Doper women with little brothers: a poll

In My Humble Opinion
1

My brother is five years younger than me. While we get along pretty well, we have almost nothing in common, and it’s only been within the past few years that we’ve gone out of our way to do stuff together (like meet up for lunch or whatever).

The other day we had the following conversation.

Brother: Um, so I slept with [some random girl he met off craigslist a few weeks ago] last weekend.

Me: Okay. <awkward pause that somehow inspires a somewhat troubling thought> Er, that wasn’t your first time, was it?

Brother: Ye-e-e-s?

Me: :eek: Jesus Christ. What about your old girlfriend? You dated her for half a year, and you never slept with her?

Brother: She was . . . terrified of . . . germs and stuff.

Me: :confused: Okaaaaaaaaaay. Please tell me you used a condom.

Brother: <indignant> Of course.

Me: Good. <tries to think of a way to change the subject>

Brother: But I didn’t finish.

Me: . . .

Brother: I jerked off the day before. Do you think that was it?

Me: <startled into blurting out> You’re a 21 year old male, you should be jerking off three times a day!

Brother: That sounds . . . painful.

I could tell that he desperately wanted some kind of advice, but frankly I was way too weirded out by the idea that my little brother was asking me about sex that I just told him to try again when he wasn’t drunk and left it at that. I don’t care that we’re both adults now. You’d think that in the age of the Internet your big sister would be the last person in the world you’d want to discuss your sex life with.

So, fellow women Dopers. Has your little brother ever asked you for sex advice? How’d you deal with it?

2

Good golly, no. I think any one of my brothers (I have 3, all younger) would shoot himself before doing that. I guess I’ve heard people say their siblings are more open about it, but we are a reserved bunch. Sorry.

3

Not the advice you asked for, but condoms can be tough, especially if it’s the first time and you don’t know jack about sex let alone your preferred brand. I’d tell him not to worry about it if he asks again, although given the reaction the last time he probably won’t bring it up. Some big sister advice you had! :stuck_out_tongue:

Although I can’t recall ever discussing sex issues specifically with my little sister, I wanted her to know that she could ask me if she needed to. I bought her her first “hand massager.”

The jerking off rate is highly variable, and can depend on physiology as well as living situation. If I’m working or in school all day, I can (and could) sometimes manage a cheeky wank before bed, but not thrice a day. Maybe if I were having a do-nothing weekend day, but it wasn’t really a regular occurence.

Dunno, maybe it’s not the relationship you have or want to have with your little brother, but he brought it up for a reason. I know I would have appreciated having female friends with whom I could have discussed my first time.

4

Good God, woman! You have brought up a thought that I had buried in the deepest recesses of my brain. My asexual sister was talking to my other asexual sister about receiving the uncomfortable ramming on her cervix. I am sure she knew I was in ear shot. Now, I suspect she had sex at least twice, because she has two kids.

BLEAAAAHHHH. BRAIN BLEACH! Where’s that bottle of Jameson’s!

5

My brother is five years younger than me, which means he’ll be 25 this year. We’re pretty close in that we get along well and enjoy many of the same things. I know he doesn’t have a problem with porn/nudity. I think he may even be bi, but I really couldn’t say for certain.

I have no idea if he’s still a virgin or not. I doubt it, but I’d rather not think about it too much. We do speak pretty open and frankly to each other, so if it came up I’d roll with it, but until that day comes, I’m doing fine without knowing. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Speaking as the younger brother of a big sister…good GOD I would NEVER talk to her about sex. Ever. Let me repeat that a bit louder…

EVER!!!

But I guess it wouldn’t be uncommon for him to not finish. I know my first time lasted a while (yes, she got uncomfortable…luckily she was very “experienced.” Had we both been virgins who knows what kind of pain she might have been in.) But think of it this way: if all your orgasms are from your own damn hand, flesh to flesh, then yeah, transitioning to a vagina with a piece of latex in between is a LOT different. I know that for me, the hardest thing to get used to was the pace…regular sex is so damn slow compared to how fast I jerk off!

7

See, my sister has a kid, but I’m 99% sure she has not had sex. I figure she just started to get really fat, and figured it was just better to say she was pregnant than just putting on weight. After a few months, she had some liposuction scheduled. So off to the hospital she goes. When she was done, she just stole someone else’s baby to complete the illusion.

