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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
The podcast This American Life, which is probably a thing that I need to go on a true archive binge for, when they are running stories or episodes that may or may not be suitable for young ears, have a disclaimer and content notes for the story / episode that's about to play. Most of the content notes are standard, but there's an idiosyncratic one that, when I first heard it, went, "That's fascinating." That content note is "this story / episode acknowledges the existence of sex."
The first and most interesting thing about that particular disclaimer is how it threads the needle of informing the listener about the content of the upcoming story without saying anything graphic, and also gives a certain amount of deference to parents who are listening and want to keep the existence of sex secret from their children.
At least some of the audience is not familiar with this practice, perhaps because they're from a less sex-negative society than the United States, or perhaps because they were not raised in a religious tradition that has tries to prevent the understanding of and participation in sex for as long as possible, or places specific restrictions on who and when sex is allowed between people. Or possibly because they had a grownup in their life decide that understanding and education was more important than social pressure and/or niceties and had their questions answered, regardless of the age at which the question was asked.
There's a virulent strain of hypocrisy/malice/grift/opportunism that rips through the United States (and other places, as well) that think that women having sex outside of a structure of control by men (usually marriage, but not always) are a threat to the social order and offensive in the eyes of megachurch pastors who believe they speak for The Being Represented By the Tetragrammaton. That same strain also tends to thinks of gay and lesbian people as threats to the social order, because they don't produce children and are offensive in the eyes of megachurch pastors. (This is my most familiar context, yours may be different or have different figures in the roles of the hypocritical or villainous men.) And those pastors tend not to be hot on relationships between people that could be in relationships that would produce children, but aren't, like wlw bisexuals or mlm pan folk. These particular pastors, their handmaidens, and their lackeys, tend to think of sex as a corrupting force on the innocence of children, and the possibility of queer sex as even more corrupting of that innocence. Once a child or teenager knows about the existence of sex, these folks believe the child or teenager will attempt to have sex, as much and as often as possible. Therefore, to preserve innocence and prevent teenagers from fucking like rabbits, society must be cleansed of any mention of sex anywhere a child might be present.
The reasoning I usually see trotted out about this is that sex is a sacred act, meant to be performed between a husband and wife in their marriage, and for the purposes of having children. (This mostly mirrors what my father's advice for me about sex was, when I was old enough to get that advice: "Don't. Unless you're married and you want children.") This line of justification includes hostility to reproductive health care and contraception, because a woman shouldn't be having sex unless she's ready to bear the responsibility of pregnancy and childbirth. Unsurprisingly, people using this justification are either very quiet about the possibility of pregnancy from sexual assaults and other circumstances where the pregnancy would not be wanted and the victim did not have meaningful or any consent in the matter, or they're very loud that any woman who had sex and got pregnant must have invited it onto herself, regardless of the circumstances in which the pregnancy happened.
The goal of keeping sex a sacred mystery, not to be revealed until the wedding night, is often about ensuring that there is a "chain of custody," as it were, for girls and women to ensure they have never been obviously outside the authority of a man, from father (or other family member) to husband, and therefore are unlikely to have disruptive ideas about the institution of marriage, or the unquestioned and divine right of a husband to exercise absolute authority over his wife and any children in his household. (Boys and men, of course, are often exempted from such rules about purity and innocence, because they are boys and men and need to be able to understand the world as it is and exercise their divine right properly.)
The hostility to sex and sexual knowledge outside of those systems of control extends to queer people because, according to the pastors and their lackeys, queer people are inherently sexual. In the eyes of these lackeys, a queer person defines themselves in part about who they fuck (or don't), and therefore a visible queer person cannot exist without the acknowledgement of sex. (Het people are exempted, of course, from being inherently sexual beings, because het people are "natural" and the unmarked default, even if they are also partially defined by who they fuck (or don't.)) From there, it's not a long hop across the chasm from "queer people have sex with each other, and acknowledging that will corrupt our children" to "queer people want to corrupt our children by having sex with them," and this is when the accusations of "grooming" start getting slung about. When the prevailing attitude is that heterosexuality is normal, natural, and what The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton ordained for humans, queerness gets cast as something that happens to a child or a teenager, brought about by a malevolent force or someone who has already surrendered their soul to a malevolent force in exchange for some kind of temporary earthly pleasure. The innocence of children is corrupted merely by being near someone queer, therefore the correct solution to the problem of corruption is to ensure there are no visible queer people anywhere. (In this regard, there are no exceptions to who is covered by the rules…except, perhaps, church pastors, priests, and those who position themselves as "ex-queer" and promote the queer-hostile messaging.)
