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Talking Dirty
My two oldest boys have just completed their freshman year in college. About 12 years ago, when they were 7 and 8 respectively I walked in on them while they were browsing the web. They fell all over themselves trying to be the first one to turn off the monitor and I knew they were into something they shouldn’t have been.
“What’s going on, boys?”
“Nothin’…”
“Yeah? Let’s see.”
As I turned the monitor back on they scrambled out of the room. I was left looking at an attractive, naked blonde conducting a “Full Lewinski” on a well endowed (and faceless) man.
That prompted “The Talk,” the one that starts with the idea that pornography is not representative of real sex inside a committed relationship, veers over to respecting women as human beings and ends with the promise of complete castration if I ever caught them doing it again. (“Remember, men, I know where you sleep. You’ll never know what hit you!”)
Not too long after that incident my wife discovered that she was pregnant with Xerox and that became the ultimate teaching tool. We watched PBS specials on the miracle of life. I became brutally honest in answering questions and answered a lot of questions that, much to their chagrin, hadn’t even been asked. After that, a year of baby poop and middle of the night screaming sessions taught both the boys and their older sister that sex has consequences. And some of them are loud, some of them are smelly, and usually it’s both at the same time.
Last fall, as they entered college, we had a sequel — “The Talk II.” But that was all about sexual politics on today’s campuses, all about avoiding feminists and accepting the fact that every teacher, every resident hall assistant and every female student was one unfounded accusation of ending every dream they ever had for themselves. (Marine was spared a lot of it as his NCOs in the Corps have their own versions of “The Talk” and the DOD spends quite a bit of time harassing the troops about sex.)
In the next six weeks, Xerox will be turning 12. Puberty has come to call and left his card. Consequently, we’ve been dancing around “The Talk” for some time now. This time things are decidedly different and not just because the wife and I won’t be producing a little miracle of life as a teaching aid. (That, as the environmentalists say, is an unsustainable model.) Even sex itself has changed.
And I’m not the only one to notice. Rebecca Reid is a freelance journalist who writes about sex for The Telegraph. She is not, by any stretch of the imagination, politically conservative. Yet in her column published this morning she laments that “normal sex” has all but disappeared.
She writes:
It seems lazy to blame porn for this shift, but I can’t help thinking it has to shoulder a whole lot of responsibility. Films that feature slower, more intimate sex between a couple are almost exclusively marketed as ‘female interest’. Somehow, vanilla sex — the type that would once have been considered ‘normal’ — has become a fetish or niche interest within its own right.
And because it’s targeted solely at women, young men aren’t growing up with exposure to it. Instead they’re seeing (violent and fetish sex) presented as a sexual fait accompli.*
Like most women whose politics are defined by sex, she takes no responsibility for what feminists and their “progressive” views have done to society.
What makes me pause is that there is a young man on Xerox’s Little League team whose last name is “Gray” and I caught his teammates calling him “50 Shades” the other day. What I don’t know is how much they know or whether they just picked that up through the culture.
This certainly doesn’t make me want to see my son exposed to “traditional” porn, but it does makes me wonder how fundamentally different the talk on the playground has become, not just from when I was young, but just since my older sons were his age.
In any event I’m afraid “The Talk” is going to be a lot more complicated and I’m not looking forward to it. But the part where I threaten to castrate him, that stays in.
*It amazes me that mainstream media has become so blasé about sex that they regularly use terms that even Hugh Hefner wouldn’t have used a decade ago and are not conducive to our Code of Conduct.
Published in General
I applaud you for your forthright and manly education of your sons. I was the one who gave my sons the pornography talk, and maybe coming from a woman they were even more mortified at being caught, but for whatever reason I never thought that they hadn’t taken my talk to heart.
I’m also appalled at how depraved our culture has gotten about sex. It started with Democrats, the Juanita Hill hearings on TV “Mom, did he say “sex with animals?” and went on through the Clinton years with unbelievable things being said during prime time.
Way too late to put the genie back in the bottle, but I would like to see at least an attempt by a large portion of society to shame those who brazenly flaunt decency. But all you hear is crickets.
Such is life.
The RIGHTeous are often shy and noncombative and would rather watch the world burn than hurt the next guy’s feelings.
Well, the Dad (I presume it was Dad) jumping out and yelling at her scared the hell out of me.
I’ll stop meeting strangers in parks immediately.
Glad my kids are grown and gone.
Worried for #2 son going to a large public university this fall (after 8 years in the Army he’s had weapons grade anti-harassment training though, so there is that).
