Up until the sixth grade, we thought a blow job was something one did to a car, like a lube job or a brake job. Kids would joke about it on the bus and we couldn't figure out what was so funny. We'd go back to our math homework and sucking on our hair. And, to be fair, sixth grade for us wasn't that long ago, but long enough for kids to be born about the time we were missing out on the joke and make their way to Jr. High where they're having far more oral sex than we ever were and know more about most things than we ever did.
Considering our parents never bothered to talk to us about sex, what we learned, we learned on our own. We figured oral sex was just as popular as any other kind (though we filed it under "special kissing"), but come to find out that had our parents bothered to talk to us about sex, they probably would have skipped over the oral part, anyway.
Every day, thousands of parents sit down with their children to talk
about the facts of life. They want their kids to know how babies are
made, how serious sex is, and how to protect themselves. For most of
us, the topic is awkward enough without getting into advanced stuff.
That's why the coverage of President Clinton's blow jobs felt like such
a cultural assault. We just want to stick to the basics.
Well,
you can kiss that era of innocence goodbye. I'm not talking about your
kids' innocence. I'm talking about yours. For your information, Mom and
Dad, oral sex is now more basic than vaginal sex. That may not be part
of God's or nature's plan. But according to survey data, it's a fact of
life.
The latest evidence comes from "Noncoital Sexual Activities Among Adolescents," a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study analyzed the U.S. government's first survey
of such practices, conducted in 2002 and released three years later.
When the data first came out, I chided the media for ignoring the
findings of widespread anal sex.
Don't worry: I'll spare you that topic today. What's interesting in the
new analysis is the correlation between oral and vaginal sex. If your
kid is doing one, he's almost certainly doing the other...
...So cheer up, Mom and Dad. You don't have to be embarrassed any more
about discussing the facts of life with your child. She'll be happy to
explain them to you.
According to something we recently read, oral sex as we know it didn't even really exist until the Fifties (but we imagine some crazy kids were doing it anyway). Does this mean we really have to sit our 55-year-old mother down to talk about oral sex? Because we kind-of think we do now. And how do we make oral sex fit into "the birds and the bees?" We need a new creature.
[Slate: The Normalization of Oral Sex]
[Previously: How Long Were You a Technical Virgin?]
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