopted children from different mothers so, they explained to me, it wasn’t against the law. I was required to sit naked in my brother’s locked room where I’d look at “dirty” magazines and pretend to get the cartoons; waiting anxiously for them to finish so i could get out of that room, get dressed and do anything else. Occasionally, I was instructed to participate. I never told.
Finally my brother snuck into my room one night, sexually assaulted me and broke that silence. I told my mother about that one incident. She told me that it had all been a dream, it had never happened and that ladies didn’t talk like that.
That was right about the time i decided being a lady was bullshit, especially if they couldn’t say what was true.
I grew up in a home that sexuality was often on the far ends of the scales. It was nothing for my Mom to walk around nude. And for my parents to very affectionate in front of us kids – kissing and groping in the kitchen wasn’t uncommon. I of course giggled at it as a little girl. But growing up I now appreciate that they could be so open with their affection and sexual attraction in front of us.
But at the same time we were told that sex wasn’t something we needed to know about until we were grown up. And they really didn’t want to talk about it.
I am not sure when it happened but eventually I figured it out that my Mom and Dad had to get married because they got pregnant with me. And as soon as I became aware the lectures came to not do the same thing. I heard all about the things my Mom and Dad had to give up because they had sex. But still it wasn’t talked about what sex was or how it worked. And it did create a message for me that sex was bad – forbidden because it made you give up things that sounded like they were better and good.
All the while though still my parents still were very open with their affection for each other so it made me want to have that but just not tell them. So I learned about sex on my own, from girly magazines my Dad had stuffed in the back of his closet and from friends.
My family was pretty uninformative, in general. If you were meant to know something, it would be told to you. Questions were not only not invited, they were completely discouraged.
One day, I came home early from a babysitting job, and found my stepfather cramming a video into a tall basket in the hall closet. I didn’t ask: I knew the punishment for asking questions. However, he volunteered, “Instructional videos. I need them for work.”
Another day, I was home alone. This was a rare occurrence, because my parents dragged us EVERYWHERE with them, whether we wanted to go or not. I was looking for ways to bond with my stepfather, so I pulled out the videos. I figured if I could ask intelligent questions about his airplanes at work, we could have a few conversations. He and I rarely got along, but when I was interested in what he liked, we tended to get along better.
I popped the first video in, and got the shock of my life when I saw a man pounding the hell out of the woman in front of him, while yanking on her hair and grabbing her breasts and squeezing them.
Now, my biological father and stepmother were semi-nudists, so I had seen naked bodies. It had just never occurred to me how those naked bodies came together. And after seeing that first video, I couldn’t understand why: the woman’s face was scrunched up like she was in pain, and she was screaming.
Sure I had grabbed a video that got mixed in by accident, I popped a different movie into the VCR. This time, two women were sucking on a man’s penis, and one had her fingers going into his anus.
I watched, shocked, until he came. I didn’t understand what enjoyment anyone would get out of these actions. I was still sure that somehow this video was mixed in by accident: surely my uptight father didn’t watch these?
I tried a third video. This one opened up to a man hog-tied, kneeling in front of a woman who was dressed in leather, 4-inch heels, and carrying a whip – which she used liberally on his penis, ass, and nipples. She ordered him to do half a dozen things, then forced him to suck on another man’s penis.
I finally got the picture: my stepfather had lied. And at ten years old, that was more of an introduction than I needed into the world of sex.
While I eventually saw other videos that were less raunchy (and a few more raunchy), and despite the fact that I was curious what sex was actually like, I made the conscious decision to not have sex – or anything near sex – until I was eighteen.
I started out slow when I did start having sex, but I have surely experimented a-plenty since then. :)
First, I’ll say that my parents did their absolute best. They are lovely people. But it’s a tough job, being a parent.
My younger brother (I’m a guy, too) learned when he was about eleven that one could find really excellent stuff in the trash people threw out. He and a buddy of his would get up early on trash day and scout the neighborhood on their bikes. They actually found an old TV that worked pretty well one time. Most of the other stuff they got was not useful to anyone but a preteen or young teenage boy. To them, these things were treasures.
I wasn’t all that interested in their stuff, but one day, they hit the mother lode. They came into the house with two sagging garbage bags of all kind of porn–back when porn came on paper and was harder to come by than logging in.
For days we read through this stuff. A lot of it was kinkier than we though possible (enemas!). But most of it was Playboy, Oui, Penthouse, that kind of thing. We read the letters, the articles (which were mostly beyond us) and the ads. My parents knew–they took away the extreme stuff. But to their credit, they let us look at the rest.
The ads got me. You could buy “prophylactics.” I didn’t know what those were, but I tended to the bookish, even then. I looked up the word in the dictionary. A prophylactic is a “preventative.” This was no help.
“Remember, you can always ask us anything.”