She’s crafty…a crafty virgin.

8

For the longest time, I thought my little brother was asexual. He’s currently living with his girlfriend, so I’m sure stuff goes on that I prefer not to think about. Ewww. Just as he refrained from bringing up in conversation the, ahem, more intimate details of my marriage. So, no, I tend not to discuss sexual matters with him, unless we’re talking in the abstract, such as about the sex life of someone on TV or prostitution in Southeast Asia or something.

9

My little brother is much younger than I am, about 16 years younger. He first asked me about sex when he was three. Er, I thought he was asking me about sex, it turned out he was asking something else entirely.

Since then, I have talked about sex with all four of my younger siblings at various times. We have been siblings for several decades now, so we have talked about any number of things. Why wouldn’t we talk about sex?

I took Second Sister to get the Pill. She took Third Sister to get the Pill. Fourth Sister got it herself, resourceful thing that she is. I think we all bought condoms at various times for one another. And if you can’t count on your siblings to distract one date at the front door while you are returning from another date via the back door, who can you trust? Really.*

I don’t recall having talked to my older brother about sex but probably we have. Certainly we talked about getting pregnant and so on as we got older and that became a result to be desired rather than avoided.

Sex aside, I’d say your brother was showing you the human being he is; and you shoved him with force and violence back into a mental box you have constructed. Honestly, in your place I would take him to lunch right now and apologize profusely for being momentarily brain locked into a caricature of what a sibling relationship ought to be and for requiring him to be the puppet in your head labelled “baby brother” rather than the person that he actually is.

But between “all 21 year olds should jerk off three times a day”, “try it when you aren’t drunk”, “you dated a year and a half and didn’t have sex, what’s wrong with you?”, and “why would anybody want to talk to their own sister when they could talk to random strangers on the Internet”, it seems to me that you may not want to have a friendly human relationship with your brother, in which case, don’t bother. But if you do, I would start with noticing that he is at least as much a person as anybody else, even if he was born to the same parents as you.

  • No, this never happened to me, alas. But I did do this for Second Sister more than once.
10

Bleeaaahhh!! No, my brother would never ask me for sex advice, because I haven’t been on a date in 8+ years (I’m 22, so you see how sad this is), let alone done any of that sort of thing.

11

This is a little harsh, but I more or less agree. The fact that he was reaching out to you suggests that he really doesn’t have anyone else to reach out to, and you really emasculated him (I can’t believe you are a virgin, what’s wrong with you, why aren’t you jerking off more?). I mean, now he’s got to get his next gf in bed inside six months or dump her, no matter how he or she feels, because even his big sister thinks he’s a pussy if he doesn’t.

I dunno. You are allowed to draw a boundary if you just can’t be comfortable talking about sex with him, but I think you screwed this up. If I opened up to someone I trusted at one of the most delicate and confusing moments in my life and I got that kind of scorn and mockery, it would do permanent damage to that relationship, and maybe all my relationships.

12

Oh, sweet Jesus! I love my little brother dearly, and we’re very close, but we have never, ever, ever talked about sex and we never, ever, ever will.

Of course, my brother is as much a person as anyone else and, of course, I want a friendly relationship with him, but if he started talking about sex to me, I would be utterly shocked. I would be way too startled to react with gentle wisdom and kindly advice. Big sisters are great at advice on how to deal with mom and dad or what to look for in your first apartment. But sex stuff? No.

13

Those of you who feel this way, can I ask, do you have a similar shocked response when your friends talk about sex? Or do you have friends of the opposite sex? Is this a gender taboo?

Also, why would you have to respond with gentle wisdom and kindly advice? Expecting that of yourself (I assume because you are older) seems to me to be as weird as expecting your siblings to be asexual because they are younger. Why not just talk about it?

14

My brother is a year younger than me and we used to be really close. We talked about sex sometimes, but it was really just awkward as hell and we came to a silent but mutual agreement that we don’t need to discuss that anymore. And now I’ve forgotten what we even said.

Yes I have, yes I have. Lalalalalala…

15

I’m a guy with a younger brother, and I had much the same initial reaction when my bro asked me for sex advice (well, not so much advice as “Take me to one of your frat parties, you know our parents well enough to know there’s no way I’m getting any while I’m living at home”). Took me about five minutes to get over it, most of that due to him consciously projecting the angelic Catholic kid image for most of his life.

