Recently, I’ve endured several conversations on how my friends and family learned about sex or conversations about their sex lives and sex toys in general. For the record, I played no role initiating these conversations, and in most, I was only subjected to them; I was not an active participant. Remember? No?
Hi, I’m Mindy, and I’m a prude.
I blame Sex and the City. Good God, pretty much every woman I know has seen the TV show and/or films. (I’m refusing. I made it more than 10 years without buying into the hype. I can survive this. God, I hope I can survive this.) As a result of the craze that is SATC, everyone and their Manolo Blahniks are talking sex. And unfortunately, I’m being pulled into the mix.
Some of the conversations have made me turn redder than my shoulders after 15 minutes in the summer sun. Such as the one a couple weeks back when it was asked if I had…well, you know…a toy.
And at times, the conversations were entertaining. For instance, there was the conversation I heard where the speaker threatened to rent a hotel room for…ahem, self-satisfaction, so that the ghost of her dead mother couldn’t see what she was up to. I would hope that ghosts can read minds, and at the mere thought of…hands-on lovin’, the ghost would want to go see what her other children are up to. Otherwise, do you think ghosts can wash out their eyes with soap? I know I wanted to after my mom made the aforementioned threat.
EW!
No child ever wants to this about his/her parents having sex. Horrific, I mean, ew! Parents are asexual, and the muffled noises we hear at night, well that’s just them playing army commandos, right? I don’t ever want to think about the process my parents used in conceiving me. I prefer to believe that I miraculously appeared in my mom’s uterus. I know it’s not true, but really, that’s a visual I don’t ever want to have again.
I remember Mom trying to talk to Paul and I about sex back in 1989. It was probably the most mortifying day of my life. Yes, it even tops that time I fell on my face in front of my entire office and flashed my underwear in the process. On that fateful day in fifth grade, the boys and girls were split up so that we could learn about our respective puberty cycles. Even though Paul and I had a pretty good grasp of what to expect, Mom still felt compelled to review it with us that evening following school. Worse, she did so with her mom sat next to her on the couch.
Say it with me, y’all: AWKWARD!
Some people may not mind learning about the birds and the bees from their parents. Okay, we didn’t mind that, but with Grandma there, it was a tad uncomfortable. I mean, it kinds begs you to start walking through the process of how you came to be. And not only did I have that disturbing mental picture of Mom and Dad doing what Barry White always alluded to, but I also had the same with my grandma. No wonder some people choose to rot their brains with drugs or video games.
Now do you wonder why I’m so strange? Or is it starting to become a bit more clear?
Mindy Kinnaman 