The Sex Talk, When You Never Got The Sex Talk

I'm going into this part of parenting totally blind

I never got the birds and bees talk as a kid. We were Catholic, and although we were more like Feed The Poor, Anti-War Catholics than the rosary-clutching busybodies who post up outside of abortion clinics to harass women in crisis with medical gore, sex was not a topic that got brought up– or at all– in our house.

My parents did tackle other challenging-to-explain-to-children topics with us, history and social justice issues like the Holocaust, the American Civil Rights movement, DDT, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, but no vagina or penis or Fallopian talk. It was easier for them to describe 150 women burning alive in a factory than it was to explain how babies were made. That’s just how shame worked on midcentury Catholics.

As a result, my sex education happened via a series of drip-drops of information gleaned from misinformed peers who got their sex education via oral tradition from the older kids on the bus, late night comedy jokes about Lorena Bobbitt, and the 1990 film Problem Child, followed by my parents’ sex-phobic attempt to correct the record without (in their minds) besmirching my childlike innocence with too much information.

In second grade, one of my classmates told an aghast lunch table of girls that one day we would all have to “pee out blood” and save the blood in a special garbage can. I asked my mom about it, and a few days later, she sat down with me on the front porch and gave me one of the least coherent explanations of menstruation in human history. I could not write something less illuminating if I tried. There was a “shedding” that happened, but only after God decided that it wasn’t time for the mom to have a baby? And bleeding only happened when a lady was ready to become a mom? Idk. She was so nervous about it that she couldn’t even look me in the eye. It took me several minutes to figure out what she was even talking about, but I listened and nodded solemnly, because it seemed like it was a big deal, what she was telling me, whatever it was.

My cool older cousin who would crimp my hair and introduced me to Green Day explained that her jeans had an extra loop around the top button because they were “rape safe.” When I asked her what rape was, she panicked a little and said that it was when somebody tries to take your pants off. Glad I didn’t have Google for that one.

When I was in fifth grade, one of the kids in my class told everybody that the “true” name for the female private part was “Pajoygen.” It sounded vaguely like Jerry Lewis mispronouncing “vagina.” Confusion abounded. Another kid corrected him and said that actually the correct word was “China.” Ah yes. Of course.

I was constantly startled by information about my own body. I was a curious kid, but all we had to fact check all this was a set of encyclopedias with an entry on “Sex” that was so medical that it was rendered nearly opaque to my 10-year-old brain. I cannot imagine the mental havoc I’d have wreaked on myself if I’d had access to an internet search engine.

When I got to middle and even high school, sex was a forbidden topic. Secret, shameful, not something to even joke around about. If I'd grown up in a place with more access to trouble-- like, say, Los Angeles-- there's no telling how hugely I could have fucked up.

This all goes to say: I don’t want that for my daughter. I want her to have a fact-based and age-appropriate understanding of human biology, sexuality, and gender throughout her life, because she’ll probably grow up with a high speed internet connection and the terrifying technological literacy of somebody more than 35 years younger than me. If I do not provide her with answers to questions about the human body and sex, she will seek the answers herself on the internet or at the library and end up learning about how babies are made by looking at fan art of a pregnant Ariel the Little Mermaid. And then I’ll have to explain that if mermaids were real, they would lay eggs due to the fact that the part of their body where the reproductive organs would reside is a fish. What parent wants to explain that to a five year old? Not me!

So I’ve been mentally preparing myself to sail through uncharted waters. I need a years-long runway here because I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t want to have the kind of kid who runs around the playground pointing at her crotch and telling all of the other kids in pre-k that it’s called the mons pubis, but I also don’t want her to spend even a minute thinking “pajoygen” is a word.

Screen Shot via Mean Girls/ Paramount Pictures/ Broadway Video