Because I am a professional book and media jockey, I know there are age-appropriate and scientifically accurate books about sex, pregnancy, genitals and who is allowed to touch them, and many other subjects that are, in my context, socially considered unsafe for children, or that children should not know about. Most of the other subjects, like death, adoption, and disability, seem to get a pass on the thought that only a child that is trying to understand what happened and sort through feelings would be interested in such works, and therefore there should be works available to them in case such tragedy or situations occur. Love, even, seems to be okay, but sex and queerness get significant pushback.
[So do racism and the other -isms, despite children experiencing those -isms far more frequently, and sometimes coming to -ist conclusions based on their observations and their attempts to make sense of the world from those observations. In those cases, though, it's only one group of people who want to remove mentions of those -isms from the collection, and it's the group most likely to perpetuate them, as the groups on the receiving end of them usually have already had the talk about that early on in life. The arguments about the innocence of children and that teaching about those -isms will put wrong ideas in the child's head are mostly the same.]
The reasoning against queer books and accurate information about sex, genitals, pregnancy, and consent is much the same arguments made against queer people and other people who have and spread accurate information about these things. Which also means that the accusations that come down against queer people and people who are interested in more reproductive freedom and accurate understanding of sex and sexuality also come down against the book jockeys. It used to be that such things would happen rarely, and that having a conversation with the other person about the need to have accurate information available, the ability of people to choose what suits them best, and that they could trust children to put down material they weren't interested in or didn't understand was enough to get someone to grudgingly admit that you had a point, even if they didn't particularly like it. These days, they're a lot more emboldened by finding others like them and having had people who think like them elected and appointed to high offices so that they don't have to try and run the gauntlet of the library folk, but instead can get the governor or the Board to demand changes and to listen to these Warriors for Innocence.
That strain of belief in the innocence of children and the corrupting influence of a person existing near enough to them also makes it difficult for people whose jobs involve being around children to have much of an adult life. Teachers get this especially hard, since they are usually expected to be substitute parents and maintain the idea that the person they are as a teacher is who they are outside of their teaching job. Librarians have gotten a little more latitude, at least teen librarians and adult services librarians. Teen librarians are supposed to be able to connect with those strange and fickle creatures called teenagers, which means sometimes you hire the person with tats, piercings, and strange-colored hair to fit in, or at least be someone who's not too square for, the teens. Adult services librarians are presumably mostly working with adults, and therefore are allowed to be adults in many of their aspects of life outside the library. Children's librarians, though…well, let's just say I get called "Teacher" a lot when I'm working with the littles in programming and Story Time. (And I get misgendered a lot, too.) So, if I were the kind of person who liked to go to bars or clubs, or who regularly visited the casinos, or who exhibited obvious signs of an adult relationship that was not simultaneously heterosexual- and vanilla-appearing, I would need to do those kinds of things pretty far away from where I work. (The scene in Varsity Blues where the students travel to the local strip club and find out one of their teachers is a dancer there would never happen.) The local community might be fine with those things, or there might be one or more people in there who want to make a crusade against moral turpitude in public service and it just so happens that the children's librarian was observed doing something that is definitely not kid-friendly.
The funny thing is that children are more observant and knowledgeable that many grownups want to admit, and in the absence of guidance and information from their responsible grownups, children well draw their own conclusions. Teenagers, similarly, and they have a wider ecosystem to draw on, full of malinformation that will be incorporated if there isn't truth available from a trusted source. And fantasy portrayals that will be taken up as the closest thing to reality in the absence of anything else.
The World Wide Web, even on dial-up, changes the balance of power significantly in that regard, even though there are filter programs and other such ways of preventing "unauthorized" access to various parts of the Web. Those filter programs mostly still work on text content, and therefore so long as a page doesn't actually use any of the forbidden words, or performs a DNS lookup for a forbidden site, it will sail through the filters. (And then there are the more advanced filter defeat methods, like proxy servers and tunneling, and the still effective file transfer protocol called SneakerNet. With the advent of cheap and expansive storage methods, an entire library of forbidden things could live on whatever computer is most convenient for it, including computers not connected to any network.) Even with strong attempts to lock down a child or teen's Internet access and keep them monitored in various places, it only takes one breach in the firewall for things to get through, whether that's a friend with a parent with a more permissive attitude, or unfiltered internet access, or a sibling that can obtain those materials and has no qualms about sharing them.
