Ewww, your parents had sex?
Cool post from Madame X of The Madame X-Files who bravely, but wisely, outed herself as a sex-blogger to her parents.
When I was forced to delete my original blog back in January of this year after nearly 360 posts I decided that it was time to come clean with my family about my blogging exploits.
What follows is the conversation I had with my parents.Mom dad, I'm a sex blogger.
What? Vinnie did you hear that? Your daughter is having sex with loggers![1] Where, where did I go wrong?
I am not having sex with loggers! Why would that be such a wrong thing anyway?
Loggers live so far away...Seattle or something.
*pause so I could figure out the logic behind that statement*
I am not having sex with loggers I am a sex blogger.
What does that mean?
First of all I think she's off to a good start. I've argued elsewhere that bloggers are just like everybody else except that we admit what we do.
She goes on to say
I post stories, some funny some sexy and sometimesItalkaboutasssex.
What was that? What was the last part? I didn't hear it?
Ass sex! Sometimes I talk about ass sex and masturbation and blow jobs!
Well, why not talk about it. People have been having oral sex and ass sex since at least the Starr Report back in the 1990s and I'm given to understand it may have been going on even before that. If Kenneth Starr can write about it, and after reading it Sen. Orin Hatch can talk about it, then so should we.
And then she says
Pictures?
Yeah Ma, pictures. Half Nekkid, pictures, me in umm...just my panties or a bathing suit....nothing too revealing.
Yeah so I lied to my mother, wouldn't be the first time
But then...
I got some pictures that maybe your men would be interested in.
Ewww, ewwwwwww eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwww!
I look over at my father and he is smiling and I swear to GOD I heard him utter
Good times, goodtimes.
You know what? That's just wrong! I am going to chose to believe that you are kidding me and that no such pictures exist...
What? You think you're the only one that likes to have her picture taken all suds up in the shower?
There, right there is when I threw up in my mouth.
Vinnie where did we put those pictures?
Remember what I said about bloggers being just like everybody else except we admit it? I rest my case!
And you wanna know why I think it's a good thing to admit it? Because then other people are going to be willing to talk about it.
And yeah, it's possible that our parents might have had sex and if people start admitting it then it's possible they might admit it too. It's a price I'm willing to pay.
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End note: I call this blog Real Adult Sex for a reason -- the reason being that for all the fun I had as a teenager I'm actually fairly biased towards waiting till adulthood to really get into it. It's not that I think sex is a bad thing for younger people -- very often it's not at all bad. It's just that I think life for teenagers is already sufficiently fraught with emotional and social turmoil and even more often we wind up having sex before we're ready and that can have consequences that far outlive our adolescence. And *that* can delay our ability to have real adult sex, sometimes for life.
Anyway, my parents -- liberal, enlightened, rational, and friends with all kinds of turtleneck-and-medallion-wearing psychologists in the 60s -- wanted to make sure their children didn't wind up as hung-up about sex as they felt they were. So they told us about it. When I was, I think, thirteen, my dad sort of took me aside and told me about masturbation and how he'd discovered it, and then told me it was ok if I did it too.
It put me off trying anything for several years, and made me suspicious enough of the whole enterprise that I was actually pretty well inoculated to the wishful and utterly psychotic chatter in my Junior-high locker-room, and considerably more cautious and thoughtful when I eventually did start having sex with my first partner. (Cautious enough, and thoughtful enough, that when we finally did have intercourse for the first time she came and I didn't.)
Consequently I definitely endorse parents telling their children about sex if they don't want them to have any till they're really ready. :-)
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Anyway, if you're a sex blogger what do *you* think would be the worst thing that could happen if you told your parents?
I suspect that, like Madame X, the worst thing might be that they'll start to tell you!
Which, when you think about it, is really a pretty small price to pay. Especially considering that statistically speaking 80% of us will have children of our own someday. We probably ought to start getting over it now. [Update: Or no later than their early teens, anyway. :-) --fl]
[1] There actually aren't many loggers left in Seattle though there are some perfectly lovely arborists and tree-pruners, many of whom are totally buff and looking sharp in their ropes and harnesses. At least one is also a sex blogger (perhaps predictably she's into ropes) which I suppose would make her something like a Seattle sex-blogger logger.
