Many people tend to say “la la la” when this is brought up and turn the topic to more comfortable topics, like the weather.
I know I am not uncomfortable, but then my parents never had sex and I was brought by a stork.
I’ve never been uncomfortable with it.
No idea why some (most?) people are.
Off the top of my head, thinking of your parents in sexual situations triggers the unconscious incest taboo. It just “feels squicky” to contemplate it.
Plus, of course, your parents are “old” and old people don’t have sex ever.
And it’s not like they’re real people–they’re parents, for cryin’ out loud! 
Seriously, though, it never bothered me. I never understood why it upset kids for their moms to be having a baby, either. I wasn’t embarrassed when my mom got pregnant when I was 14–I was happy and excited about a new sibling.
I remember having read an article by Rajneesh ( his discourses complied into a book), the self styled Indian guru , on the same subject. If I remember correctly, he ridicules the eastern sensitivity abour sex in that discourse.
I agree that the utter revulsion people have about parents having sex is strange. It’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t be here, ya know?
I understand it a bit more about younger siblings. I’m an only child, but the thought of people who I still sort of conceive of as little kids now being older and sexual beings is very difficult and I can only imagine is more so for the siblings themselves (especially with a quite large age difference).
I think it’s mostly a thing about old(er) people having sex, since they are almost never presented in the popular media as sexual creatures. Try this:
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Imagine your parents having sex.
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Now think of a friend’s parents, those parents being about the same age as your parents. Imagine them having sex.
Is the latter less unsettling than the former, or about the same?
I agree that the utter revulsion people have about parents having sex is strange. It’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t be here, ya know?
I understand it a bit more about younger siblings. I’m an only child, but the thought of people who I still sort of conceive of as little kids now being older and sexual beings is very difficult and I can only imagine is more so for the siblings themselves (especially with a quite large age difference).
Sorry for the double post!
That’s got nothing to do with “the media,” hangups about sexual intercourse gave us the dogmatic formulation that Mary was a virgin “before, during and after Our Lord’s Birth” and that’s not exactly from last year.
I hope there’s an afterlife just so I can sit down with the dude who formulated that and get him to explain it sloooooowly.
I reckon those hangups go to the same bin as not wanting to talk about death (are people afraid they’ll suddenly be adresses by someone who TALKS LIKE THIS?) or bodily functions. There is a difference between “don’t talk about your bowel movements at the table” and pretending that people of the fairer sex don’t fart. It’s all about fear of mortality and of the lack of control that comes with having a physical body which does a lot of things on its own.
I have a close friend who expressed this idea to me several years ago. It makes sense. If it doesn’t bother you to think about your parents having sex (the generic ‘you’, not anyone here in particular), then it doesn’t bother you to think of your parents as sexual creatures. Combine this with the idea that you were probably “in love” with your parent of the opposite gender when you were two, and yeah, it could lead down some uncomfortable roads. And then, yeah, there’s the "but those people are old stigma attached, too. I for one know that I was shocked as hell when my hubby and I dropped by his parent’s house unannounced; his parents were in their late 70’s at that point. We had to knock for several minutes in order for the door to be answered (it was locked; we weren’t surprised at having to knock so long, his father is hard of hearing), and when his father finally did answer the door, in nothing but his boxer shorts, he made it pretty clear we were interrupting a “moment”, well, I was glad they were still “doing the nasty” at that age and at that point in their relationship, but I certainly didn’t want to think about it! 
Funny, somewhat related story: My middle daughter is 18 now, but when she was a kid, she was a natural-born prude. It’s nothing her father or I did, just how she was. When she was 8, I was pregnant with her baby sister. She came to me one day and here’s how the conversation went:
Her: “Mommy, I know what you have to do to get a baby, right?”
Me: “Yeah. . .”
Her: “But you keep saying this is your last baby, right?”
Me: “Yeah” (I was going on 38, I sure wasn’t gonna have another one!)
Her: “Thank goodness! You and Dad won’t have to do that anymore!” (she sounded sincerely relieved on my behalf!)
Me: “Well, sweetheart, believe it or not, when you’re grown up and you love someone very much, sometimes you do that just because you want to”.
Her: “Well, I’m not going to!”