Sometimes, in situations that go well, the discovery of age-restricted materials in the possession of someone age-restricted will spark talks with their grownups about fantasy and reality, consent, and will offer either themselves or another trusted adult as further conversation partnering and answering the questions that someone who acknowledges the existence of sex will have about the process, how to know when you're ready, who you want to have it with, and the like. And there will likely be a request about waiting until one is of the age to possess such materials before doing so. (I suspect many an exploratory entity learns their first infosec matters and materials in relation to pursuit of age-restricted material.) Sometimes, in situations that go less well, or in situations where the relevant grown-ups are more interested in asserting control than in acknowledging the existence of sex and providing information and answers, grownups double down on an insistence that sex is sinful, looking at sexual things is sinful, and looking at kinky things or fetish material is extra sinful, if that happens to be in the mix of the age-restricted material found. (Substitute "shameful" if there wasn't really a conception of sin in the household.) Such practices rarely do much other than instill shame and a need to hide (or hide better) the things that are still interesting to someone, but that have now been branded as forbidden or shameful. Most of the people I have talked to with that kind of upbringing and sex-negativity have said that it takes additional effort, and sometimes the assistance of professionals, to unwind that shame and have a mentally healthier attitude toward sex, sexuality, and what turns them on.
The great miracle, I suppose, is that so many children and teenagers make it through the space that wants to deny them everything, or give them the most cursory of information from people who are clearly embarrassed to have to do it, and come out the other side with a reasonably accurate understanding of how sex works, who they might be interested in doing it with, and what precautions they have at their disposal to make sex as safe as possible for themselves. (Whether they get used is a different matter entirely, as there's still a certain amount of masculine something tied up in getting your own pleasure maximized, regardless of what that means for your partner's pleasure or what risks they're being told to accept.) I'll bet more on that information coming from the Web, print material, or their peers, than from most formal structures or trusted grownups.
I certainly had to navigate issues, as the amount of information given to me by my trusted grownups has already been relayed above. Other messages came in, from the substitute paper driver who commented on the chest size of a passing woman and thought I was of age to begin engaging in that kind of objectification and opinion making. From peers in classes who speculated not just on the sexuality, but on the sexual practices of others, based mostly on how outspokenly feminist they were or how much they conformed to the limp-wristed stereotype. Finding out that a friend of mine was gay, had known this for a significant amount of time before telling me, and who was deeply in the middle of trying to figure out if there was a way of squaring this knowledge with a fundamentalist religious upbringing. (I suspect there was not, but I mostly lost contact with that friend after our university days, so I don't fully know how it has all resolved.)
There were the relationships that developed in secondary school and university days (others developing them) and first the wonder, than some amount of certainty, that I was a desirable person (even if I couldn't tell any kind of flirting more subtle than "Hey, I like you. Would you like to knock boots?") A somewhat lengthy string of trying to find compatible people, or trying to make myself compatible with people who were not compatible. (Because I didn't get any messaging about whether I had a say in that matter. All of my messaging was that I was supposed to be grateful active took an interest in me at all. Picking and choosing was for popular people and those who were more man than I was, and they were picking from abundance and apparently having women throw themselves at them.) At least one friendship ruined by expressing an interest of more than friendship. At least one relationship ruined through incompatibility and the need for self-preservation, once it finally kicked in and I listened to it enough. Laughing at Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me because it's funny, while a brainweasel gnaws at me that it's actually true. (It's not.) And, of course, all throughout this journey, collecting stories of what happened, what could have happened, and marveling at some of the things other people have done along the way. (Which, according to the update, now includes slime molds.)
So, yes, I acknowledge the existence of sex, and there's a big community of people out there who also do so, some of whom have been trained as educators or therapists to help people get accurate information and work through shame or curiosity. I still think that it was good for me that when I got asked by someone about where the sex books were, I was able to ask relevant questions that helped narrow the query to something useful, and then point the person to informative resources. Not freezing up or thinking the question inappropriate was good for me to understand, as well.
