(Illustration by Lilli Carré)
I’ve never been sure what to tell my kids about sex. Early on, rather than explaining how they were conceived, I borrowed the old line about storks delivering them to our door. Later, as a strategy for raising my daughter in a sex-depraved culture, I considered holding off potty training until her late teens. (Diapers: the ultimate mood killer.) As my kids got older, the stork story wore thin and potty training, sadly, took its normal course. Years later, I still haven’t got the foggiest idea what to say. Once, at a parents meeting, our youth pastor encouraged us all to talk to our kids about sex. I raised my hand, objecting, “That’s why I send them to church, for you to do that!”
Back in my day, it felt like we had all the answers. The United States was emerging from the anything goes ’70s and ’80s. (Any society that considers big hair and bell-bottoms sexy is constitutionally disposed to permissiveness.) By the ’90s, American Christianity was ready to clap back, and we showed our moral superiority by outspending the Soviets and saving ourselves for marriage. In that context, telling people what to do and what not to do with their bodies felt totally normal. We had no problem condemning “going too far,” and we talked early and often about lust, pornography, and masturbation.
It all feels rather quaint now. It’s hard to imagine saying anything to anyone about sex these days. In the long shadow of Christianity’s history of patriarchy, misogyny, and sexual abuse, telling others what they should do with their genitalia strikes people as pretty cringy.
