I honestly don’t remember a time when I didn’t know. My mother was always very straightforward with us about things like how babies are made, what sex was, etc. There were children’s books on our shelves that showed illustrated adult bodies and explained in drawings how babies were made, developed, and born. It was not a mystery how that stuff worked. She used the proper terms for anatomy–penis, vagina, vulva, clitoris–and even told us at a young age that “the clitoris feels good when you touch it.” They were just very scientific and matter-of-fact about it.
Yet, at the same time, our household was otherwise just as prudish as everyone else’s. We weren’t a “naked family” or anything like that.
When I was six, I walked up to my mother and asked, ‘‘Mom, is sex illegal?’’
I got what procreation was, in an abstract and technical way, and I also knew that couples did something behind closed doors that they didn’t like to talk about, and called it sex. I never made the connection, I just assumed that people were so secretive about it because it was against the law.
Between kindergarten and third grade, fitting together bits and pieces from rumors gave me a pretty good idea. It was explained in detail in 5th grade sex ed, and again in graphically explicit detail in 7th grade sex ed. 9th grade health class also covered it, but more clinically–the focus was largely on disease and contraception.
When I was four years old, I spent an afternoon playing in our sunroom which had wall to wall bookcases. Looking for picture books, I discovered a history book of erotic art. I flicked through it, fascinated, and felt unexplainably excited by the pictures. The Japanese section had the most incredible series of antique drawings depicting a penis on legs fighting a vulva on legs in a sumo ‘wrestling ring’. I was pretty much obsessed with sex from then on, but didn’t give a damn about babies or where they came from. I think I connected those dots a few years later.
a) Where Babies Come From, including fundamental plumbing (Tab A into Slot B) and that it’s not the stomach, some time before 5, with repetitions in response to perpetual child-questions.
b) That there is Lust Involved, and that adults actually do this freaky shit not just "when they love each other enough and want a baby badly enough to do such a totally weird thing, but actually do it for its own sake and babies are often unplanned side-effects: Umm, circa 4th grade, 10-11 years old, after being teased in summer camp & coming home with some Questions.
I went to a Catholic school, and in fourth grade, we had “sex ed”. They told us about the sperm and the egg…only they didn’t tell us how the sperm GOT there in the first place, so it sounded like it just magically transported there.
I asked my mom about it, and she rented this little educational cartoon, like a video version of this.
My reaction? I wasn’t grossed out by the concept of sex, only by the realization that my MOM and my DAD did THAT! shudder
(Did anyone else previously think that sex was just kissing while naked?)
I was seven, maybe eight. A friend said the F word, I asked her what it meant, and she told me. Unlike me she had the advantage of older brothers and sisters, as well as less uptight parents. I had the classic reaction of “eewww, my parents never did THAT”.
My father eventually took it upon himself to give me the talk when I was about 12. I was trying to spare him the embarrassment by telling him that there was no need, that we’d already learned all that in sex education at school, when the doorbell or phone rang, and that was the end of that.
I was 9 years old. I found the stack of old Playboy magazines that my Dad had stuck in the closet of the spare bedroom/sewing room upstairs.
In those days (1974), Playboy was pretty tame (plus these were probably older issues that he really DID buy for the articles).
I remember lots of whipped cream on the privates.
But, still, I just knew there was something good going on in those pages, it was buried in there somewhere. So I surreptitiously delved through them for a couple of days.
It didn’t take long until I got bored with porn-lite. So next I started to organize the magazines. In chronological order. That was a lot more interesting. Had them spread ALL over the floor one afternoon when my Mom finally got curious about what I’d been doing in that room & opened the door.
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: She freaked.
So it was time for the Official Birds & Bees talk, presented by both parents and sponsored by Nytol – the first thing my Dad did was launch into the etymology of the phrase “the Birds and the Bees”. By the time he was finished with THAT, I no longer cared about any of it.
Although I suddenly understood half the jokes on One Day at a Time.
Five years later I babysat for a couple who had The Joy of Sex on their living room bookshelf, which cleared up any lingering confusion over the mechanics of the act.
I knew how babies were born by age 4 or 5, since it’s hard not to know when you beef cattle.
The sperm and egg bits I grokked fairly early, too- definitely by age 6.
In second grade, I was bored at the craft fair thing on the rez, so I read all the pamphlets in the community center. One of them was about “your maturing body!” and I figured out the rest.
I didn’t actually get until fifth grade just how NAKED people usually are during sex (I saw the “teen couple forgets to turn off the web cam during sex” joke website), and it freaked me out. It still scares me, when I think about it- so much flesh. But that’s just me being neurotic.
This is probably the best thing I’ve read all week! Ha!
Anyway, I’ve known the basic facts of procreation as long as I can remember. My mom is ex-Catholic and didn’t want it to be a big mystery like it was when she was a kid. That’s not to say she told me much about sex - I learned about that through various porn stashes.
Don’t lie to us, Sampiro…you’re just trying to build that perfect pithy comeback in your basement, and you needed to run out and get some extra shellac.
I don’t recall either of my parents ever having any kind of ‘talk’ with me.
I am pretty sure I pieced things together mostly through reading, I was reading pretty advanced novels for my age.
And… I accidentally found a videotape my parents had made. I was looking for something in a drawer and discovered it, as I recall. VHS tapes weren’t really labeled well in my house. Oops.
I remember this one well actually- I was in the 3rd grade, and I was reading the book Cujo at the time. And there’s a scene in it, when the Husband is yelling over the phone at a Police officer who is describing the husband’s bedroom to him (since I believe the Husband was away at the time, and his wife was having an affair).
Anyways, there’s a point where the Husband just gets angrier and angrier until he yells over the phone (much to the horror of his friend just standing nearby) something to the effect of “Goddammit! How can you be so calm when telling me there’s another man’s CUM all over my bed!”
And I remember being confused as a child, because they misspelled come- I was thinking the the man arrived at the bed, and I was trying to figure out the context of why a man having an affair would come to the bed when the police was there.
Finally, the thought struck me to go check and encyclopedia, and I couldn’t find it. So I did the dictionary- and BOY did that open up my eyes to a whole bunch of other stuff to look up!
Interestingly enough, there was a sex scene earlier in the book, and it never phased me, because I understood the mechanics of Sex, but only in an “insert A into slot B” sort of way that you get from the Encyclopedia when looking up Fertilization. It never struck me that stuff came OUT of a guy when you were doing that stuff.
So yeah, Stephen King taught me more about Sex than my parents ever would.
I pieced things together from awkward conversations with my mother, embarrassing videos in sex ed, filthy jokes on the school bus, furtive research in our encyclopedia, and hidden romance novels. By the time I was 12/13 I had a decent handle on the mechanics and why the idea was appealing. (Then my mom got pregnant with my little brother and I realized ew! ew! ew! and desperately wanted some brain bleach.)
About the time I was 8, my mom took The Talk as her personal civic duty and decided to show a video on sex, puberty, and pregnancy to me and all my neighborhood girl friends.
