People are funny about stuff like that. I had someone chastise me recently for talking about something sexual (nothing graphic) in front of my almost 15 year old son, as though it would shock him. I reminded her that 15 year old boys are lucky if they have any skin left on their hands...
Atta boy, Dan.
My husband and I met in a bar, dated frequently in that bar, I went there to see music when I was pregnant, and he proposed to me there. In that order. We've never "hid" that info from the kids.
And hell, yes, teens know what oral sex is. My 15yo is a huge fan of yours. I didn't "lead" him here, he found it on his own.
"And being eaten by people with pretty mouths is definitely one of the ways in which it gets better." OH yeah, there is truth.
Ya know, mebbe if ppl stopped acting like their precious teen children's ears shouldn't be sullied with discussion about sex, oral sex, etc, there wouldn't be about 8 million new cases of STD's/STI's between young folks aged 15-24. About half of all new HIV infections are teenagers.
There's a high squick factor in knowing your parents Do It, Did It, etc, & the Talk is never fun. But we definitely need to stop acting like our teenage kids don't already know what's going on out there. Since the 'net they can see way nuttier things than I, for one, can imagine.
People are funny about kids. A large number of people want their kids to never hear about drugs or sex or alcohol....despite having smoked pot, lost their virginity as a teen and started drinking at 17. Somehow the adult convinces his or herself that their children will be irreparably scarred by things they themselves as well as every other functional adult they know went through at exactly the same age.
It's the sheltered kids, who never heard of the things that go on in the real world, who go absolutely bonkers, and melt down when they finally are exposed to real life. They just don't know how to handle it.
This kind of stuff always reminds me of this: my mother got pregnant with my little sister when I was 5. I asked my dad, "Where do babies come from?" He said, "When mommies and daddies love each other very much, they have a baby!" I spent the next 5 years (until sex ed class) PETRIFIED that every time I "fell in love with a boy" (had a crush), I'd get pregnant. Everything would've been a lot better if he'd just given me the talk right then, at 5. What was I gonna do--go out and do it?
I'm one of those who believes that if you take all the mystery out of this stuff, it makes it a lot less likely that kiddos will try to figure it out on their own when their hormones start talking to them. Also, I'm apparently the only person on earth who thinks it's cute that my parents do it. I mean, I know my life is better when I do it, so why wouldn't I celebrate the fact that they have fun, too?
One day, when she stops trying to put the dog in her mouth and can, you know, talk, I will tell my daughter that her father and I met when I told him that for my last year in grad school, I was planning to skip a lot of class and develop a drinking problem, and did he want to help? He did.
If you had told my sad-sack 14-year-old self that she would one day have the confidence to say that to someone, and immediately follow it with "and you have to give me some warning so that I can polish my leather pants", it would have given me a LOT of hope that it would get better.
And lets see by the time I was 14 I knew what felching was. You see as a KID I used this thing called the INTERNET that can be found at LIBRARIES. We would look up gross stuff to tease each other with, the more obscure the better!
I can't have been the only one who actively tried to get my parents to do it by buying them things like expensive dinner GCs or hotel nights somewhere else for their anniversary (in order to get the house to myself for a night). I think I started this when I was like 11 or 12. I didn't need to know the details, but I figured they needed nights to be romantic without me, and I needed nights to grow without them.
Also, only the most conservative, closeted, protected kids haven't watched television with sex in it by then. They haven't seen movies with sex in it. Why keep the sham. I remember watching Pulp Fiction when I was 13 with my parents in the theater, and my parents throwing a pitch fit about the foot massage conversation. I found them adorable for being so protective.
There is plenty of sexual innuendo of TV shows and movies, even family-friendly crap like that Charlie Sheen show. Dan's right, kids are not idiots. I think this woman's homophobia was showing. It bothered her because it was a gay couple.
Uh, how are people supposed to meet the future mothers/fathers of their children? Being completely socializing- and sex-hostile means no one gets to meet and mate. This is hardly pro-family. There are a LOT of lonely people out there.
@9 Cute!! As your daughter gets older, you'll discover that letting her know that you and your husband still have sex is one of the best tortures you can inflict on your child.