Liz: This guy ran a “social experiment” to prove to clueless parents just what kind of dangers are lurking on social media.
Did you hear the girl? When she started crying she said “I was just lonely.” Now 12 year old girls have feelings of loneliness, no surprise there. But there are so many points of entry into the problem. First, that she considered meeting someone in person when her Dad wasn’t at home. Second, her response to loneliness was mediated through social media. Intense emotions deserve a real conversation with a real person, but that is a distinction teenagers don’t make. Third, she didn’t make this response to loneliness up on her own…this response (reaching out to boy on social media) was learned somewhere, and she may have done it before. But safe to say, her friends are doing it or envying girls who are.
I am firmly convinced that I could find all kinds of childhood reasons, or relational issues with her family to tie into the vulnerability, but the fact is, if it’s accepted among her peer group, then it is likely she is or is going to participate in it.
I feel really old and cynical right now.
The internet is certainly a big game changer. Boys have always gotten access to their Dad’s Playboys etc. But with the internet, anybody can access unlimited full video of the worst perversions imaginable for free. (I have no idea how pornography stays in business given how much free pornography is available.)
While everybody worries about this leading to too much sex, I think the bigger worry is that ultimately this leads to too few people having sex. The consumption of pornography in Japan is higher than in the US, but the fraction of virgins in their 30’s is vastly higher. Self-sexual satisfaction has become so common that there is no motivation to go out and seek relationships (even one-night stands).
The old saw, “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?” has to changed to “Who cares about chasing down real cows when there is an unlimited supply of digital milk for free on the internet?”
EJ in addition to the various suggestions I would like add my two cents. I have come to understand the importance of stressing ones’s self value & importance of establishing boundaries with women. So much focus is on chivalrous behavior without teaching that women aren’t perfect creatures. Where men discount their manhood & masculinity to keep the peace or get some action. Just as women should assert their self worth to avoid negative relationships. So should men be taught their inherent value to avoid not only the crazy predatory women but also to have healthy boundaries.
It has long been an irritant to me that makers of children’s films feel the need to add adult humor to the films to keep the interest of the parents. It wasn’t necessary in Sleeping Beauty or Pinnochio, or Bambi or any of the other great Disney classics that I grew up with in the 1950s. If parents can’t sit through a movie with their children that is purely for their children they don’t deserve to be parents.
Be thankful that you did not have to have a talk during the Clinton-Monica era. I had kids who were about 14, 12, and 10 at the time. It was not pleasant.
That’s when they were born. Strangely, I didn’t fear for their future the way I do now. I thought Bill Clinton was a reckless idiot. Now it’s deliberate destruction.
That was a plot point in Rabbit, Run as well. Harry pressures his mistress into performing an act that she considers humiliating and degrading. I found this quite surprising when I read it since when I was a teen our President argued that this same act didn’t even count as having sex.
He’s so adept at photoshop that it’s easy to overlook his equal agility with words.
Of the handful of women near my own age who I’ve discussed such things with, none agreed that anything qualifies as sex except the procreative act. Other stimulations are not considered casual, but are not reserved for marriage either.
And it is common now for young people to think getting to know each other and testing compatibility includes experiments in sexual harmony.
I remember having the talk with my father when I was 8. It was odd. It was a conversation in a car – my father is an enormous personality with a surprisingly quixotic sense of shame and I am quite sure he could not have made eye contact.
He explained about seed and the egg, and I asked how they got introduced. He said “naturally.” I queried this. He assured me that there was nothing interesting about it. I knew I was not getting any more information. Then I discovered Dr. Ruth on the radio, and it all became much more clear.
With my own kids? I still remember my oldest boy, who might have been 6 at the time, asking where babies came from. I explained they came from Mommy’s tummy. He looked at me like I was the world’s most pathetic standup comic, and proclaimed, NAAOOOO!!
My boys are attracted to highly intelligent elegant young women who dress modestly. I don’t claim the credit, but I am relieved. You can tell a lot about a man by the kind of woman he is interested in.
This is why euphemisms like “intimacy” are actually really helpful. The fact is that one can be intimate with another person while fully clothed and without touching tells us that we are more than just physical beings.
I think the significance of those conversations is that any sexual act not open to the possibility of new life is withholding something. Only loveful face-to-face sex with a willful commitment of life together is complete abandonment to each other. Sex might begin by a selfish impulse, but love is ultimately self-giving and sex is fulfilled by love.
RAH, EJ! Kudos on all of this!