Saw a comic recently about this topic and got me thinking. I know what “the talk” is about since it appears in so many media but I don’t ever recall having such an experience personally. Did you? What was it like?
I was a late 80s kid, just for context. As far as my experience goes, my parents were very open about sex as a natural process for reproduction. They answered openly any questions I had whenever I had them, keeping to the bare minimum necessary but never avoiding the topic- also never using metaphors as a substitute for plain facts ie. “the birds and the bees”.
So at about age 5 or so I was already aware about how reproduction worked on animals, us humans included. As I kept growing up of course I kept connecting the dots on any social aspects of sex and relationships (ie that is supposed to be pleasant, that people do it even if they’re not planning to have babies, etc) but I never had a moment of shocking realization regarding sex. I often found it stupid how some of my classmates would giggle or lower their voice when talking about anything sexual like, well, like it’s a taboo. And I was often disappointed at how much of what my classmates knew wasn’t exactly true, which at the time I chalked to their stupidity, although obviously it wasn’t their fault. They were misinformed.
By the time kids got to sex ed in highschool they already had their facts pretty much right though, fortunately.
So I’m curious about your experiences about this while growing up. Was yours similar to mine or did you sit through some awkward conversations? How did you feel about it all?
My parents raised me out in the wilderness in a literal compound and hour from the nearest convenience store with no phone or even a mailbox.
So yeah… I had to learn everything about the world through a little black-and-white TV in my room that had big ol’ rabbit ear antenna that if I moved just right, I could get PBS from another town that had a lot of educational programming. As long as it wasn’t about “evolution” they were fine with me watching PBS.
If it wasn’t for PBS I would probably be dead. Seriously, that life doesn’t do a person well, both my parents and a sibling drank themselves to death, others are on the way. I however, learned science, and biology, and how to read and how to do math and a host of other topics that I am going to be an eternal sponsor of PBS for. There was one special that explained sex to some degree, but was still heavily censored. My parents were too busy being high and religious to dream of having an awkward talk with their son, so I was totally on my own.
Thankfully, I learned where to find the “relationship” books on my rare ventures into town to visit places like bookstores and managed to learn a lot about sex from pilfering a book from the sex and relationship section and reading it in the kid’s books section.