WHALE BIOLOGIST

[trinityvixen]

I dunno why I am still reading the comments about this.

Background info: Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister is pregnant. She's having the baby, and no, she's not married (nor rumored to be especially close to the sperm donor). If you didn't already know this...well, I don't believe that anyone hasn't had this news shoved in their face, but if you managed to escape it until now, I apologize for ruining your hot streak.

The question that is being commented on in the link above is when parents should give the "sex talk." Predictably, no one agrees with anyone else; the religious conservatives accuse people of making their kids want sex by bringing sex up at all (there's even one "L1BRu7 M3d1A C0NSP1R4CY" post in there for good measure; and everyone's obviously embarrassed.

Which, pardon me, is the fucking problem. Because of whatever trauma these people had inflicted on them as kids when they got the sex talk, they remain embarrassed. To me, that's a sure sign that, however sex was brought up (if it was), it was too late and too shame-laden when it was. Am I a crazy liberal? Yeah, probably. Am I wrong? Nope.

Like it or lump it, kids are going to ask questions. How prepared you are to answer them will affect them more than the information itself. It's like with babies and how we coo and aww at them. The communication is meaningless, but the vocalization is key. Telling a five-year-old that sex is when a boy puts his penis into a vagina (or mouth or anus or real doll) is an answer that is really beyond his understanding of cause/effect/omgwhy? But the fact that mommy/daddy can't say that while making eye contact or have to think about it for a while opens a real can of worms. Associations are key.

And embarrassment is a self-fulfilling prophecy, unlike, say, the accusations that telling kids about contraception makes them have sex more (which is, in a statistically significant fashion, patently not true; whereas "abstinence" programs do nothing but leave teenagers uneducated about means to protect themselves when they go ahead and have sex anyway).

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that "no one agrees with anyone else". As much as I hate artificial dicotomies, there are fairly obviously two vocal groups, here: The realists, and the nutjobs. (Guess which side I support?) You either understand that kids are going to be curious about sex regardless and should be given full information as soon as they want it; or you believe sex is ickynaughtysinful and as long as kids can be kept ignorant, they'll be miraculously pure.

I, for one, was told the penis-in-vagina thing very young, and remember getting a couple of "official" sex talks when I was 10 or 11. My parents also were...unsubtle as to where they kept books about sex.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

A good deal of sexual knowledge should be self-discovered, so I like your parents' approach. And there should be talks--plural--so that's about right, too. Honestly, openness is to be encouraged, so the more the better.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

So, what do the whales have to do with this? Is it a play on "whale whore" or do you have whales on the mind now that we know they might have evolved from raccoons?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's just a Futurama reference :)

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Honestly, the amount of time spent considering the Jamie Lynn story as somehow indicative of any national trend or a failure of sex ed just seems silly to me. The story's really more basic than that; the Spears family is, for lack of a better description, famous white trash.

Though if you want to kill some time on a thread whose commenters will make you fume even more, check out Rachel Lucas's post on the subject, which is perfectly reasonable, but some of the commenters seem to want to go back not to the pre-Roe era, but to the pre-Griswold era. Yikes.