Inspired by Osiris’ Childhood Spoilers thread, in which she queries about when people first learned about things like Santa and the Easter Rabbit, I thought I’d start a tangential thread.
When and how did you first learn about the “birds and the bees”? And when did it first occur to you that your parents must also have done the deed?
I was raised in a typical sexually repressed Catholic family, and I don’t recall that my parents ever really brought it up. I got my first idea that there was something fun to be done with our equipment from a little girl who live next door to us in Seattle, when I was about 6 years old. But it was quite some time after that before I put two and two together about where babies came from, probably age 11 or 12, and a bit further on down the road before I realised my parents also had sex. I still don’t believe that they actually enjoy sex.
My mother was raised in a typical sexually repressed Catholic family, so she made up her mind to be completely straightforward with us. The cute thing is that she had absolutely no idea how to go about doing this.
When I was in the first grade, a boy at school got in trouble for saying the F word on the school bus. I came from school and asked Mom what the F word meant. She took this as a cue to explain all the mechanics of human reproduction, when in fact what I was really after was something along the lines of “it’s a cuss word.”
For years after, I was completely confused when I heard the F word in movies. If the bad guy said “F - you” to the good guy, I sat there and wondered why the bad guy would want to make babies with the good guy.
How my otherwise very educated mother mixed up the sex ed lecture with the polite/not polite words lecture, I will never understand.
I don’t remember ever not knowing about sex. MY parents never gave me the “birds and the bees” lecture. Instead, my dad left his Playboy magazines in the bathroom and neither of them provided any supervision on my television and movie watching habits whatsoever. Plus, there was the time I found my dad’s extensive collection of underground comics from the '60s, including the complete run of R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural. I was about eight at the time, I think. This was about the same time I saw Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and was shortly there after busted by my second grade teacher for singing “Every Sperm is Sacred” during recess. So my guess is that I figured it out around eight or nine, with plenty of help from my surrogate parent, Pop Culture.
I pretty much figured it all out on my own, thanks to a long time without web restrictions and cable television.
I was a smart kid anyway, so putting 2 and 2 together wasn’t difficult for me.
My mom sort of half assed-explained birth control to me, but she figured that I’d learned it in school, (god damn school abstinence curriculum policy…) but of course I didn’t until my freshman year, but again, I pretty much knew it anyway.
Sorry for quoting the whole thing, but this could almost be a description of my upbringing. For me it was my grandpa’s Playboy magazines every summer and winter during my childhood…then I found my dad’s Penthouse magazines after I moved in with him. When I still lived with my mom, our bathroom reading materials included Everything you always wants to know about sex…* and back issues of “National Lampoon,” when they still included pictures of naked women. My mom made it clear as a given that if we had any questions we should just ask her, which led to my 9-year-old self piping up in the middle of brunch at Denny’s, “Mama…what’s a menage a’ trois?” I recall several senior citizens starting somewhat, and my mom said, “Well honey, when three people care about each other very much…” She didn’t go into grubby details, but she gave me a bit of an idea.
I don’t remember not understanding at least a little bit about sexuality. I was the kid my friends came to with questions like, “Why do girls like to give head?” (from a female friend.) Or, “What does ‘voyeruism’ mean?” I was the only person they knew who knew the answers who a) wasn’t an adult AND b) wouldn’t laugh.
(I’m not tooting my own horn here, I swear…I’m not Dr. Ruth or anything, I just had more knowledge than my peers. Less PRACTICAL knowledge, of course…grrrr…but more intellectual knowledge.)
My mother was an Obstetrics nurse so she was very straightforward. I don’t remember not knowing where babies came from. I have heard that, for a while there, I thought the baby came out of the belly button. Well… What else would it be for?
My mother was an Obstetrics nurse so she was very straightforward. I don’t remember not knowing where babies came from. I have heard that, for a while there, I thought the babies came out of the belly button. Well… What else would it be for?
