When I was in grade four, the brother of a girl in my class
brought a condom to school. The news spread like wildfire – by recess, a large
group of kids had surrounded his locker, hoping for a glimpse. Having no idea
what a condom was, let alone what one looked like, my curiosity had been
sufficiently piqued. When I got home from school that afternoon, I broached the
subject with my mother.
After her coughing fit had subsided, she fished a piece of
paper from a pile on the dining room table and drew her best dome. I’d learned
in sex-ed class (led by my hairy-chested and very oversexed Phys-Ed teacher) that a condom was used during
sexual intercourse – I just didn’t know why, or what one looked like. Thanks to
my mother’s illustration, I thought for years that condoms were made of hard
plastic, with finely pointed tips.
That drawing, those sex-ed classes and what was scrawled in
the stalls of my school’s second-floor bathroom sums up the extent of my sexual
education as a child. I entered my teen years armed with more knowledge about the
dangers of sex than its pleasures; when it came to the act of lovemaking
itself, I was fairly clueless. It’s not the experience I want for my own
children, and when it comes to The Talk, I have no qualms about having an open,
honest discussion with them, when the time is right.
And when that time comes along I’m pretty sure that this half of the parental unit will be
leading the conversation, as my husband still blushes when I use anatomically
correct terms with our kids and shuts down altogether at the thought of them
becoming sexually active.
“You can take care of that stuff,” he once told me, which,
according to this article, is a popular consensus among fathers. It seems that,
along with making meals, scheduling appointments, cutting crusts off of
sandwiches and, well, everything else, initiating The Talk winds up on many
mothers’ To Do lists as well.
According to the article, a third of kids in the U.S. aged
15-17 have had sex. Among teens aged 15-19, 13 per cent of females and 15 per
cent of males had sex before they’d turned 15. A Toronto-based survey revealed
that among teens aged 13 to 18, one-third were sexually active. It’s not
surprising, really – sex is everywhere these days, and kids aren’t stupid.
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