Sex Talk

Magnify

When my mother was 17 years old, my grandmother (“Bunky”) summoned her to the den to “have a talk,” which only meant bad news. Mom remembers following her mother into the den and scanning her memory for what she might have done to get into trouble. The den is a small room with built-in bookshelves and two chairs for reading. There is an old TV and a lamp, and it is the room where as a child, Bunky and I had art shows. For me it was a room for books and drawing, but for my mother the den had always been a room for punishments. On that day, with the door closed firmly behind them, my grandmother turned around and said, “A woman who has sex before she is married is nothing but a common whore!” At 17, Mom was still a virgin and the words were a slap in the face. It was the sixties, a time of peace and free love, but my grandmother was preaching from a pulpit of the past. Bunky’s language wove the strands of sex and shame into my mother’s head, and she remained a virgin until she married my father, two years later.

When I began to show interest in the opposite sex, instead of hauling me into the den and yelling about being a whore (we didn’t even have a den), Mom said nothing. I learned about the birds and the bees through trial and error. We had a hardback copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves in our house, and my sister and I used to pull it down from the bookshelf, stuff it under our shirts and sneak it upstairs to our rooms to pore over the illustrations of naked male and female bodies, but Mom never talked to me about sex. Instead, I learned about sex my freshman year from the older girls at boarding school during late night “rag sessions.” After study hall, we snuck from our rooms to the common room, and sat in a circle to listen to the older girls’ stories of sex. They’d had sex in the backseats of cars, in motel rooms, and in the woods behind the science building. Sitting quietly and hanging on every deliciously scandalous word, I couldn’t wait to join the conversation. But the older girls never explained how to enjoy sex. They didn’t have the language to translate the act of sex into something other than an accomplishment, or a step on the ladder of popularity.