The Intercourse Is For Fun, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Readers keep the thread going:

The problem I have as a parent of three (two boys, one girl) in telling them the truth – that intercourse is fun – is that I’m not sure how to balance that with the message that they’re better off waiting. “It’s one of the most enjoyable things a person can do! But don’t do it until you’re older!” And we say “because”: because you can get pregnant or get someone pregnant, because it can be emotionally complex, etc. But not getting too deep into this rabbit hole is the same reason I don’t tell my kids that I smoked pot and really enjoyed it – because smoking pot, too, is fun. That’s why people do it in the first place.

I do think you need to tell kids the truth. But, knowing kids, I worry that they’ll blow right past that “because” and focus on the fun. If it’s so fun – why wait?

But another looks to reverse psychology:

I can’t think of a better way to get kids to abstain from sex for longer: Let them know the details, and that mom and dad think it’s fun and cool. Kids never want to like what their parents like.

Another reader:

The latest series on sex being fun and yet inexplicable to children reminded me of when we told our kids “the facts.”

My wife worked from home as a lawyer for families seeking a surrogate.  Sometimes the family needed eggs, sometimes sperm, and often a uterus.  She concluded that she could not keep telling stork stories to the kids while working in the kitchen and talking on the phone with clients about sperm count, viability and the other issues that naturally needed to be addressed.

So when my two girls were 9 and 11 my wife decided it was time to have the talk.  At that time we still had our Sunday dinners as a family, so my wife picked a Sunday and just started talking.  My wife thought it was important that we provide more than the usual detail.  She remembered when her mother, in the early 70s, explained the matter to her and left out the erection bit, and that her reaction had been, “That can’t work.  I’m a babysitter and I’ve seen those floppy things.  That can’t go inside me.”

So the kids got the whole shebang.  Even the warning that “boys like it a lot and will try to talk you into it.” My oldest, always more analytic and scientific, simply nodded and took in the info.  The youngest was horrified.  “Does Joel know about this?” is what she wanted to know, Joel being a close family friend who my daughter obviously respected more than us after telling her the weird things we do.  “Joel has three kids of his own,” was an explanation that did not quite solve the question, but time has passed.

Another story about talking to kids honestly about sex:

When I was in middle school in Marin County in 1977, two of our teachers gathered the sixth-through-eighth graders together for “Sexuality Day.” They told us we were free to write down any questions we might have. “Anonymity promotes honesty,” they said, so innocent to the fact that they were sitting in front of a room of leering preteens. So we wrote down questions and the first one pulled from the hat by a stern Mrs. Meyers was “Can you get pregnant by butt fucking?” Her answer: “I prefer the term anal intercourse. And the answer is no.” The next question was “Do you fuck? Do you like to fuck?” The matronly Mrs. Floyd took this one and answered honestly, bless her heart. “I also prefer the term ‘intercourse.’ And many of you know my daughter Kristen so I guess the answer is obvious. And yes, I’m not ashamed to say I enjoy relations with Mr. Floyd!”

Hats off to these brave teachers of yore. You probably couldn’t get away with that kind of nerdy honesty today.

Update from a reader:

One of your readers mentioned Our Whole Lives (OWL), the progressive sexuality education program created by the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. Both our daughters went through the middle school OWL program – and then they volunteered to take the more involved high school OWL program as well.

OWL works by answering every question, and providing more information than you could ever want. As some of your readers suggested, knowing all the facts is generally the opposite of an aphrodisiac. My daughters have been part of informative discussions about pleasure and abortion and LGBTQ issues and masturbation and date rape. They’ve been shown illustrations that include different positions and even disabled people having sex. One of them even won a classroom race to get the condom on the banana first.

The result is that while they have a positive attitude toward sex and toward their bodies, their eyes are open. They’ve made it clear that, at ages 18 and 15, they’re in absolutely no rush to go all the way. Meanwhile, adults in our congregation are wondering when they can sign up to take the OWL classes for people over 35 (there are curricula for six different age levels in all), so that they can explore issues such as, say, how to enjoy sex after a mastectomy.

In fact OWL’s success is so strong that one can’t help but wonder if part of the popularity of abstinence-only programs is an unspoken knowledge that they keep kids ignorant and therefore more sexually malleable – that they keep young women more likely to end up barefoot and pregnant per a certain 1950s ideal.