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Sparkle (7)
So a few weeks ago, I made a terrible error. I was driving my girlfriend and her daughter home. I’d read something funny on the Internet earlier that day that I wanted to tell her about, so I did. Animatedly. Loudly.
It was this thing about how Moby wants to make porn about men with average-sized penises. “So then the article is like, “Moby is a man who doesn’t have hair. He doesn’t eat meat, he doesn’t care for furniture. But like all men, he wants to make porn.”
I told this story a little too animatedly, and into the silence that followed, the little girl in the back said, “What is porn?”
Now, clearly I should not have been talking about porn in front of someone else’s child. That was a major social faux pas. I am sorry I did it.
And the Universe has been making me pay for it ever since.
First, there was Grease. You know, that cute movie from the '70s, about teenagers in the '50s with a goofy penchant for singing and dancing? I remembered this flick as a lighthearted jaunt through high school romance. I’d forgotten the “teen pregnancy” subplot until I was watching it with the kids. This scene rolls around when two of the central characters roll into the backseat of a car in a secluded spot.
“I know what those people are doing!” Rio shouted. “They are going to have sex! In their car!”
“Yep,” I said, suddenly wishing we’d opted for another episode of "My Little Ponies."
A moment later, the boy on screen pulls out a condom.
“What’s that?” Rio asked, right on cue.
“It’s a condom.”
“What’s a condom?”
“It’s a kind of plastic wrapper you can put over a penis if you want to have sex and you don’t want to get pregnant. It stops you from getting pregnant.”
“And they don’t want to get pregnant, do they?”
“No, they don’t. They are in high school. They’re still teenagers. Having a baby when you’re a teenager is really hard. It’s a good idea to wait until you’re a grown-up, and that’s what they want to do. They want to have sex and not get pregnant.”
The characters, meanwhile, have now discovered that their condom is a crispy bit of dried out rubber, thrown it away, and decided to have sex anyway.
“Mommy! They’re having sex without a condom! That’s really stupid, isn’t it Mommy? What they’re doing is dumb! Are they going to get pregnant?”
“Yes, I think they are,” I say, vaguely remembering (wrongly, it turns out) how this plot thread goes. “And yes, it is really dumb. If you know you should be using a condom, having sex without one is stupid.”
“Daddy! Daddy! These people in the movie are really dumb! Daddy, they had sex without a condom and now they are going to be parents and they don’t even want to have a baby. Daddy, that’s dumb, right?”
So I guess that went Okay? I mean, I can’t say I enjoyed having an off-the-cuff conversation about contraception with my 7-year-old, but I’m glad she got to talk to me about the idea that sometimes people have sex for fun, not just to make babies. And that birth control exists and it’s smart to use it. I don’t think I handled that with grace or anything. I wish I’d been clearer that there are all kinds of sex you can have that don’t risk pregnancy at all, for one thing. I think my perspective came out a little heteronormative.
But whatever. We got through it, and I’m sure I didn’t do anything to discourage her from talking to me about sex again if she has more questions.
Really sure. How can I be so sure?
Because a couple of days later, we were sitting around the living room when she offered to read the newspaper to me. I’d just come in from a long, tiring outing with her little sister, and wanted a few minutes to sit in peace on the couch.
“Sure,” I mumbled without looking up. “You can read the newspaper to me.”
"This guy was in Fleetwood Mac!” she says. “Look at his picture, Mommy! And here’s an interesting bicycle. Do you want to eat this kind of food?”
I should probably have figured out that she was reading The Phoenix, but as I mentioned, I wasn’t really paying attention. Until she turned the page and said, “Oh, Mommy! Here is the girly page!”
That’s right. My 7-year-old had just discovered the adult personals. I handled this kind of the way I would handle an encounter with a poisonous
