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[linnea]

My mind just couldn't wrap around the fact that there is a little kid out there who doesn't know the proper word for her body. Like, I wouldn't expect a pediatric patient to say, "Hey! Thank you for checking my pulse at the brachial artery," or "Sweet! *I* get an IV line in my right antecubital fossa vein." but... kids need proper names for things at their level of understanding.

There's a section in the pu$$y monologues near the beginning where they say, "I'm worried about pu$$ys." and they go through a laundry list of all the different regional slang words that people use, from "Poonani" to "coochi snorcher" to "peepee" to "Gladys Spiegelman", plus a whole lot more.

I mean....I thought that part of growing up was having your 3-year-old son or daughter scream out at the top of their voice in a crowded grocery store, "MOMMY! GIRLS HAVE pu$$yS AND BOYS HAVE c*ckES!" Does that women live in Afghanistan or someplace where kids aren't allowed to know those words??

[AugustWest]

Gladys Spiegelman?

[Carlos del Vaca]

I mean....I thought that part of growing up was having your 3-year-old son or daughter scream out at the top of their voice in a crowded grocery store, "MOMMY! GIRLS HAVE pu$$yS AND BOYS HAVE c*ckES!" Does that women live in Afghanistan or someplace where kids aren't allowed to know those words??

I am so, so waiting for my 3-year-old to say to her moderately prudish grandmother, "YOU have a pu$$y!!  Because you're a girl!"
It's coming, it's just a matter of time.

[jaydub]

I've always referred to my daughter's external anatomy as her vulva, so she does as well.  She's completely unaware that some people are uncomfortable with any reference to genitalia, which is the way I'd like her to be as long as possible.  Someday she'll say something around someone who's sensitive, and there'll be a scene - and hopefully they won't send her to the principal's office or something; I figure that's a better future for her than one where she develops a lifelong hangup about a part of her being shameful or "dirty".

Its a sign of my pedantic nature that we settled on vulva as the word of choice.  Anatomically, pu$$y refers to the "birth canal" (which is a euphemism that confused me for years as a wee kiddie), and really isn't a feature that you get to see on most women, naked or no.

[theinevitable]

Man.
I am planning on doing the opposite of what my parents did, and finding some way to explain to any kids that I have that some people don't like it when you talk about these things.
I think sometimes parents forget how horrible doing/saying something embarrassing is when you're in 2nd grade.

I really get the impression that on me, my mom used all the stuff she learned from majoring in child devolpment, and then she didn't do any of it on my brother or sister.
people, I played with dolls as a child. those were my toys.

[littlefallsmets]

The extent of my sexual education from my parents pretty much goes as following:

Somewhere around twelve, my dad asks me if I've picked up on the whole sex thing on the schoolyard.

I say, yeah, but don't worry about it anytime soon, at twelve I am as terrified of women as I am intrigued.

Do I have any questions? No, I'm pretty much informed.

And then, like, he pats me on the head and leaves.

And I was pretty much right, I didn't end up comfortable enough with myself to get down to the sexing until I was 20.

[side_show]

I came home one day and some pamphlets had mysteriously appeared on my bed - one about menstruation, another about pregnancy, and another one that was basically the same information as the other two combined into one pamphlet.  They were evenly fanned out on the bed like one would organize magazines on a coffee table.  I'll never forget finding them there.  There was absolutely no conversation.  Later, the nuns at my school showed us some Christian-based films that filled in a little more in the school's chapel on a projection screen pulled down directly in front of the life sized Jesus crucifix and alter. 

The fact that I've had a wonderful and healthy sex life can only be attributed to figuring out how to masterbate at the age of 3 or 4, combined with being hired to teach peer-to-peer sex-ed by Planned Parenthood in my teens.  So it was all a fluke - I could have just as easily have ended up one of those pent-up literary types that gets off on reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and eating Triscuts.

[V-Adore]

My first parental sex-education talk beyond "boys have a c*ck, girls have a pu$$y" came at the age of, I believe, seven, when my mom and I filled out my registration form for Girl Scout sleepaway camp together. One of the questions on the form was "has she started menstruating yet? If not, has she been told?," which my mother inevitably took as a cue to tell me. I don't remember her explanation very well, but I remember two points of confusion:

1) At first, for some reason I assumed that menstruation only happened for about a year during puberty, as some sort of kick-start thing that made you able to have babies. My mother cleared this up, at which point I was horrified by the concept that this happened once a month until you were fifty-ish. Gah!
2) I never mentioned to my mother, and thus she never cleared up for me, my irrational belief that menstruation involved expulsion of something that would look like a fetus, or at least obviously human in some way. I still don't know where this came from, but I attribute my current extreme mellowness about the topic on the fact that this particular nightmare did not come true.

The remainder of my sex-related conversation with my parents came at seventeen, right before I met my Internet Boyfriend for the first time at a sci-fi convention. The conversation consisted of "you know how to be safe, right?" "Right." "Okay, don't do anything stupid." Parenting!

[KeithHernandez]

The remainder of my sex-related conversation with my parents came at seventeen, right before I met my Internet Boyfriend for the first time at a sci-fi convention. The conversation consisted of "you know how to be safe, right?" "Right." "Okay, don't do anything stupid." Parenting!