I’m in the “apologize, you cut him down pretty hard (however inadvertently)” camp–I don’t have sisters but I don’t think I’d like hearing what you’d said from anyone when I was a 21-year-old virgin (back in the day).

16

I’m actually sort of with **Manda JO ** and Marienee on this one and my brother and I have never actually discussed sex. Or at least not in the specific sense. Although, I feel compelled to point out that my oldest sister had a very, very brutally frank discussion about sex with my brother when he was about 15 and giving every sign of putting himself in the position of making himself a father before he could legally drive. She didn’t want to see him screw up his life that way, and figured the little talk would help. Which it more or less did.

But I’m thinking that your brother might have been reaching out to you because there wasn’t really anyone else he could talk about this with. From your earlier posts, I get the feeling your parents wouldn’t be a good place for him to have this sort of talk - and really, this is just so not the kind of talk you want to have with your male friends. Admitting you were a virgin at 21? And that you didn’t have an orgasm? And weren’t sure if that was normal? I’m assuming his friends are about his same age, and the late-teens, early-20’s guy who can manage to have a conversation along those lines with another late-teens, early-20’s guy and not resort to cruel mockery is gonna be a rare bird indeed.

I can see it weirding you out a lot (and you have my sympathy there - I know it would bork my brain fairly thoroughly were my brother to approach me about sex even though he’s married and his oldest kid is starting kindergarden in the fall), but I think you sort of owe your brother an apology and a willing ear with the advice he seems to need.

17

Um, no, that would be a pretty weird conversation to have with my brother.

18

I have lots of male friends. We just don’t talk about sex.

With my brother, it’s not so much a gender taboo as a family taboo. It would be a little awkward to talk about sex with my male friends. It would feel flat-out wrong to talk about sex with my brother or my dad. It’s not rational, but that doesn’t make it invalid.

You seemed to be taking **HazelNutCoffee **to task because of how she responded. I was trying to point out that if my brother got into detail about his sex life with me, I would probably be too shocked to respond in the most sensitive fashion either. I would not feel comfortable “just talking about it” with my brother.

It seems like HazelNut’s little bro could really use a friendly ear on this. But I don’t think she should have to be that ear. I think it’s okay for her to say, “I reacted badly when you brought that up yesterday. I love you, but I really don’t feel comfortable discussing sex with you. Maybe you should check out [website devoted to sex advice, whatever that might be].”

19

Thank you for all the responses.

I cut out a lot of our conversation because I wanted to keep the tone of the poll light-hearted. I wasn’t expected to be scolded for being a bad sister!

I did, in the end, reassure him and tell him that he shouldn’t be worried because when you’re drunk and you have a condom on it can be hard to finish no matter how many times you’ve had sex. I even went out on a limb and told him that The Guy had trouble finishing the first time we had sex because he was drunk and had a condom on. I figured it would make him feel better since my brother thinks all the people I hang out with are awesome. I told to be careful and that there’s no reason to rush into having sex if he feels uncomfortable with it, and that he shouldn’t be afraid of asking the girl about how to have good sex if he wants to continue that kind of relationship with her.

Please don’t castigate me for not giving him tips on how to go down on a girl. I do my best to be a good sister, but that’s where I must draw the line.

I think, in the end, I was trying to scare him into never asking me about sex again, because not only did I make allusions to my own sex life, I also alluded to the fact that I masturbate and that I watch porn. He looked kind of horrified by the end. Well. THAT’S WHAT HE GETS for bringing up his sex life with me! :stuck_out_tongue:

20

Yeah, my little (half-) brother was born the month after I graduated college and is 20 years younger than me, plus he doesn’t discuss that stuff with anyone in the family that I’m aware of - so far he hasn’t admitted ever having a girlfriend, though we all have our suspicions. In fact, when my dad and stepmom first went to visit him at college, and saw a curling iron in his dorm room (needless to say, his hair isn’t long enough to be curled), the family was (somewhat jokingly) scandalized. I actually had the talk with my dad; “You know what? Someday your son is going to get laid. In fact, it may have already happened.”

I’d like to think I’d give my brother balanced advice, but I think I’d be so shocked that he even requested it that I have no idea how I’d react.