It’s a pretty well-known fact that every parent out there dreads one thing above all others. Not changing diapers, watching annoying children’s shows, or scrubbing crayon off the walls (though those are all pretty bad). No, every parent fears the day that these five words exit their child’s mouth:
“Where do babies come from?”
Well, every parent, that is, except for mine.
That’s right. I never got the birds and the bees speech from my parents, much to their probable relief. Why not, you ask? Well, we can thank my third parent for that: good old TV.
You see, at around the time when a kid usually asks about these sorts of things and gets something resembling a coherent answer (which I’d estimate is between 8 and 10 years old), I was in the position most kids were. I had something of an idea of reproduction through a series of dirty jokes (which led to exclamations like “Wait … so I’m made out of PEE?”), but there were still a few blanks that needed filling in.
I could’ve asked my parents to answer these questions for me, but they did me one better ““ when I was 10, I got a cable TV in my bedroom.
At first, I used this TV to play video games and watch “Star Trek” reruns and Nick At Nite (favorite show when I was 10: “Mary Tyler Moore.” Seriously). This all changed one night, though, when I came across “Animal Instincts 3″ on HBO.
I remember flipping the channels and one minute, I was staring at Captain Kirk leading some red-shirted crew members to certain death. The next moment, I was looking right at a woman’s bare chest.
This was perplexing to me. I mean, I had never seen anything like this on TV before. I clearly remember my first thought being, “Wait a minute, they can actually show this?”
Oh, and show it they did. Because not long after I flipped to HBO, the female lead and her male co-star proceeded to, uh … wrestle.
Now imagine me, as a 10-year-old, sitting in a chair looking up at the TV, frowning at what was taking place. Suddenly, the dirty jokes I had heard were all starting to make sense. It was sort of like that scene in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” where Steve Carell goes to Planned Parenthood, sees a model of a vagina, takes it apart and examines it intently, only to curiously ask himself, “Where do you put the penis?”
Well, now I knew the answer to that question.
This viewing of “Animal Instincts 3,” its ludicrous story aside (Animal tranquilizers make people horny? Ha! I was 10, and even I knew these people would just pass out if they took them), taught me many things about not just sex, but about how ultimately pointless “the talk” can actually be.
I highly doubt my parents put cable TV in my room to teach me about sex. However, that’s the unintended side effect that exposing your child to the world can and often does have. And the effect is even more obvious today.
Imagine if I were 10 and wondering these same things now, in 2007. I could just go search on the Internet, and God only knows what I would find. Of course, I’m not suggesting parents should let their children get exposed to all manner of disturbing things on porn sites.
What I am saying, though, is that now more than ever, when you actually sit your kids down to talk with them about these things, there’s a good chance they already know the answers to all the questions you’re sure they’ll ask ““ especially if they have older siblings.
Hell, if they’re adept Google users, there’s a decent chance your kids could teach you a thing or two.
When it comes to soft-core porn as sex education, Humphrey feels that “L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies: Return to Savage Beach” runs circles around “Animal Instincts 3.” E-mail him at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.