My parents, either through misjudgement or simplicity, seemed to think they could hide the world from me. That I would forget physical and emotional abuse. That anything I felt or wanted was easily dismissed. Children are young people. They aren't some kind of unripe melon.
Thanks Dan. I always felt a little ashamed that my fiancee and I had our first outing at a bar and our first inning a few hours later. . .I never really knew why but now I do. Because people still think that you are only supposed to have sex in a loving, committed relationship and that one night stands are wrong. Well here is to the one night stands gone terribly right! Live in shame no more!
I remember asking my mom how she and my dad met when I was about 12 or 13. I think I caught her a little off guard but she told me they met at a strip club. (No my mother was not a dancer lol). They were there for a Jack and Jill and hit it off after a few drinks and good laughs.
This has never hurt me growing up, in fact the openness made it easier to talk to my mom about other "adult" aspects of life. Like why my parents didn't get married until after I was born. Parents need to relax a little their precious little snow flakes can handle a few details about sex and sexuality.
For some reason this reminds me of a friend I used to have who was extremely opposed to the consumption of alcohol in any form. He wasn't just a teetotaler himself--he sneered at anyone who drank any alcohol. As he got older his behavior got even weirder. He didn't like people discussing drinking. He didn't like the show Cheers because it was set in a bar. He didn't want to go down the beer aisle in a grocery story, and he didn't like anyone who was with him to go down it either, even to fetch something non-alcoholic (like potato chips).
One day he sent me an e-mail and told me he was planning a trip to England. Since I'd been he wanted my recommendations of things to do. I rattled off some touristy things, but then added that he should go to a pub or two. I said, "Order a Coke, and just talk to some of the people you meet there. You'll meet some really nice, really interesting people."
I never heard from him again. I heard not too long ago that he's married and has a daughter, and I worry about what kind of parent he is.
My parents were sex-positive and supportive. In kindergarten, when the boys were doing the "girls have cooties/girls are gross" game, I yelled at them "When you grow up - you're going to have sex - AND YOU'RE GONNA LIKE IT!"
I caught hell from my teacher, but my parents thought it was hilarious!
"I reminded her that 15 year old boys are lucky if they have any skin left on their hands..." - Canuck
Hah! Okay, that almost cost me a keyboard, which I spent the last 5 minutes cleaning up.
My nephews first learned about their 2 uncles when they were about, oh, 6-9 years old. Not in any graphic detail, of course. But they know nearly as much about me and my partner as they do about their own parents. They seem to have survived the experience without any noticeable trauma.
There was a moment last night, when she was sandwiched between the two Finnish dwarves and the Maori tribesmen, where I thought, "Wow, I could really spend the rest of my life with this woman!"
Not so long ago in our history, it was common to be married and spitting out kids by the age of 14 or 15. Can we please stop acting like teens don't know anything about sex or have sexual desires?
oh my goodness. My parents met in a bar. And my mom was still married to her first husband at the time. But some how my petite pollack father wooed my mexi mother away from her hustler husband from the neighborhood, knocked her up, and married her in the Sears Tower.
Even if they met at a orphanage building fundraiser for music prodigy holocaust surrvivors I'd still be embarassed and disturbed that they ever locked eyes and decided to wreck their lives so they could do the horizontal twist.
It's icky realizing your parents are sexual beings. A kind of icky that is not increased if they are gay or decreased if they were wed in front of a ceramic statue of buddy jesus by a pedophile.
Good for Christians for thinking they invented being disgusted by your parents.
I met my now-husband in a bar. He was the bartender. I loved to see him bend over to pour a drink - and all these years later, he still has the great ass.
My brother is trying to tell his kids that pot is BAD and will ruin your life, which is only making my nephew more determined to be a stoner, because he can recognize the hypocrisy. If his folks just told him the truth, that the worst problems are the legal repercussions of getting caught and doing dumb shit, then he would probably quit.
Jeez, I first learned about blowjobs in the third grade. Maybe in the first, actually, when my twin brother was sharing a bed and fooling around with his girlfriend.