The podcast This American Life, which is probably a thing that I need to go on a true archive binge for, when they are running stories or episodes that may or may not be suitable for young ears, have a disclaimer and content notes for the story / episode that's about to play. Most of the content notes are standard, but there's an idiosyncratic one that, when I first heard it, went, "That's fascinating." That content note is "this story / episode acknowledges the existence of sex."
The first and most interesting thing about that particular disclaimer is how it threads the needle of informing the listener about the content of the upcoming story without saying anything graphic, and also gives a certain amount of deference to parents who are listening and want to keep the existence of sex secret from their children.
At least some of the audience is not familiar with this practice, perhaps because they're from a less sex-negative society than the United States, or perhaps because they were not raised in a religious tradition that has tries to prevent the understanding of and participation in sex for as long as possible, or places specific restrictions on who and when sex is allowed between people. Or possibly because they had a grownup in their life decide that understanding and education was more important than social pressure and/or niceties and had their questions answered, regardless of the age at which the question was asked.
There's a virulent strain of hypocrisy/malice/grift/opportunism that rips through the United States (and other places, as well) that think that women having sex outside of a structure of control by men (usually marriage, but not always) are a threat to the social order and offensive in the eyes of megachurch pastors who believe they speak for The Being Represented By the Tetragrammaton. That same strain also tends to thinks of gay and lesbian people as threats to the social order, because they don't produce children and are offensive in the eyes of megachurch pastors. (This is my most familiar context, yours may be different or have different figures in the roles of the hypocritical or villainous men.) And those pastors tend not to be hot on relationships between people that could be in relationships that would produce children, but aren't, like wlw bisexuals or mlm pan folk. These particular pastors, their handmaidens, and their lackeys, tend to think of sex as a corrupting force on the innocence of children, and the possibility of queer sex as even more corrupting of that innocence. Once a child or teenager knows about the existence of sex, these folks believe the child or teenager will attempt to have sex, as much and as often as possible. Therefore, to preserve innocence and prevent teenagers from fucking like rabbits, society must be cleansed of any mention of sex anywhere a child might be present.
The reasoning I usually see trotted out about this is that sex is a sacred act, meant to be performed between a husband and wife in their marriage, and for the purposes of having children. (This mostly mirrors what my father's advice for me about sex was, when I was old enough to get that advice: "Don't. Unless you're married and you want children.") This line of justification includes hostility to reproductive health care and contraception, because a woman shouldn't be having sex unless she's ready to bear the responsibility of pregnancy and childbirth. Unsurprisingly, people using this justification are either very quiet about the possibility of pregnancy from sexual assaults and other circumstances where the pregnancy would not be wanted and the victim did not have meaningful or any consent in the matter, or they're very loud that any woman who had sex and got pregnant must have invited it onto herself, regardless of the circumstances in which the pregnancy happened.
The goal of keeping sex a sacred mystery, not to be revealed until the wedding night, is often about ensuring that there is a "chain of custody," as it were, for girls and women to ensure they have never been obviously outside the authority of a man, from father (or other family member) to husband, and therefore are unlikely to have disruptive ideas about the institution of marriage, or the unquestioned and divine right of a husband to exercise absolute authority over his wife and any children in his household. (Boys and men, of course, are often exempted from such rules about purity and innocence, because they are boys and men and need to be able to understand the world as it is and exercise their divine right properly.)
The hostility to sex and sexual knowledge outside of those systems of control extends to queer people because, according to the pastors and their lackeys, queer people are inherently sexual. In the eyes of these lackeys, a queer person defines themselves in part about who they fuck (or don't), and therefore a visible queer person cannot exist without the acknowledgement of sex. (Het people are exempted, of course, from being inherently sexual beings, because het people are "natural" and the unmarked default, even if they are also partially defined by who they fuck (or don't.)) From there, it's not a long hop across the chasm from "queer people have sex with each other, and acknowledging that will corrupt our children" to "queer people want to corrupt our children by having sex with them," and this is when the accusations of "grooming" start getting slung about. When the prevailing attitude is that heterosexuality is normal, natural, and what The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton ordained for humans, queerness gets cast as something that happens to a child or a teenager, brought about by a malevolent force or someone who has already surrendered their soul to a malevolent force in exchange for some kind of temporary earthly pleasure. The innocence of children is corrupted merely by being near someone queer, therefore the correct solution to the problem of corruption is to ensure there are no visible queer people anywhere. (In this regard, there are no exceptions to who is covered by the rules…except, perhaps, church pastors, priests, and those who position themselves as "ex-queer" and promote the queer-hostile messaging.)
