The Birds and the Bees
Written By Catherine Newman
print
single page
comments
As it happens, I can gab the day
away about making babies --
but sex for pleasure?
This conversation
is as natural as sawing off my
own foot. "That thing grown-ups do
to make a baby?" I said in my Talking
to Children About Sex voice, which is
as paranormally loud, calm, and clear
as my Talking to Foreign Tourists voice.
"It actually feels good to them, so
sometimes they do it anyway." I wish
I'd gotten a shot of Ben's grimace,
just to make his future wife laugh.
Luckily, reading Amazing You! now, I stop to think before responding to Ben about "that other part" -- the one he's "most interested in." I recall the advice of psychologist Lawrence J. Cohen, author of Playful Parenting: "Don't assume that you understand what your children are asking." Which reminds me about that old joke where the kid asks, "Where did I come from?" and after the parents finish their big, long story about ovulation and ejaculation, the kid says, "No, I mean was it Cleveland or St. Louis?"
And so I ask Ben, "What other part, honey?" And he answers, laughing, "The booty!" Then I say, "Um, honey? Tell me what part you think your bottom plays in making babies." And Ben laughs again, and says, "Oh right! The booty is more like bathroom talk."
If grown-ups confuse sex and love, maybe kids confuse sex and pooping. In a Venn diagram, my children's understanding of reproduction would overlap mysteriously with fart jokes, even though it's more a vague blur than any precise kind of misunderstanding. "Oh, they think everything's butt," Saltz says when I tell her this story. "They think babies come out of butts, everything comes out of butts. It's important to clarify."
Ben is happy to clarify. "Now this is a great book," he says about the 1973 classic Where Did I Come From? He points to his favorite picture: someone's bare bottom reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror. But he barely notices that the book has an actual reference to orgasm: "All the rubbing up and down that's been going on ends in a tremendous big lovely shiver for both of them."
Ah, the '70s! So awash am I in sex-ed nostalgia that I write a fan letter to illustrator Arthur Robins, who sends back a delightful e-mail. "It was a very long time ago and I haven't drawn a bum since," he writes when I convey Ben's enthusiasm. "I don't know what became of Peter Mayle," he jokes about the book's author, who went on to write the best-selling A Year in Provence. "I think he wrote a book about France, but it didn't have any illustrations, so I doubt if he will have much success with it."
Maybe it's that sense of fun
I'm missing from today's conversations
about sex.
When I
speak with Saltz, she cautions, "Avoiding
talking about it makes it more
sexually charged, ironically." And this
makes perfect sense to me, as does
her point that it's important to name
all the parts -- especially with little
girls, for whom vulva, vagina, labia,
and clitoris can cut through the fog of
shame and confusion about what goes on "down there." Absolutely. And
yes, whether I like it or not, children
do need to be told about good
touches and bad touches. Of course.
But I agree with Robie Harris, author of It's Not the Stork! and It's So Amazing!, who says, "Adults make jokes, teenagers make jokes. Probably cave people made jokes about sex. And kids pick up on this." Indeed they do. I confess to Harris that my kids cracked up when the kids in her book look at their butts in the mirror. "It's really important for them to have information that's accurate and accessible," she says. "But the flip side is that it all sounds completely absurd." It does. It is. That's what I'm starting to grasp: As parents, our job is to offer the facts of life as clearly as possible.
And then, well, maybe we've
got to let the mystery be.
Part of
what makes sexuality special is the
unspeakableness of it -- of longing,
pleasure, the way bodies intertwine
with love. And part of what makes
it special is its absurdity: not just the
erections springing up all across your
eighth-grade math class, but the way
it's amazing and hilarious and weird.
Like now. The kids are drawing from an Ed Emberley book called Make a World. "Ed Emberley should do a Make a Penis book," Ben chuckles. "I mean, that's pretty much what kids want to know how to draw, all the holes and cracks and stuff." "Make a penis!" Birdy echoes, adding the predictable "Make a booty!" and hee-hawing until she wheezes. The kids are dying laughing ("Make a penis! Make a booty!"), these kids, who started life as desire, friction, cells dividing, a flutter of movement. Whom we love more than life itself.
