Sex is a Dangerous Business
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday July 28, 2012
Section: Opinion

My 11-year-old son knows what a rubber is. He’s seen me wearing one. We’d gone to the local pool so he and his best friend could let off some steam and I could do some laps.Fighting the uncooperative elastic of a white swimming cap, I was trying to force the last of my hair inside it when son number one said “Mum, you look like a rubber” and then he and his mate fell about laughing.

Sex education is a dangerous business.

I couldn’t think of a fast rejoinder. So I laughed too. And then swam up and down the pool with my rubbered head submerged in a sea of questions — does he really know what a rubber is? Does he know what’s it for? And why? And how?

I didn’t envy his teacher ploughing into the sex education curriculum at the end of last term. All that sniggering and stifled giggling. A little birdy told me in one class, the teacher had the kids yelling “Penis!” and “Vagina!” until they lost their indignity. I might try that at home. Mine’s still quite undignified.

We learnt about sex the old-fashioned way. Behind the toilet block in the school playground. Where girls tittered about how gross it would be and which one of the cool gang had already let a boy get to No. 2. (No. 1 was a kiss, four and five were unthinkable.)

By the time we were 13, sex education was a black mark on Friday’s calendar. The teacher who took it was awkward and humourless, much like those first fumbling entanglements would be. From her drawings of the male anatomy in both its incarnations, I had a handle on the mechanics (there was an apprentice I quite liked too!) but I’d heard not one word about love itself — infatuation, desire, what led to sex in the first place, and I knew from the besotted and lovestruck poets on the school reading list that I was only getting half the story.

Our mothers’ Cleo magazines threw up more questions than they answered. Cleo was a leap too far but the centrefolds had us in stitches. Right around the staples.

The Playboy stash under a girlfriend’s house filled all the gaps we could imagine. And there we’d sit, poring over the pictures (no one reads the stories) after school until we got a chance at a real life encounter, or her big brother came home.

After we left school we shared everything in infinitesimal detail. No young man’s performance was ever going to escape the huddled scrutiny of a clutch of young women chattering at warp speed about the ins and outs of last night’s liaison.

Perhaps that’s how we learnt how to behave sexually. We taught ourselves and each other about the unreliable and shifting rules of the mating game, the dangers of lust and inappropriate flirtations, the heaving burden of unrequited love, what felt right and what didn’t. Some of us found Mr Right and had the happy endings, others we know met with tragedy, crushed by heartbreak or infidelity, and many are still dating, like a never ending story.

So whose job is it to teach my son about love and sex? Yes, his teacher’s. If he’s concentrating hard enough and not distracted trying to impress the girls. Maybe his father, or his step-father, probably not me, if his withering look when I circle the subject is anything is to go by.

I will tell him everything I know about men and sex from a woman’s perspective. That should take about three minutes. Then I’ll give him my beautifully rehearsed and effusive speech on the importance of following your heart and what falling in love feels like and bore him witless until he begs for mercy.

No, he’s going to learn most of it by osmosis from his mates, as have generations of teenagers before him.

He’s about to turn 12 and I know he’s already being bombarded with confusing messages about his sexuality from the great mass of modern media that stalks his every move: Computer games with leather-bound women so tough you can beat them up and they’ll happily come back for more. Video clips that show women laid flat out like dogs begging to be used up and sent packing, with or without a bone. Magazines full of pop stars and actresses proudly telling anyone and everyone how they bump and grind and like to change partners on a Tuesday. Music that shouts angry misogyny into your earphones. Does modern male culture think it needs to reassert its wounded superiority by resorting to the age old business of insulting young women as hoes and hookers and easy game? God knows girl(ish) celebrities make it easy for them – have you seen Rihanna lately? She might be the highest-selling digital artist in US history, but she sure knows how to look cheap.

All the dads I know are going to great pains to teach their boys the right way to treat girls, leading by example. But they’re up against it when their teenagers are turning to their iPods for guidance on these matters. And what do mum and dad know anyway? The new world is awash with music and videos and games that not only justify, but glorify the exploitation and the objectification of women.

And half the time, those mixed messages are being drip fed through headphones attached to boys who take gangsta rappers at their every word, and whose parents, hearing only silence, live unwittingly in compliance.

Is feminism to blame for spawning this cult of misguided masculinity? And how do we correct it for boys coming of age? Sex education hasn’t got a hope. It’s still in the dark ages. And how on earth are young girls (and their parents, no less) going to navigate this mire of mixed messaging?

Fashion doesn’t help. Neither does our great obsession with celebrity. All that does is make teens feel inadequate and desperate to rise above the crowd as though being famous is a destination for who you are, not what you do.

I don’t know the answer, and my generation certainly hasn’t provided any adaptations for the renewed symbiosis of the sexes. Talk to any woman in her 30s or 40s and you’ll hear the familiar complaint that men and women are still poles apart.

And the pole is part of the problem. It’s a self-centred, narcissistic, fickle, unpredictable organ and women don’t understand it. That’s the nub of the problem. Women are every bit as fickle and unpredictable, and most of the time, none of us have the balls to speak openly and honestly about why we don’t get it.

Or give it. So there we lie, adolescence a distant memory, each of us on our side of the bed with this great gulf of misunderstanding breathing heavily between us.

For my eldest son (and the smaller one growing up alongside him), I hope he experiences all the rapturous highs and crushing lows that come with the search for acceptance and contentment.

Which is often what love and sex are about. I hope he cherishes the girls who will pass through his life. Above all, I want him to treat them with respect, no matter what happens.

And I hope somewhere along the line, someone perhaps older and wiser than him, will earn his respect by telling him the whole intoxicating story of sex, with all its knobs and buttons.

In case he ever has to wear a swimming cap.