Because I am a professional book and media jockey, I know there are age-appropriate and scientifically accurate books about sex, pregnancy, genitals and who is allowed to touch them, and many other subjects that are, in my context, socially considered unsafe for children, or that children should not know about. Most of the other subjects, like death, adoption, and disability, seem to get a pass on the thought that only a child that is trying to understand what happened and sort through feelings would be interested in such works, and therefore there should be works available to them in case such tragedy or situations occur. Love, even, seems to be okay, but sex and queerness get significant pushback.
[So do racism and the other -isms, despite children experiencing those -isms far more frequently, and sometimes coming to -ist conclusions based on their observations and their attempts to make sense of the world from those observations. In those cases, though, it's only one group of people who want to remove mentions of those -isms from the collection, and it's the group most likely to perpetuate them, as the groups on the receiving end of them usually have already had the talk about that early on in life. The arguments about the innocence of children and that teaching about those -isms will put wrong ideas in the child's head are mostly the same.]
The reasoning against queer books and accurate information about sex, genitals, pregnancy, and consent is much the same arguments made against queer people and other people who have and spread accurate information about these things. Which also means that the accusations that come down against queer people and people who are interested in more reproductive freedom and accurate understanding of sex and sexuality also come down against the book jockeys. It used to be that such things would happen rarely, and that having a conversation with the other person about the need to have accurate information available, the ability of people to choose what suits them best, and that they could trust children to put down material they weren't interested in or didn't understand was enough to get someone to grudgingly admit that you had a point, even if they didn't particularly like it. These days, they're a lot more emboldened by finding others like them and having had people who think like them elected and appointed to high offices so that they don't have to try and run the gauntlet of the library folk, but instead can get the governor or the Board to demand changes and to listen to these Warriors for Innocence.
That strain of belief in the innocence of children and the corrupting influence of a person existing near enough to them also makes it difficult for people whose jobs involve being around children to have much of an adult life. Teachers get this especially hard, since they are usually expected to be substitute parents and maintain the idea that the person they are as a teacher is who they are outside of their teaching job. Librarians have gotten a little more latitude, at least teen librarians and adult services librarians. Teen librarians are supposed to be able to connect with those strange and fickle creatures called teenagers, which means sometimes you hire the person with tats, piercings, and strange-colored hair to fit in, or at least be someone who's not too square for, the teens. Adult services librarians are presumably mostly working with adults, and therefore are allowed to be adults in many of their aspects of life outside the library. Children's librarians, though…well, let's just say I get called "Teacher" a lot when I'm working with the littles in programming and Story Time. (And I get misgendered a lot, too.) So, if I were the kind of person who liked to go to bars or clubs, or who regularly visited the casinos, or who exhibited obvious signs of an adult relationship that was not simultaneously heterosexual- and vanilla-appearing, I would need to do those kinds of things pretty far away from where I work. (The scene in Varsity Blues where the students travel to the local strip club and find out one of their teachers is a dancer there would never happen.) The local community might be fine with those things, or there might be one or more people in there who want to make a crusade against moral turpitude in public service and it just so happens that the children's librarian was observed doing something that is definitely not kid-friendly.
The funny thing is that children are more observant and knowledgeable that many grownups want to admit, and in the absence of guidance and information from their responsible grownups, children well draw their own conclusions. Teenagers, similarly, and they have a wider ecosystem to draw on, full of malinformation that will be incorporated if there isn't truth available from a trusted source. And fantasy portrayals that will be taken up as the closest thing to reality in the absence of anything else.
The World Wide Web, even on dial-up, changes the balance of power significantly in that regard, even though there are filter programs and other such ways of preventing "unauthorized" access to various parts of the Web. Those filter programs mostly still work on text content, and therefore so long as a page doesn't actually use any of the forbidden words, or performs a DNS lookup for a forbidden site, it will sail through the filters. (And then there are the more advanced filter defeat methods, like proxy servers and tunneling, and the still effective file transfer protocol called SneakerNet. With the advent of cheap and expansive storage methods, an entire library of forbidden things could live on whatever computer is most convenient for it, including computers not connected to any network.) Even with strong attempts to lock down a child or teen's Internet access and keep them monitored in various places, it only takes one breach in the firewall for things to get through, whether that's a friend with a parent with a more permissive attitude, or unfiltered internet access, or a sibling that can obtain those materials and has no qualms about sharing them.