People meet people in all sorts of places. My Mom met her second (and still current) husband by answering his ad in the newspaper. That was 25 years ago and they've been married for the last 19. For months, she lied to me and said he flirted with her at the DMV. Two friends of mine met by having an anonymous fuck in a bathhouse. Guess it was good, because they decided the exchange numbers -- and names -- afterwards. That wass 17 years ago. If they happened to have children (they don't, but many of our friends do), would they tell the kid? Probably eventually, maybe by mid-teens. I'm guess that when he's younger, they'd probably lie and say they met in a bar.
My great grandparents used to own a bar. I don't think any kids, outside of maybe abstemious Mormom families, would find that in any way weird.
I have always frustrated my now ex-husband by being way too honest about everything with my children. They know that I met their father when he was stood up by another girl. They know the first day we 'talked' that I had a hickey on my neck the size of a silver dollar. They know I was 14 when I got pregnant and that it was my first time having sex. They know they can ask me anything and I'll give the most honest answer that I can. And if I don't know what the answer is, I'll admit it and try to find one for them. My oldest is 27 and my baby is 15. I want them to know sex is a natural part of life, not something dirty and shameful. And we have told them since they were little that our love was unconditional.
@12- let me see if I have this right. The guns, the oceans of profanity, the graphic shooting of at least ten people, the needle through Uma Thurman's sternum, the Gimp, all these things didn't make your parents take you out of there? But the foot massage conversation was a problem?! That said, I will have some serious editing to do if my kid asks me how I met Mr. Teamcanada. "Well, Mommy was high as a kite..."
@11 thx for the new addition to my vocabulary... you know, those things you never realized you didn't have a word for until...
Anyway, it IS funny how wonky parents suddenly get with their kids. My sister did this -- went from a free spirit to a protective mom with her two, even trying to get me to clean up my language around them.
However, I'm taking every oppty to be the eccentric auntie who will talk to them about anything - ANYTHING - at all they wish to. Because that's what everyone deserves: young or old, gay or straight, deaf or hearing, male or female, cisgendered or not and so on.
Yes, Donna's heart is in the right place, but like Dan said, kids aren't idiots.
The more we show them how real relationships work, the better a chance they have to have healthy relationships themselves, AND properly be able to identify a shitty relationship.
Ah, but Dan, don't you realize that your story of how you and your husband met makes some people want to "vomit" (no, not me, but I'm sure you already know who) because gay bars are "codified queer-space, restricted to 21+, w/ alcohol"?
Thank you for saying this. I hate the stigma that starting a relationship over booze and/or sex somehow makes the relationship deficient, and people who met that way should keep that info to themselves. The missus and I started as a one-night stand at a party and spent much of our getting-to-know-you time in bars. Fuck people who say I should be ashamed of that.
I'm tacking this on a bit late, but what about online dating? All my close friends who met their boyfriends/partners on the internet seem hell-bent on hiding that info from everyone. Wonder when the stigma from that will wash away?
Unlike many parents, my kid's mom and I believed that our kids would be the same way we were as teens, and never tried to hide anything from them. So our stock lecture was- "Here's the condoms, don't get anyone pregnant or get an STD, and PLEASE- be safe and use your common sense. And oh- masturbation is perfectly natural, and you needn't feel shame- beats sex with another human too early".
Our kids are now 21, 24 and 26, with none of the above having occurred. All the mystery was taken out of sex, et al, for them, and oddly, none of them exhibited the crazed, compulsive, obsessive attitude about those things that their mom and I did.
But then, we were raised by hypocritical parents, who 'hid' everything from us- what we didn't know couldn't hurt us, right? Pure silliness.
I had quite a lot of freedom as a teenager (thanks to a reasonable set of parents and the fact that I wasn't generally inclined to be a dumbass). But, I went to a Catholic university, where many of the kids had been quite sheltered by their parents. That first year, I could barely relate to anybody as they were all "Freedomz!! I'm going to get shit-faced drunk every night and hook up with as many people as possible!"
Yeah, don't shelter your kids, or they will be total idiots once they leave the nest for the first time.
Jesus, this is required curriculum along with the birds and bees. How many parents lied to their kids for years about why Mommy or Daddy aren't around before they found out the truth. Those same kids only wind up lying themselves because they think it's acceptable behaviour. As they say, the truth will set you free. And keep you from having to explain over and over to your kid that not everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie and hope they eventually believe you.
