Conversations About Sex

Conversations about sex are a paradox, particularly when we look back to our teenage years. On one hand, for so many of us, sex was the dominant thing we thought about. We imagined. We speculated. We strived toward it. And, yes, we talked about it—with friends, with ourselves, maybe a sibling.

Sex is, simultaneously, the most horrifying topic to talk about. When it came to talking to parents, for example--the parties society has anointed as the most appropriate purveyors of knowledge about the birds and the bees, despite no parent I know of really being prepared for such conversations--the topic of sex is impossible. To talk about sex means revealing that you have thought about sex and, in so doing, probing crushes and hitherto-unspoken-of experiences and masturbation and insecurities and a laundry list of other topics you have no interest in sharing with someone you’ve desperately been keeping secrets from, and yet simultaneously seek the approval of. And all of that doesn’t begin to address an implicit understanding that the parents who gave birth to you and are talking with you about sex are speaking from personal experience. Is there anything more fundamentally problematic than really thinking about your own parents’ pre-, post-, and mid-coital moments?

I learned about sex around the age of ten, from my sister. I don’t remember much particular context, but I can only assume that she had only recently learned the mechanics and thus, like any good older sibling, felt duty-bound to share when she volunteered that if I ever wanted to know how people have sex, I could ask her. Naturally, within a couple minutes, I had asked.

She asked how I thought people had sex and I responded that it had to do with a man’s penis and a woman’s breasts--already aware that each part of the anatomy had its own taboo qualities and that adults referred to them as private parts. She clarified the particulars for me.

The next time I had a conversation about sex with a family member, the talk was shorter and more to the point. My father and I had just pulled into the driveway at home after some errand or other. I was sixteen years old and junior prom was less than a week away. I was taking Jenny, about as clean-cut of a Christian girl as the school had to offer, and moreover a friend with whom I hadn’t given or received any hints at romantic overtures. She was the kind of girl who, despite my budding hormones and finding her pretty, I had absolutely no plans, expectations, or even hopes of engaging with in anything more intimate than a slow dance in full view of the dance chaperones.

But my father didn’t know that. He put the car in park, turned to me, and asked, “Do you need any rubbers?”

There is an extent to which this interaction could make you characterize my dad as kind and charitable--dare I say, even cool--for offering his unconditional assistance in this matter. He wasn’t trying to guilt me into confessing dirty thoughts; he wasn’t trying to give me a lecture about the evils of premarital sex. If anything, he was kinda-sorta trying to play wing man.

By the same token, the idea of my father talking to me as a sixteen year old--a sixteen year old who had never had a real date, let alone had a girlfriend at that point in my life--still seems off. Perhaps we had watched enough television shows and films together with sex subplots that he assumed I knew what I needed to know. Likely, he felt as tongue twisted and unsure as I have for most of the awkward conversations in my life that he didn’t know what to say and spat out the most concise version of the sentiments he wanted to get across.

I didn’t thank him. I don’t remember my exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “No, Dad. No.”

I wouldn’t have sex until a few years later, but a couple months after it had happened, another conversation about sex came my way, this time in the newspaper office in which I worked during my undergraduate years. I don’t remember the context, but I must have said something about sex to prompt Sally, a co-worker I’d been perfectly friendly with up to that point to say, “But wait, you’re a virgin, right?”

This is the sort of question about sex to which there’s no right answer, particularly when you’re a skinny, not particularly suave young man who’s non-virginity could justifiably be in doubt. If I were too explicit, it would, at the least, be ungentlemanly and, more to the point, run the risk of circling back to my first partner and precluding future encounters. Too vague and I could just as easily come off as a liar with all the grace of American Pie’s Sherminator, boasting of conquests no one would trust I'd actually had. Undershoot or sidestep the conversation--keeping things ambiguous, rightfully telling Sally it was none of her business, or shying away in such a way that might imply she were right and, well, I’d reinforce the image that I was a virgin, and when you’ve a young man who just lost your V-card, that’s about the last thing you want to do.

I tried to strike a balance between indignant and disaffected when I told her I was not a virgin, but recall leaving the conversation with the sentiment that I, like the lady who “doth protest too much” had come off the worse for the exchange. Thus, much to my dismay, conversations about sex didn’t come any easier after I was actually having it.

But conversations about sex grew less frequent in the stages of my life to follow, progressing from one office job to the next. While I still indulged in my share of inappropriate conversations after hours, including an ill-advised short-term obsession with translating every sentence I heard into a “that’s what she said” joke, I recognized that personal matters generally grew more taboo as I progressed in my career--awkward and out of place, if not the stuff of cautionary tales bout sexual harassment suits.

So, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that conversations about sex returned to the fore after I walked away from office work for full-time graduate studies, working toward my second master’s degree. I was surrounded by a cohort that was mostly several years younger than me, and more often than not in different places in their lives. I recall a late-night talk over beers and barbecue plates at a restaurant off campus, after a reading. The conversation arose as to whether it were OK to wake one’s partner with oral sex.

One of my peers argued that he couldn’t imagine a scenario when he would object to waking to that sensation.

Another party put forth that someone asleep couldn’t possibly give consent, so, even if the act were well-received, it was nonetheless an act of rape.

“You can talk to your partner,” I ventured. To my surprise, all eyes turned to me. I had been relatively quiet in this social circle, and I think they were surprised to hear me pipe up, not on a conversation about literary aesthetics, but something so personal. “If either of you is interested in doing it, you have a conversation about what each of you is and isn’t comfortable with.”

After a pause one of the women I was talking with nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

I don’t recount this final anecdote to suggest that I have grown particularly enlightened, or that my insights were so original, unique, or impressive in that moment. Just the same, in reflecting on the conversation, I marveled that, at the age of thirty-one, I had just had a mature adult conversation that was not only about sex, but about other conversations about sex—that I hadn’t been embarrassed, and that what I had to say had been reasonably well received.

And I guess that’s what happens as we grow more comfortable with not only our sexuality and our partners, but most fundamentally in our own skin. Conversations about sex grow more practical. Less concerned with image and cool. More concerned with trust and caring. At one time or another, we learn sexual desires. We learn mechanics. We learn etiquette.

But perhaps best of all, we learn the companion piece to all this talk of penetration, rubbers, virginity, and oral sex in the morning. We learn to talk about love.