Sometimes, in situations that go well, the discovery of age-restricted materials in the possession of someone age-restricted will spark talks with their grownups about fantasy and reality, consent, and will offer either themselves or another trusted adult as further conversation partnering and answering the questions that someone who acknowledges the existence of sex will have about the process, how to know when you're ready, who you want to have it with, and the like. And there will likely be a request about waiting until one is of the age to possess such materials before doing so. (I suspect many an exploratory entity learns their first infosec matters and materials in relation to pursuit of age-restricted material.) Sometimes, in situations that go less well, or in situations where the relevant grown-ups are more interested in asserting control than in acknowledging the existence of sex and providing information and answers, grownups double down on an insistence that sex is sinful, looking at sexual things is sinful, and looking at kinky things or fetish material is extra sinful, if that happens to be in the mix of the age-restricted material found. (Substitute "shameful" if there wasn't really a conception of sin in the household.) Such practices rarely do much other than instill shame and a need to hide (or hide better) the things that are still interesting to someone, but that have now been branded as forbidden or shameful. Most of the people I have talked to with that kind of upbringing and sex-negativity have said that it takes additional effort, and sometimes the assistance of professionals, to unwind that shame and have a mentally healthier attitude toward sex, sexuality, and what turns them on.
The great miracle, I suppose, is that so many children and teenagers make it through the space that wants to deny them everything, or give them the most cursory of information from people who are clearly embarrassed to have to do it, and come out the other side with a reasonably accurate understanding of how sex works, who they might be interested in doing it with, and what precautions they have at their disposal to make sex as safe as possible for themselves. (Whether they get used is a different matter entirely, as there's still a certain amount of masculine something tied up in getting your own pleasure maximized, regardless of what that means for your partner's pleasure or what risks they're being told to accept.) I'll bet more on that information coming from the Web, print material, or their peers, than from most formal structures or trusted grownups.
I certainly had to navigate issues, as the amount of information given to me by my trusted grownups has already been relayed above. Other messages came in, from the substitute paper driver who commented on the chest size of a passing woman and thought I was of age to begin engaging in that kind of objectification and opinion making. From peers in classes who speculated not just on the sexuality, but on the sexual practices of others, based mostly on how outspokenly feminist they were or how much they conformed to the limp-wristed stereotype. Finding out that a friend of mine was gay, had known this for a significant amount of time before telling me, and who was deeply in the middle of trying to figure out if there was a way of squaring this knowledge with a fundamentalist religious upbringing. (I suspect there was not, but I mostly lost contact with that friend after our university days, so I don't fully know how it has all resolved.)
There were the relationships that developed in secondary school and university days (others developing them) and first the wonder, than some amount of certainty, that I was a desirable person (even if I couldn't tell any kind of flirting more subtle than "Hey, I like you. Would you like to knock boots?") A somewhat lengthy string of trying to find compatible people, or trying to make myself compatible with people who were not compatible. (Because I didn't get any messaging about whether I had a say in that matter. All of my messaging was that I was supposed to be grateful active took an interest in me at all. Picking and choosing was for popular people and those who were more man than I was, and they were picking from abundance and apparently having women throw themselves at them.) At least one friendship ruined by expressing an interest of more than friendship. At least one relationship ruined through incompatibility and the need for self-preservation, once it finally kicked in and I listened to it enough. Laughing at Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me because it's funny, while a brainweasel gnaws at me that it's actually true. (It's not.) And, of course, all throughout this journey, collecting stories of what happened, what could have happened, and marveling at some of the things other people have done along the way. (Which, according to the update, now includes slime molds.)
So, yes, I acknowledge the existence of sex, and there's a big community of people out there who also do so, some of whom have been trained as educators or therapists to help people get accurate information and work through shame or curiosity. I still think that it was good for me that when I got asked by someone about where the sex books were, I was able to ask relevant questions that helped narrow the query to something useful, and then point the person to informative resources. Not freezing up or thinking the question inappropriate was good for me to understand, as well.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-25 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 12:48 pm (UTC)Funny then that I had a string of boyfs at uni and after (and regret none of those relationships) before finding the one who was for keeps and we have built an 18 year marriage on top of a 32 year relationship all of it sexually active, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 04:16 pm (UTC)