@31 We actually walked out (me, my parents, and my aunt and uncle...a family outing!) as soon as the slow soul croonings of Al Green appeared over the title "Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace's Wife." They figured that meant hardcore sex.
The sea of profanity was a little problem, but it was nothing I hadn't heard before, and they knew it. In middle school, I was known for having a sailor's mouth among students (which is impressive knowing middle schoolers). And, they weren't worried about the violence. But sex and adult conversations about oral sex...that was bad. My parents were adorable in their coddling. In 6th grade, we also FF'd through the topless runners in Meaning of Life.
When I saw it the next summer on a sleepover (as I also did with Natural Born Killers), I fell in love with it.
My parents had a very tame meeting - they were both competitive ballroom dancers and met at a competition - but I knew ever since I was a kid that they moved in together six months before they got married because they didn't want to bother paying a mortgage and the rent for an apartment.
My father always told me, "If you decide to have sex before marriage, you had better be 100% prepared to deal with the consequences."
This lead to me using condoms AND the pill every time, which I figure pretty much covers it. I'm still looking for a nice latex condom-safe spermicidal lube for the overkill though.
@31 I also realized that Clerks came out when I was 12, and I saw it when I was 13 (I loved my video stores). My parents didn't know how bad it was, and I discouraged them from watching it until I was older, simply because I knew I'd be in trouble if they knew the content in it.
I think most kids, by the time they're 12, know what oral sex is, and in probably graphic detail. Especially if they're intelligent and read beyond their grade level.
Dan, just to clarify: When I emailed you about this, it wasn't that I thought that kids couldn't handle the story or that yours and Terry's meeting story was in any way abnormal or shameful. Personally, I wouldn't give a second thought about showing it to any adolescent. It was that my boyfriend, currently teaching in a high school, wanted to show it in a 9th grade advisory about bullying with the blessing of his administration. You could argue that it's a pussified school that isn't willing to expose its (obviously worldly enough to understand) 9th graders to such a relatively tame sexual innuendo, but superiors can be weird about this kind of shit. I doubt he would lose his job or anything, but would it kill you to make a PG version to be shown in schools?
Yes, Canuck, I understand that life is rarely PG, which is why I said that "I wouldn't give a second thought about showing it to any adolescent," personally.
The principal concern is making it easier to show the video in *schools,* where it is likely to send a strong message about the school's support of an anti-homophobic culture, but is unlikely to be shown because teachers and administrators are squeamish about sexual innuendo in the classroom. You can argue that they shouldn't be, but is it worth standing on ceremony about this segment and making it that much less likely that a school will be inclined to show it? I'm not for permanent deletion, just the creation of an alternative, school-safe version.
There are other ways for a school to strongly communicate anti-homophobia, but I think showing a video like this one is difficult to top in terms of current, explicit anti-gaybashing, which is why I think it's a good idea to make it as easy as possible to show in a classroom.
Just a point.
"You have a pretty mouth" can be taken two ways:
1. "ohh, he wants to kiss him!! <3#^_^#<3"
(which is the way kids who don't know about oral sex/people with whom sexual innuendoes never register, like me)
2. "ohh, he wants to sex him in the mouth!!"
(which is the way kids who do know about oral sex/people who think everything is a sexual innuendo will take it)
So clearly, the response should have been "I was talking about kissing him!! What were YOU thinking, pervert?!?!?!?"
*cackle*
My parents met at work (waitress and cook) and bonded over the massive amount of money they could scam from the owners of the restaurant. Which is worse; crime or sex?
I like the It Gets Better videos which include mention of the great sex you'll have as an adult gay person. That part is really something to look forward to!
A few weeks ago my very catholic very unpractical sister in law almost fainted when I explained my 12 year old niece (her daughter) how babies are born. I mean, the actual birth. I am an ob-gyn an my nieces and nephews have known forever that auntie helps babies be born. Of course, at 12, my niece knows how babies are MADE, and after a new cousin was born in her very prolific family she wantet to know how the birthing process took place. I only told her that babies are born head first, what the umbilical cord and the placenta were, what a c-section was (she asked) and I showed her some drawings of in-utero babies growing at diferent gestational ages. She then asked about identical and non identical twins.
