Behind Every Choice Is a Story

Chapter One: The talk

3 Chapter One The talk When the question is sex, the answer is silence. My mother visited me in New York City a few years ago. One day, as we were walking home from Rockefeller Center, she said to me, out of the blue, “You know, I don’t think I ever said the word ‘sex’ to you in my life.” I thought for a minute. Because of my job, I probably spend more time talking about sex than any woman in America. “You know,” I said. “I think you’re right.” As best I can recall, that constitutes the sum total of our discussions of the subject. So I could feel for Tamika: My mother was not at ease talking about sex or even about the female body. I was at Girl Scout Camp when I woke up to a sleeping bag full of blood and thought I was dying. I was too afraid to even talk to our troop leaders. A week later my mother discovered, from looking at the laundry, what was going on. She never talked to me about exactly what happened but she did provide a pamphlet . . . I just thank God that I did not end up a statistic—a pregnant teen. —Tamika, age twenty-eight 4 • Growing up America’s most popular topic is its most avoided subject When I was thirteen, my father handed me a slim paperback titled The Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers. Not that he ever said anything else to me, but at least I had some accurate biological information and, in a larger sense, acknowledgment that I was growing up and therefore entitled to know these things. He probably felt pleased to have fulfilled his duty as a parent. My little book became the hottest item at that summer’s Campfire Camp. By the end of my two-week stay, the book was in shreds. Like most children, my campmates learned about sex from a peer—me (or at least my book). And my career as a sexuality educator was unwittingly launched. The only problem—other than the fact that my little book was trashed—was that I didn’t understand much of what I had read, and I was too embarrassed to ask questions. No one in my home said “sex.” Ancient history? I wish. Not enough has changed. From Jeni, now nineteen and in college: The frustration, the pain, the shame and guilt. I was only fifteen and I didn’t know what else to do. My little sister was pregnant also. We both had just recently lost our virginities and I still didn’t even know what an orgasm was. In my house we talked about everything, but that one topic seemed to stay out of all conversation. Jeremy, twenty-one, says it even more succinctly: As a teenager, I was not informed of sex . . . by my parents or schools. I had to learn it all on my own, the hard way. In public today, battle lines about sex are drawn all the time. Over condoms. Over sex education. Over what services a teen courageous enough to go to a family planning clinic can get. Comprehensive, medically accurate sex education gets painted as promoting sex and promis- The talk • 5 cuity. Contraceptive ads are banished from Fox TV ’s sexually explicit Temptation Island. At the same time, in private, parents retreat from honest talk about sex. Doctors fail to take sexual histories. School nurses cower. Talk is perceived as risky. A parent who merely teaches a child proper terminology for body parts can get into trouble, as Marian found out when her daughter was in daycare: The little boy said, do you want to see my peter? My daughter replied, “that’s not called a peter, it is a penis!!” I was called in by the school principal because the boy went home and told his mother that my daughter told him he had a penis. Later, my daughter was in the girl’s bathroom while a teacher was changing her ‘pad’. My daughter went out to a class of fiveyear -olds and announced that the teacher’s egg broke. Needless to say, I was called to the principal’s office again. This time they recommended that I tell my daughter that not everyone is ready for the information she has. Somehow, she is a well-adjusted twenty-five-year-old going...