Love, Marriage and Sex - preferrably in that order

I'm sitting in an airport lounge in LA waiting for my connection back to Melbourne. May need to have a couple more drinks to make sure I sleep! Anyway, on the flight from Boston to here I was pondering something that has been bugging me lately.

Some of my friends and colleagues now have kids at that age when they start asking questions about sex. One of the American trainers at the course I just attended told a funny story. Her friend's 7 year old daughter came home from school and asked that question that parents dread: "Mummy, what's sex?" Her friend explained it in an "appropriate way" suitable for a 7 year old to understand. Long pause. 7-year-old says "So, do you and Daddy do that?" Even longer pause. Mum says "yes, sometimes". Even longer pause. 7-year-old thinks about this for a moment and says "You know, I think I'd understand it much better if I could watch you doing it"!!!! Glad I didn't have to explain to a 7-year-old why that was not going to happen!

But I digress. My real issue is with what is an appropriate way to explain this kind of thing to children. Another colleague of mine was telling me a similar kind of story lately, about having to explain the concept of sex to her young daughter. She told me that she had said that sex was something that happens between a man and a woman after they get married. She must have seen the look on my face and quickly explained "well, I don't really expect her not to have sex before marriage, I mean we all do, but I thought I should get her to aim high at least while she's this young". Funny though, it wasn't that part so much that bothered me. It was more the "sex is something that happens between a man and a woman" bit. Just in case anyone reading this hasn't figured this out yet, I am a lesbian, and my colleague knows this.

So, this conversation, so typical for parents with kids of this age, has bugged me for weeks, and I am adding a lot of my personal baggage to contextualise it. Let me share (purge?)... When I was growing up I didn't even know that there was such thing as gay men and lesbians, let alone transgender, intersex and all the other labels that we like to attribute to people. I did have a very similar sex talk with my Mum at about the age of 9, when I clearly remember that after my Mum explained the mechanics of the male/female sex act I said "eeeew, I will NEVER do that"! I wonder if Mum remembers that, she'd laugh about it now! Anyway, at some later stage, I found out about gay men and lesbians, but I had a very negatively stereotypical image of what they were like. Gay men were VERY effeminate men, and lesbians were VERY masculine women, and not only that they were really weird and evil. They were nothing like me.

I recently had a bit of a talk with my mother about 'when I realised I was a lesbian'. She asked. I think she feels that she didn't support me enough and that I may have been happier earlier if she had done something differently. Maybe. But as she pointed out, she didn't ever know anyone who was gay or lesbian (as far as she knew), so she really couldn't give me any broader kind of sex talk or support than she did. She did her best.

I am confident that children of glbti families are now given a wide range of information about sex, gender, etc and their freedom to be whatever works for them. And I would like to think that many heterosexual parents who are now exposed to a more 'normal' (I use that word with some trepidation) vision of homosexuality also have much more open discussions with their kids. But after the conversations I've had recently, I'm not so sure. All these people I've spoken with are not homophobic - well not in the conscious ugly sense of the word. But it doesn't seem that any of them have explained any options other than the standard hetero-normative view of sex to their kids. Is it because this is just easier? Is it because you tell what you know? Is it because they can't quite figure out how to explain homosexual sex (I mean, what DO lesbians do in bed?????!)?

And then the whole marriage thing. You see, if the highest standard to encourage your children to reach for is sex within marriage, then my relationship with my partner is automatically substandard, because we can't get married. And, on a related note, even within the heteronormative framework I worry about this as the standard, having known it to come unstuck with a few of my friends, who believed strongly in not having sex before marriage, and thus didn't think about contraception before marriage and then 'accidently' got pregnant before marriage in the heat of the moment (and here I don't mean necessarily sex in the standard heteronormative way either, a couple of them didn't actually 'do it' - in their words - and still managed to get pregnant - virgin mothers almost).

Anyway, I think a more interesting conversation would be about what marriage actually means to people - other than the actual wedding ceremony, that is. Anyway, that's another dissertation or two in the making.

Enough ranting and raving for one stop-over!