I mean, is that damaging information for a 12 year old? Most children get that knowledge from biology classes (she didn't thanks to the awful catholic school she goes to) and I tried to make her see the birthing process as a fantastic thing (and I actually think it is ) and not as gross, painful thing. My sister in law is horrified and I am thinking how to talk to my niece about safe sex and birht control before she turns 30.
My husband and I met in a bar, dated frequently in that bar, I went there to see music when I was pregnant, and he proposed to me there. In that order. We've never "hid" that info from the kids.
And hell, yes, teens know what oral sex is. My 15yo is a huge fan of yours. I didn't "lead" him here, he found it on his own.
Ya know, mebbe if ppl stopped acting like their precious teen children's ears shouldn't be sullied with discussion about sex, oral sex, etc, there wouldn't be about 8 million new cases of STD's/STI's between young folks aged 15-24. About half of all new HIV infections are teenagers.
There's a high squick factor in knowing your parents Do It, Did It, etc, & the Talk is never fun. But we definitely need to stop acting like our teenage kids don't already know what's going on out there. Since the 'net they can see way nuttier things than I, for one, can imagine.
I'd rather talk to them about it than not.
"swaping innuendos with someone you want in you end-o"
Hah.
I'm one of those who believes that if you take all the mystery out of this stuff, it makes it a lot less likely that kiddos will try to figure it out on their own when their hormones start talking to them. Also, I'm apparently the only person on earth who thinks it's cute that my parents do it. I mean, I know my life is better when I do it, so why wouldn't I celebrate the fact that they have fun, too?
If you had told my sad-sack 14-year-old self that she would one day have the confidence to say that to someone, and immediately follow it with "and you have to give me some warning so that I can polish my leather pants", it would have given me a LOT of hope that it would get better.
And lets see by the time I was 14 I knew what felching was. You see as a KID I used this thing called the INTERNET that can be found at LIBRARIES. We would look up gross stuff to tease each other with, the more obscure the better!
Also, only the most conservative, closeted, protected kids haven't watched television with sex in it by then. They haven't seen movies with sex in it. Why keep the sham. I remember watching Pulp Fiction when I was 13 with my parents in the theater, and my parents throwing a pitch fit about the foot massage conversation. I found them adorable for being so protective.
This has never hurt me growing up, in fact the openness made it easier to talk to my mom about other "adult" aspects of life. Like why my parents didn't get married until after I was born. Parents need to relax a little their precious little snow flakes can handle a few details about sex and sexuality.
One day he sent me an e-mail and told me he was planning a trip to England. Since I'd been he wanted my recommendations of things to do. I rattled off some touristy things, but then added that he should go to a pub or two. I said, "Order a Coke, and just talk to some of the people you meet there. You'll meet some really nice, really interesting people."
I never heard from him again. I heard not too long ago that he's married and has a daughter, and I worry about what kind of parent he is.
I caught hell from my teacher, but my parents thought it was hilarious!
Hah! Okay, that almost cost me a keyboard, which I spent the last 5 minutes cleaning up.
My nephews first learned about their 2 uncles when they were about, oh, 6-9 years old. Not in any graphic detail, of course. But they know nearly as much about me and my partner as they do about their own parents. They seem to have survived the experience without any noticeable trauma.
Indeed, kids are not stupid.
Even if they met at a orphanage building fundraiser for music prodigy holocaust surrvivors I'd still be embarassed and disturbed that they ever locked eyes and decided to wreck their lives so they could do the horizontal twist.
It's icky realizing your parents are sexual beings. A kind of icky that is not increased if they are gay or decreased if they were wed in front of a ceramic statue of buddy jesus by a pedophile.
Good for Christians for thinking they invented being disgusted by your parents.
<>
People meet people in all sorts of places. My Mom met her second (and still current) husband by answering his ad in the newspaper. That was 25 years ago and they've been married for the last 19. For months, she lied to me and said he flirted with her at the DMV. Two friends of mine met by having an anonymous fuck in a bathhouse. Guess it was good, because they decided the exchange numbers -- and names -- afterwards. That wass 17 years ago. If they happened to have children (they don't, but many of our friends do), would they tell the kid? Probably eventually, maybe by mid-teens. I'm guess that when he's younger, they'd probably lie and say they met in a bar.
