It’s a difficult line to walk as a parent — when is it appropriate to tell your kids the real truths about sex? While we all may wish to stage sex ed to our pre-teen kids according to when we think they are ready — and maybe when we’re ready too, because of our own attitudes about sex — by the time a kid is in his her/her/their teens, I think they deserve to know everything. By which I mean EVERYTHING. How it works, what to expect, what problems can crop up, and how changeable sex can be person to person.
There is no point trying to hide or lie about adult sexuality to kids who are entering adulthood. They may not be emotionally or psychologically ready to engage with the complexities of human relationships, and they may not be mature enough to act on their new urges and lusts. That is a matter of individual development. But by the time they are 15-17, they are ready to start learning about it in depth.
By the time I was 16 (the photo shows me sitting on my parent’s porch ca. 1971), I’d already experimented with a wide range of males and females and knew more about sexual diversity than my parents. Many of today’s teens do too — it’s all available to them at the click of a Google link.
In the 1970s, thanks to a small but thriving network of Planned Parenthood clinics, I was able to get brochures with a realistic perspective on how to avoid pregnancy at that age. Since the 60s and 70s were an age of sexual permissiveness, where casual hook-ups were a norm in urban cultures, birth control was a matter of massive importance to women and girls. By junior year of high school, all my girlfriends were trading information on how girls got pregnant, how to use condoms, whether to take the Pill, along with a lot of anxiety-inducing myths about how girls got pregnant, and fierce debate about whether you could get knocked up from swimming in a pool (you can’t) or a toilet seat (you can’t).
While I didn’t believe these stories, they made me worry anyway, because the myths were so prevalent. Like that time my boyfriend came on some of my pubic hairs and I was near-hysterical for a few weeks because I was afraid his all-mighty sperm ambitiously crawled through my pubes to find my vagina and then doggedly swam up inside me in search of an egg. I freaked out until my period finally started. Today that episode is as amusing as a ridiculous Ask Yahoo question.
Semen was a single woman’s greatest threat to her social status. No one wanted to be an unwed mother then. Meanwhile, STIs were not even on the radar in the 1970s. Since this was pre-AIDS, we had a smug self-confidence that doctors could cure any STI we contracted with a dose of penicillin. But then came Herpes, and then came AIDS, and by the time the 1980s were over, sex had crawled back into an all-new closet of shame
Yet despite being more knowledgeable than most of my friends about sex, and despite my very good luck in avoiding incurable STIs (thank you, PP!) there were still a ton of things about sex that totally mystified me. There was literally nothing that taught me about the realities of relationship sex, for example.
Most of the literature on sex at the time was all about demonizing sex, including things I always accepted as normal and human, from masturbation and sex before marriage to bisexuality and homosexuality. All the books seemed to be written for straight married couples, and all the sex they were having looked awfully different from the kind of sex I was having. There was nothing about blow-jobs or hand-jobs, my two basic go-to types of sex with boyfriends. Neither was there a single affirmative word about queer sex and bisexuality. Anal sex simply did not exist, at least not in public dialogue. Instead, there were whispers and lectures about how all the above was abnormal and perverted, likely symptoms of mental illness which required psychiatric cures and psychotropic drugs. Adult relationships, the literature suggested, was strictly devoted to fucking and having babies. Books profiled married people who seemed to have problem-free sex lives and could jump right into a crazy Kama Sutra position without foreplay, teasing or the kind of aggressive flirting I loved. Nor was my experience of relationship sex anything like the problem-free, “Me Tarzan, You Jane, let’s make Boy” models that adults kept throwing at me. No way would I ever find someone who’d love the real me. I was an outsider, a weirdo, and an undiagnosed mad-woman.