Being 18, her views have changed somewhat. But OMG, she used to make me laugh when she was little! (She’s still got a streak of prude in her; she doesn’t like anyone else using the bathroom if she’s in the shower, won’t come out of her room unless she’s completely covered, etc.) She will talk to me about sex, but not face-to-face, literally. She’ll have the convo over the phone, or, if we’re in the same room, I have to face away from her when she gets to the intimate parts. I’m still kinda amused by it.
Maybe 'cause sex isn’t always the cuddly-giggly kind of intimacy that we understand as kids.
I have said this before, but I wish I had the luxury of being uncomfortable about my parents having sex. They always, always, always slept with their door open, as far back as I can remember. And I was adopted, so while I’m sure they did, there’s no guarantee they ever did have sex.
Back when I was in high school I was at my girlfriend’s house one afternoon. She and her brother were folding clothes when her 16yo brother holds up a holed, ratty towel and says he’s just going to throw it away.
I respond with something like Don’t do that, it’s your mom’s favorite after sex towel!
The look on his face was priceless.
I was never bothered by the idea until I accidentally witnessed it in high school.
My WAG is that it has to do with your childhood ending.
See, when you’re a little kid, your parents aren’t two human shlubs who happened to have a baby. They’re superhuman, center-of-the-universe, Powers That Be. They’re also full-time mommies and daddies- they don’t have lives of their own, silly, they’re parents. They parent. It’s what they are and what they do.
Also, at that age, sex is icky. He puts his what in her what? Ewww, cooties!
About the time you start realizing that your parents are just people, you also undergo your sexual awakening (for most people, anyway). “Mom and Dad aren’t the almighty beings that make the world go round, and they have a life outside of the home” coincides with “Sex doesn’t seem so icky anymore”.
The concept of sex and the concept of my-parents-aren’t-Superman become linked together, so that “My parents have a sex life” reminds you of “My parents’ life doesn’t revolve around me anymore, because I’m not a little kid anymore”.
That’s my $0.02, anyway. I realize what I wrote sounds kinda Freudian, and like much of what Freud said, it could be total BS.
I’m kind of digging this theory.
Also, even if you aren’t attracted to the people having sex, just hearing or knowing about people doing it is enough to turn a lot of people on, if only because it leads them to think about other, more attractive people having sex. Thinking of your parents having sex one second could very well lead to you daydreaming about doing your favorite celeb the next. Not a connection some people want to make.
I’m not uncomfortable with taking a dump. Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it either.
Seriously, I could go my whole life with out knowing if my Mom is a three input woman or not.
I’m not particularly uncomfortable with the idea of anyone I know having sex. I mean, most of them are in relationships or actively dating, so it’s pretty much a given that they’re having sex (probably quite regularly and enthusiastically, and some of them in very kinky and unusual ways).
That said, I don’t need to know the details. Not from my friends, not from my sister, and certainly not from my parents. It’s just not something I want to discuss.
Plus, when it comes to my parents, there’s an extra layer of discomfort that comes from my mom bringing up my dad’s lack of sexual prowess into unrelated conversations. Apparently, she thinks I’m old enough to deal with the knowledge that my dad was lousy in the sack, and it invariably comes up whenever he’s even tangentially related to the discussion (it goes without saying that they’re divorced, and it wasn’t amicable). Not something I particularly like anyone throwing into a random conversation, ya know?
When I was young my parents were awesome! They took me to the park and let me help make the pizza for dinner on Friday nights and sat and watched Muppet movies with me. They were, without question, the epicenter of my world. Then as I got older I understood them to be human with flaws and that kind of dampened the awesome. Yeah, my dad still walked me to the end of the street so I could get a snow cone in the summer but he also went hunting and killed innocent deer for sport. My mom still let me help her make pizza on Friday night but she also didn’t like my best friend because she was black. The things that made them human stopped them from being perfect to me and sex was one of those things that, while it wasn’t a bad thing, it wasn’t what you expect someone perfect to do either. (Seriously, take a moment and imagine Jesus or Allah or some other deity masturbating to a copy of Penthouse and see if it doesn’t fuck up your brain for the rest of the day.) I hope for my parent’s sake that they have crazy, wild, neighbors-calling-in-noise-complaints kinds of sex but I don’t want to think about it. I want to keep some part of them in my mind as Mommy and Daddy.