I always took stuff like this involving alcohol, drugs and sex as "alright, we know you are going to do want you want, and we can't stop you and don't care that much, but we can't tell you to do these things and give you our support, but please, please, please don't cost us money or die."

[littlefallsmets]

The remainder of my sex-related conversation with my parents came at seventeen, right before I met my Internet Boyfriend for the first time at a sci-fi convention.

This brings up an interesting point: The Internet.

Pretty much, any halfway inquisitive preteen will now invariably learn the whoooooole sexual schmear from the internet, years before a parent would even think to have The Talk. Like, they'll be trying to have The Talk and the kid'll be all like "Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know all that... but how do they get the Coke can in that far?"

You'll be all thinking they wanna know where babies come from or why their peepee feels weird when they see rude titties... and they'll get right down to the business of asking how one meets a dwarf or how large of a gourd you have to put at the base of the donkey's dick so that you are not impaled.

This is the truth of the internet, this is the future.

[theinevitable]

ew, nooooo

What's weird to me, in retrospect, is how many times I remember hearing sexual things and thinking that they made sense...
until one day I learned what people were actually talking about. I cannot comprehend how some of those things could make sense to me if I didn't understand the Sex Concept.

I had a (self)embarrassing moment a few weeks ago when a sex ed person came to talk to my floor. I got pissed off when she answered this kid's question wrong, and I set him straight afterwards.
Apparently knowing that much about sex is not OK. Weird. Would have thought it'd be the other way around.

My roommate got a little weirded out when I pulled up a diagram to show the kid where the clitoris is, though. HE NEEDED TO KNOW! EDUCATION!

[Muse_Of_Fire]

Heh. When I was in third grade my mom had a hysterectomy, and I happened to mention at school that my mom was in the hospital to have her uterus removed. I was sent to the principal's office and they called my dad:

"Yes, Mr. Muse? This is Ms. Principal. I have Little Muse here in the office. She said... *audible blush over the phone, and then a whisper* uterus,"

"Oh."

long pause

"We should have a meeting."

"Why?"

"Well, she said...*sputters* uterus."

"Well, okay. What did she say about it?"

"She said your wife was in the hospital to have her uterus removed."

"Well, she is."

This went on for about 20 minutes, my dad still completely baffled as to why this was an issue. Eventually my parents talked sense into the administration.

My mom in particular, being a medical professional, was very open about the biological realities of sex. So when I asked persistently where babies came from (I think right around 3rd grade), out came the medical books and the diagrams and I got the whole explanation.

I was sooooo grossed out by it at that age.

But the cool thing was:

1. I was accurately informed about the birds and the bees, so I had all the facts, which makes anyone better-equipped to make choices
2. It established a pretty open culture around talking about sex in my household, so I always felt comfortable, even when I was a teen, talking to my mom about that stuff. I really think it helped me make good choices and strengthened my relationship with her (we've always been really close anyhow).

[theinevitable]

wow, really? I find that I am incredibly freaked out about talking to my parents about that stuff, even though they've always been really open about it.

I mean, I didn't tell my parents about my first girlfriend for like a month. or the 2nd one. they don't know that I'm single, either.

when I came to school, my mom made my dad buy me condoms.

OK, now that I think about it, my mom has always tried to be really open about that stuff, but she always seems really wigged out. I mean, when I was 14 she told me she didn't care if I had sex as long as I was sure I was ready, etc, it's a beautiful thing, she will buy me condoms...
and then when I had my first girlfriend she completely lost it if I closed the door to my room or we were home alone for 10 minutes.

[Muse_Of_Fire]

It's a hard thing for parents to do. I know I've never been really comfortable talking to my dad about that kind of stuff, just because it'd be weird. But my mom always made it really easy. In fact, after I graduated high school, my then-boyfriend and I took a week long vacation to a bed and breakfast on the lake. My parents were okay with it (although they were a bit apprehensive because they didn't like the guy much, but they figured I was a smart girl and knew where my boundaries were). Apparently, though, my then-boyfriend's mom called my mom practically every day and was all, "Well, do you think they're having sex? What should we do? What should we doooooo?" And my mom would just shrug and say, "So what if they are? We can't stop them, and I trust them to make good choices."

Thankfully the makeouts did not go that far on this trip. I say thankfully because my parents were right in not liking the guy. But you know, I was in high school, what did I know?

The funny thing is, I feel so comfortable talking to my mom about that kind of stuff that... well, nevermind, this is going to turn into an overshare, and we're off-topic as it is.

Linnea, I hope your bag is okay, and it sounds like you've forgiven your bad little cats.

[slink]

My parents have always been fairly cool with me about most anything, though at the time when I was in my first serious relationship (christ, my only serious relationship but it lasted long enough) I told my mother I would be camping out on top of a hill with my girlfriend to watch the sunrise on the solstice. She said I should talk to my brother about the whole sex thing if I needed to... Frankly, back then I'd have felt more comfortable talking to my mom about it! Not to slight my brother, who has become one of my absolute best friends, but back then, with the 6 year age difference, we didn't really open up to one another. Has to be said, it meant a lot when he phoned me to ask advice about a potential relationship some years later, and from there, and the smoking up regularly together...

You're right Muse... *cough*topic*cough*
And I'm guessing you've tried some sort of leather polish or something on that purse?