My great grandparents used to own a bar. I don't think any kids, outside of maybe abstemious Mormom families, would find that in any way weird.
Anyway, it IS funny how wonky parents suddenly get with their kids. My sister did this -- went from a free spirit to a protective mom with her two, even trying to get me to clean up my language around them.
However, I'm taking every oppty to be the eccentric auntie who will talk to them about anything - ANYTHING - at all they wish to. Because that's what everyone deserves: young or old, gay or straight, deaf or hearing, male or female, cisgendered or not and so on.
The more we show them how real relationships work, the better a chance they have to have healthy relationships themselves, AND properly be able to identify a shitty relationship.
Our kids are now 21, 24 and 26, with none of the above having occurred. All the mystery was taken out of sex, et al, for them, and oddly, none of them exhibited the crazed, compulsive, obsessive attitude about those things that their mom and I did.
But then, we were raised by hypocritical parents, who 'hid' everything from us- what we didn't know couldn't hurt us, right? Pure silliness.
I had quite a lot of freedom as a teenager (thanks to a reasonable set of parents and the fact that I wasn't generally inclined to be a dumbass). But, I went to a Catholic university, where many of the kids had been quite sheltered by their parents. That first year, I could barely relate to anybody as they were all "Freedomz!! I'm going to get shit-faced drunk every night and hook up with as many people as possible!"
Yeah, don't shelter your kids, or they will be total idiots once they leave the nest for the first time.
The sea of profanity was a little problem, but it was nothing I hadn't heard before, and they knew it. In middle school, I was known for having a sailor's mouth among students (which is impressive knowing middle schoolers). And, they weren't worried about the violence. But sex and adult conversations about oral sex...that was bad. My parents were adorable in their coddling. In 6th grade, we also FF'd through the topless runners in Meaning of Life.
When I saw it the next summer on a sleepover (as I also did with Natural Born Killers), I fell in love with it.
My father always told me, "If you decide to have sex before marriage, you had better be 100% prepared to deal with the consequences."
This lead to me using condoms AND the pill every time, which I figure pretty much covers it. I'm still looking for a nice latex condom-safe spermicidal lube for the overkill though.
I think most kids, by the time they're 12, know what oral sex is, and in probably graphic detail. Especially if they're intelligent and read beyond their grade level.
sexually explicit language: "I will fellate you with this mouth."
oxymoron: "sexually explicit language such as ... sexual innuendo"
The principal concern is making it easier to show the video in *schools,* where it is likely to send a strong message about the school's support of an anti-homophobic culture, but is unlikely to be shown because teachers and administrators are squeamish about sexual innuendo in the classroom. You can argue that they shouldn't be, but is it worth standing on ceremony about this segment and making it that much less likely that a school will be inclined to show it? I'm not for permanent deletion, just the creation of an alternative, school-safe version.
There are other ways for a school to strongly communicate anti-homophobia, but I think showing a video like this one is difficult to top in terms of current, explicit anti-gaybashing, which is why I think it's a good idea to make it as easy as possible to show in a classroom.
"You have a pretty mouth" can be taken two ways:
1. "ohh, he wants to kiss him!! <3#^_^#<3"
(which is the way kids who don't know about oral sex/people with whom sexual innuendoes never register, like me)
2. "ohh, he wants to sex him in the mouth!!"
(which is the way kids who do know about oral sex/people who think everything is a sexual innuendo will take it)
So clearly, the response should have been "I was talking about kissing him!! What were YOU thinking, pervert?!?!?!?"
*cackle*
I like the It Gets Better videos which include mention of the great sex you'll have as an adult gay person. That part is really something to look forward to!
I mean, is that damaging information for a 12 year old? Most children get that knowledge from biology classes (she didn't thanks to the awful catholic school she goes to) and I tried to make her see the birthing process as a fantastic thing (and I actually think it is ) and not as gross, painful thing. My sister in law is horrified and I am thinking how to talk to my niece about safe sex and birht control before she turns 30.