Reading that exchange was hilarious - and refreshing.
The worst thing that could happen? Well, my mom knows I'm a sex worker, and knows I had been considering doing fetish work - but she still doesn't know about my blog.
I'm worried she'd start reading it. And get grossed out. And keep reading anyway. And talk with me about it at inappropriate times. And start - or is that resume? - teasing my SO about our exploits.
Mostly I don't want to deal with her criticizing my fiction. I still remember her reaction the first time she found my attempts at erotic writing (junior high). "Did you have to put so much *sex* in it?" Nothing like the feeling of mom reading over your shoulder when you're naked... eek.
[Yeah, that's the biggest consideration for me. I don't mind that friends and family know I'm a blogger but I *definitely* don't want them knowing which one. It's not that I'd be embarrassed as I think it would be distracting -- I'd inevitable start thinking things like "well, so and so, who I see every other day, might this this is about him, or her, or them. It usually isn't, by the way, I get almost all my inspiration online. But try to tell that to other people. (It's the downside of bloggers doing everything other people do -- what we say is just naturally going to look suspiciously familiar. Till everyone realizes we're all pretty much alike, anyway.) Thanks, Sabrina. --fl]
Yeah...for a while my mom had my URL and figured out how to leave comments.
God love her she was more concerned about getting HER stuff on to my blog than what I had written.
She's 'challenged' when it comes to surfing the net so I went to her house and deleted her history and she hasn't been back since.
[Hey, I bet if I could get her phone number I could get her to start her own blog. Think she's post the photos she took with your dad? (Hey, they're not my parents! And I know it might be hard on the offspring, unless we're all planning to lose interest in sex once we go gray we'd better get over our bias about older people having sex lives now.) Thanks, Madame. --fl]
I suppose the worst thing that could happen to me is that they could stop funding my college education, figuring that maybe all that liberalism and sex-positivism I'm getting at university is to blame.
But them telling me about their sex lives? Hell no. That wouldn't even be squicky. I'd be fascinated. Sex just interests me, pretty much no matter who's having it (as long as it's safe, sane, and consensual of course), and talking about everybody's experiences is something I could do all damn day. In fact, if I could make my living brewing coffee and talking about sex, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
My parents know I blog, but so far the most I've heard are requests to "tone down your language" (because my dad thinks people will be more likely to stalk and kill me if I tell them to fuck off instead of ask them nicely to please let me alone). I get the idea that, while they know I write about my sex life periodically, they're bound and determined to ignore it.
Which is kind of sad, I guess, because I'd like to be able to talk about sex with them. Especially if I manage to make my living the way I want to, because how else am I supposed to field all those "So how's work going?" questions? The most information I've ever gotten out of either of them was from my mom, when I told her that I'd never orgasmed with a partner, and she admitted that she was in her thirties before she had her first one. And mum and I have gone over and over and over our views on masturbation (she's Catholic and really, truly believes that masturbating is a misuse of our God-given sexuality), but while that's a start it doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter.
I don't try to talk about sex with my dad, because the last conversation we had about it amounted to "You're a whore for not waiting until marriage, and anyway if you need it that badly you should just buy a vibrator (but not a really good one because you don't want to turn yourself off to men forever)." Not exactly productive.
But I've got a newer blog that's going to be decidedly more explicit, so we'll see how it goes. Who knows, maybe it'll open the floor for discussion, and I can stop dodging questions about what I intend to do with my critical gender studies: sexualities major.
[Cool points, Sara. I'm glad you're engaged with your mom about masturbation -- I think a lot of people who've gotten that message growing up wind up doing it with a sort of "it's not really *that* bad" attitude. Actually talking out your differences instead of sweeping over them is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable about *not* doing it. And finally, let me know when your new blog is up. Thanks. --fl]