Adults and the books they wrote for other adults made it seem like all adults were more in touch with their sexual needs and sexual identities than teens. They led me to believe that when you got your “adulthood card,” it came with total clarity about your sex and gender identities. Boy were they fucking wrong! It turned out that adults were even dumber than teenagers. Dumber and apparently less sexually satisfied too, as adultery and divorce rates were sky-rocketing in those years. And while my teenage friends seemed so much wiser about sex than our parents in 1971, by the time they had their own kids, they had turned into their parents. They forgot or blocked from memory how much they jerked off. They covered up and lied about all their pre-marital affairs and bisexual experiments to their kids. They taught their kids that sex was all about being in love with one special opposite-sex someone, and that natural needs and impulses were dangerous or sinful. They caved to the universal negativity about sex and passed the same old shame to their bewildered kids.
It wasn’t until I started research for Different Loving in 1991 that I first grasped the stunning truth that most people didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about when they talked about sex. Modern attitudes towards sex were still being shaped by 19th-century quacks. Parents carried forward the guilt and ultimately churned out equally sexually-stupid kids who believed their misinformation. The cycle hasn’t stopped. Millions of teens start too young, experiment broadly without understanding the ramifications of what they’re doing, and get bumped around, gaslighted, assaulted, harassed, and worse. Some are so scarred by the shame and guilt of these failures, it distorts their self-image and changes the course of their lives for the worse.
There are a wide range of things teens need to know when they start jerking off, whether they’re 13 or 18 when they first do. They need to be prepared emotionally and psychologically for the realities of adult sex. The negativity has to stop and the importance of body/mind integrity needs to be stressed, along with issues of consent and what to expect from a partner. So I’ve come up with a list of four things I WISH someone had told me to spare me the angst and anxiety I had growing up.
FOUR THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT SEX WHEN I WAS A TEEN
I wish I knew that mutual consent was a keystone of a healthy relationship.
There were lots of times I let both boys and girls push me into having sex. Sometimes it was a peer thing, like a group of friends pairing up when we went camping, leaving the only available boy to naturally hook up with the only available girl (i.e., me). I went along with it because I didn’t want to feel like an outsider. Sometimes it was a boy just expecting me to want to have sex with him because he wanted to have sex with me based on his own beliefs around male privilege. I didn’t know how to push them away then without them getting angry, so I agreed to sex more times than I wanted to have it. Really, it felt like it was my JOB somehow to provide some kind of sexual service to guys who bought me dinners or brought me flowers – as if sex was the price a girl was obliged to pay for a date. I wish I’d known that my personal feelings mattered more than what my peer group was doing. I wish adults pounded consent issues into me the way they tried to pound abstinence and acting “lady-like” into me. More than anything, I wish I’d learned how to say no in a good way and protect my right to choose if, how and when I’d have sex.
I wish I knew that I’d only be fully sexually functional with a small number of people.
The way the books all made it sound, all you needed was a marriage license to make you achieve sexual ecstasy with a partner. But I found out, through shitty experience, that only a handful of my sex partners turned me on enough to have orgasms. If and when someone did get me off the way I wanted to get off, I became totally sexually addicted to them. I then interpreted my sex addiction as true love because, after all, that’s what adult lessons suggested: that when you have great sex with someone, it means you were meant for each other. But in my case, as soon as reality set in, I began to realize how dysfunctional the other parts of the relationship were and I suffered for it. If only I’d known that sex chemistry is actually about sex chemistry, not eternal love. I wish I’d known that there is no magical binary marriage formula that makes adults compatible in bed. Maybe then I would have focused on people who were good to me instead of just having nice dicks or gorgeous tits. All teens deserve to know that sex is hit-or-miss, that compatibility issues are a real thing, that their sexual needs should matter more to them than other people’s needs, and that getting obsessed with someone because he or she is great in bed is totally different from true love.
I wish I knew that sexual predation wasn’t just about rape — it was about everything I didn’t want to happen
Every girl knew what rape was when I was growing up: it was when a malicious, violent stranger attacked you and penetrated your vagina without your permission. Maybe other horrible things happen but that was kept secret. The code language for oral or anal sex was “sodomy,” and nobody’s parents ever talked about that!