So I asked my mom what a prophylactic was. I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Late 1970s.
She looked horrified. “I think you’re too young for that.”
That was it. I found out a few years later. But my theory in raising my kids has been that if they’re old enough to wonder, they’re old enough to know.
And if anyone’s reading this who doesn’t know–they’re condoms.
I was given porn magazines at the age of twelve by my grandmother (she raised me) who thought that if I had porn as a kid I wouldn’t want it as an adult. No other kids talked much about it to me as I was pretty shy. I sent away and faked my age to get more porn. I had at one time half a foot locker full of it, and didn’t feel all that good about it.
I feel as though it took two decades to learn about sex. Porn didn’t instill me with a bad feeling about it, since with my first sexual experience with my first girlfriend, I was so interested in understanding how to please I went to the library and looked up books on sex, especially cunnilingus.
This pattern continued after I left a marriage and I had to start dating; I started studying social dynamics and sex techniques. I still give a lot during sex. I made sure that when my son was old enough, that I gave him a good foundation on what it was, and a bit (as much as his seven-year-old mind could handle) about psychology between men and women.
Even though it’s been a long road, it’s been a joyous adventure to continue learning about sex, keeping it varied, and always a good dance together. The joke is on my grandmother, though, as I started an erotic publishing house, not at all like what I had as a kid though; much more artistic. Oh the irony!
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
When I look back on my life and try to figure out the exact moment when I realized what sex was, I find it a bit of a letdown that I can’t come up with one. There were always moments that I can say contributed to my not-insubstantial wealth of knowledge on the subject, but no specific one. My mom primarily raised me, and didn’t teach me about sex so much as she didn’t keep me from researching it – the highlights run like a blooper reel.
My mother called the vaginal/labia area “Mimis”. As in, the plural of Mimi. I think it was Hawaiian slang, as I spent the vast majority of my in vitro months in Honolulu before my grand debut. Now, normally this is just a cute folksy family thing, this slang-for-vagina practice, but my mom also called snap dragons mimis, or mimi flowers, because when you pinch the back, they open as if they are singing an operatic aria — the musical note “mi.”
So before my age hit double digits, I had firm association between my female parts, flowers, and music. This made perfect sense to me, but was met with incredulous alienation when the other girls in the playground took their “no no place” and “cookie” teachings to go play among other frigidly raised children instead of the little girl with an imaginative vagina that produced music and flowers. (In a related note, “Cookie”? Wtf is that about?)
I found my mom’s vibrator one day when I was probably about five. I ran around the house with the fleshy 1970’s relic turned on full blast, holding it aloft like the scepter of a sexually liberated relay runner. When I poked my napping mother in the side with it while she dozed on the couch, she made no move to take it away from me, and showed no sign of freaking out and telling me to drop it immediately.
Years later, earning my keep writing marketing for objects much like that one, I wonder if her lack of freakout was when the road to my own comfortable sexual awareness went the right way instead of the route of fear and loathing. I realized many years later in horror, as the memory flitted through my subconscious, what exactly I had been running around with and asked my mom why she DIDN’T freak out. She replied: “I always washed it, and if I grabbed it away from you or scolded you, you would have just gone looking for it again.”
When my mom instructed my father to throw out his Stonehenge-like piles of old Playboys, he did what any man would do: threw out the boring ones and hid a few of the really dirty ones that he wanted to keep under his ten year old daughter’s stuffed animals, (on a shelf too high for her to reach) to come back for later. My father didn’t realize the determination of a young lady to have attendees for the tea party that day, and when I stood on a box to get my Cabbage Patch Kids down for the soiree, my first real view of sex literally hit me in the face. A truly filthy issue of Hustler I read enraptured by curiosity as a tan, oiled woman spread across the pages alongside a story of a cable repair man, a lonely woman, and a banana. After gleefully retelling this story to my day care playmates, my father received a stern phone call and sent me to my room for the rest of my natural life. Mom came home, smacked my father upside the head, and told me to go outside and play.
Sex was like a bomb with a very slow fuse that went off in a glorious burst of a pilfered romance novel, Interview With the Vampire commercials on television, and and a cleverly folded pillow. It was one of the bigger “AHA!” moments in my life. My first self induced orgasm, at thirteen, was a glorious earth-shattering thing during which I actually saw stars.
Years later, it occurred to me that this happened while I was on my stomach with my face buried in a pillow, and that my first orgasm damn near killed me via suffocation. The “stars” were black blooms behind my eyes from my preoccupied but oxygen starved brain.
I remember being confused at the story in the bodice ripper novel, because all that seemed to happen was the man thrusting his “thobbing manhood” between her “nether lips.” I would find out in time that “lips” are slang for “labia” and the story, as well as my ensuing healthy appreciation for performing oral sex, became much more understandable.
–Submitted by That Toy Chick
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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