As promised, today I bring you a guest post. Let me introduce you to my friend, Getty, a fellow linguist. His email said: Here was what I have written up – unedited, really, just the raw ramblings. Tell me if it ought to be longer or shorter or less weird or what. I’ve been reading a lot of Neal Stephenson, which has a lot of overstatement, and I’m pretty sure that showed up there.
As you’ll soon see, though, the best version is the un-edited version. So, without further ado, I give you, The Talk, Getty Version.
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It was never like sex was a secret at our house. As a young child, my parents would watch movies that other parents might attempt to censor well into a child’s teenage years, if only to avoid the awkward explanations of what those people were doing with sheets conveniently covering their naughty bits. Home videos reveal my grandfather – a coarse, often offensive old man with a salt-and-pepper moustache and a considerable belly from years of alcoholism – being frankly shocked by my mother’s candid discussion of breasts while my brother and I were nearby. And I suppose the real talk happened when I was very young – three, or four, I can’t remember – and I asked my mother at point-blank range.
“Mommy, where do babies come from?”
She looked at me and smiled, and explained to me that when a man and a woman want a child, the man inserts tab a into slot b and then the sperm hunt down the egg and so forth. She was, as a matter of fact, a labor coach, and thus had a great deal of knowledge about babies – not to mention the fact that she had two of them. She took care to explain that for nine months, the fetus develops, and then is birthed. I fixed her with my three-year-old eyes and told her, “I don’t believe you!”
I could go on and list other adorable children-talking-about-sex stories, such as when I offered suggestions for why my mother didn’t have a penis, or my brother’s misunderstandings about how cat sex worked, but that’s not really the point of this piece of writing. My parents weren’t overly protective, and they were always candid enough – however, they also had a somewhat odd sense of humor, which is why, when I was in eighth or ninth grade or so, my mother called me in to her room before the family retired for the night.
“I know you already know some of these things, but I feel like it’s my duty as a parent to educate you. So, I think we need to have The Talk.”
Already, I could feel every rational impulse in my head urging me to dash out the door, and most of the other impulses urging me to dash out the window. Against the better judgement of every conscious neuron firing in my brain, I sat down and nodded apprehensively.
“You already know about sex.” It wasn’t a question. It was fairly impossible not to know about sex. Even if the exact physiological details hadn’t yet been revealed to me, even if I had never put a condom on a banana, even if I had never seen a nude woman that was not on a TV screen or made out of marble, I knew quite enough that, should an occasion arise in which I would be called upon to save humanity by having sex (humor me here), I wouldn’t let my fellow human beings down. So, inasmuch as it was possible for a nerdy, introverted twelve-year-old boy, I knew about sex.
“Yes, mother, I know about sex.” Now the question was whether this was going to be merely aggravating or actually painful.
She thought, clearly trying to taking her job as a mother as seriously as possible. “Well, do you know about sixty-nine?”
I nodded, edging into a position where I could tumble backwards out the window, if the situation required it – which it did. “Yes, mom, I know about sixty-nine.” (Around sixth grade, I decided that mommy was too childish, and consciously switched to calling her mom in order to sound more adult and less reliant on her. I would on occasion use it in a pointed, almost patronizing way to let her know that she wasn’t mommy anymore – she was mom, and I was no longer her little baby. I would later do the same thing with mother.)
“I just feel like I haven’t been teaching you enough, like I’m failing as a mother. I need to teach you something new.” She adjusted her glasses and sat up a bit. A smile spread across her face – clearly, she had thought of something to teach me, something which I hadn’t known before. “Well, do you know about golden showers?”
“I’m leaving now,” I said. And I did.
And that was the Talk.