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to reflect on and analyze my early experiences. That’s when I realized how many times I’d actually been preyed on. I finally realized that rape doesn’t have to be a penetrative act; in fact, rape doesn’t have to be a physical act. It can happen when someone messes with your mind enough in sexual ways. Like the family member who started fondling me when I was thirteen and kept trying to pressure me into sex with him. 90% of my time with him was spent in conversation, and that conversation always led to “grooming” — telling me how sexually frustrated he was in his marriage, telling me how smart and pretty I was, saying I was sexier than his wife and how he wished he’d married me instead. Now, I was 13, he was in his late 20s. I thought he was one of my best friends because he was the only one in the family who really liked me. But that 10% of the time when he was touching me made me feel horrible and disloyal and dirty. It left me utterly confused about what to expect from relationships with men. Here was my bff putting his hands between my legs, and he was 15 years older and a married man. Surely he knew right from wrong. So if he did those things to me, maybe it was right in the adult world, even though it felt so wrong to me inside. I assumed the problem was me.
In my later teens, I let dozens of men I didn’t really want to be with talk me into blow jobs and hand jobs. My parents didn’t know about my secret second life as an unrepentant slut because I was sure my mother would’ve blamed me for putting myself in disgusting situations in the first place. So I stumbled along, thinking it was normal that men should get what they wanted. Not that I saw it that way back then. Their predation was sometimes flattering (ooh, they really love me!) and always opaque. I mean, I was a horny girl myself and they weren’t penetrating me, so it wasn’t rape, was it? It was, I told myself, part of learning to adult. Some of them were strangers but some were trusted insiders in my parents’ circles. So they cared about me, didn’t they? That was totally different from rape, I told myself, even though it really wasn’t.
I wish someone had told me that anytime someone forces their sexual fantasies or needs on you it’s a form of sexual predation. I wish someone had warned me that predation is about more than rape. Most of all, I wish I had some inkling of how to tell the difference between a snake in lamb clothing from someone who saw me as a thinking, feeling human being.
I wish I knew that adults were dangerous to my psychosexual health
Intergenerational sex was no big deal in the 1970s. Age of consent laws were so crazily uneven, no one even paid attention to them unless they wanted to get married. It was common for teenagers to sleep with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and older. I slept, by my choice, with a teacher in high school and with professors in college. I kind of noticed that sex with people more or less my own age, within five years or less, was always more relaxing and pleasant. Relationships with adult males, by contrast, were fraught with anxieties and self-doubts. They treated me as if we were the same age, which meant they felt free to blame me and criticize me when things didn’t go right. They brought a shit-ton of adult baggage with them, including divorce, alcoholism and erectile dysfunctions. If they didn’t drown the relationship in sex problems, they acted superior, making me feel like they were gods of sexual wisdom while I was an innocent young maiden they had to educate. Fuck, that pissed me off.
I wish someone talked to me about how power works in relationships. I wish someone warned me of the psychological risks of a fresh and adventurous young mind getting sidelined by a messed up older person — who, not coincidentally, is exactly the kind of adult who pursues sexual relationships with minors. I wish someone had told me that even when you are consenting or eager for sex with an adult, as a teen it’s a really emotionally risky place to go, with a good chance that your sex and even gender identity may be compromised and warped. I wish someone had helped me understand that there is no true emotional equality when an adult has sex with a minor.
Your teenagers deserve to know all of those things. They deserve to have a better sex life than previous generations because in the here and now, we have the right tools and a vast body of intelligent, evidence-based data on human sexuality, sexual development in children. We have a firm grasp on the interconnections between sex and gender and human biology and our psychology. I wish all teens a happier, smoother sex-life than I had growing up. I want to help all concerned parents break the cycle of trained helplessness and stupidity and teach their children the truth about relationship sex.
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A Guide For Parents
Gloria’s new guide for parents who want to take a proactive approach towards teaching their kids about sex.
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