Is the age of the old "Birds and Bees" speech dead and gone?
I'm not sure why I'm asking this or why I'm even thinking it for that matter, but here I am. And I'd seriously like to know if the days of dads sitting down with their sons (and mothers with daughters, for that matter) and delivering some insanely awkward diatribe that is intended to convey the concept of sex from one generation to the next has gone the way of the DoDo.
Did any of you have such a speech from a parent or, as a parent, have you delivered this load of hooey to your kids?
To the best of my recollection, I never received "the talk" from my dad. And, to be honest with you, I'm not entirely positive how I learned about sex other than from the three moving boxes worth of magazines that one of my best friends discovered his dad had hidden in the basement of their house. I'm dead serious here. Three flippin' boxes worth. And they weren't even particularly well hidden.
Of course, every time we visited this friend's house, we were in said basement checking out the goods, as it were. It's amazing how quickly a youth can evolve from being a giggly kid excited about any little piece of illicit porn and chanting words like "boobies" to being a discriminator of what images are well shot and which models look better in which situations. I think that took all of two weeks.
There were other lessons learned from a variety of other sources throughout my formative years, as you might expect. But this Library o' Hef was my formal introduction.
And I'm sure my dad is happy he never had to suffer through "the talk."
So how did you learn the story of the birds and the bees?
This post was written in support of the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008. Don't worry, neither this post nor I am eligible for any prizes. Damnable thing about being the creator of the promotion.
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