Innocence Glossed

Your comment re: "sex is something that should be addressed at home" is DEAD ON ! How dare these sanctimonious prudes say, "We won't teach your kids and neither will you... under penalty of law." Once again, Star, you gave the nail on the head.

". . .because Smalley's children were 11 and 15, they were near or at the age of puberty, making it acceptable for their mother to explain sex to them. But, according to the criminal complaint, the younger son objected. The boy told a counselor about the discussion and, when asked by police, said he preferred that his mother 'keep that kind of information personal,' according to the criminal complaint."

Would any ADULTS be comfortable, hearing their parents talk about sex?

Under the "What's Wrong with America" banner, this is the sort of crap that show the difference in "LETTER OF THE LAW" people, and "intent of the law" people (CAPS used for emphasis).

The morons. . . .

As always, Starshine, I appreciate your frank approach. In this essay, however, I think the subject is more complex than “information versus innocence.”
You might be giving the parent of the other boy short-shrift. Innocence does not necessarily mean under-informed, or a puritanical denial of life and passion. It may mean guarding the imagination of a child, not so much from the facts of sex, as from distortions and dysfunctions of the adult world around the subject.
When I was a nine-year-old boy, in fact, my older brother and sister showed me my father’s secret stack of Playboy magazines on the upper shelf of his office closet. I didn’t really know how to assimilate this fact. It created a tear in the fabric of my world-view. Why do these women take their clothes off for the camera? Why does my father have these? Does my mother know, and what does she think? Would I get whipped if they found out I knew? There was a bad or shameful feeling about the whole thing. The fact of the magazines colored the way I looked at my father. When I was with him, I would try to imagine him buying or looking through the magazines. I was trying to put my mind around an apparent duplicity.
Meanwhile, every so often, when I could get away with it, I would climb up on a chair in the office, and look through the top two or three issues. By the time I was 12, I was getting very aroused by the magazines, and by the age of 14, I was looking at them almost daily and relieving myself by masturbation. This practice became a habit and an addiction which carried with it unbearable secrecy and shame. The duplicity of my father had now become my own duplicity. I was desperately afraid someone in the family would find out, or my parents would suspect what was happening.
This “lost innocence” became a drain-hole in my life, sapping my energy and attention. If I was not daydreaming about sex, I was pre-occupied with shame and a feeling of being soiled.
With my daughter I have tried over the years, during “teachable moments” to emphasize the wholesomeness and poetic beauty of sexuality. I told her, when she was younger, that the outer facts of sex might sound grotesque, but as her body, mind and emotions matured she would experience desire and perceive the poetry. I also told her that many people in our culture don’t get it. They trivialize, deflect and caricature sex with crude humor or expletives. But I told her, as you move through and observe all of this, somewhere preserve the thought that sex is sacred.
I’m tempted to specify a Hindu maxim in this respect. Its general form is “Those who preserve dharma (law, order, the natural way of things), dharma will preserve.” Here, I would apply it, “Those who preserve sex, sex will preserve” or at least, “Those who do not debase sex, sex will not debase.”

So much for “innocence,” (my above comment.) As for “information,” I do not think the woman in the story was merely educating her sons. There is something prurient about recalling her own experiences and displaying a vibrator to them. I do not believe it is a line, as you have described it, between information and disgust. To merely describe it like that puts it on par with getting grossed-out over open-heart surgery on the science channel. This is not merely a matter of anatomical disgust, and I would guess the boy’s “discomfort” is far more complex. If an adult outside of your own family were to tell your son about their own sexual experiences, and exhibit a sex-toy, I am sure you would consider that borderline, if not outright, sexual abuse. The fact that the adult in the story was not an outsider, but the boys’ own mother makes the story that much sadder to me.

How many billions of neural connections are evolving daily in an adolescent boy’s brain? It is like a wildfire. The front edge is the burning line of attention. In its wake is formed his concept of selfhood, values, goals, motives. When and how sexuality is introduced into this dynamic interior world is not a trivial consideration. As you correctly say, kids will learn one way or another. When knowledge of sex comes through the backdoor, it will most likely be a distortion which can infect the imagination, as I think my personal story illustrates. The sad thing is when, for many kids, like the boys in the story, there is no front door.