Beyond Birds and Bees

Introduction

I was never likely to write a book about sex. I grew up Catholic in a middle-class American suburb where I babysat often, wrote long frilly nature poems, and always waited thirty minutes after eating before jumping into the pool. Despite commendable efforts by my parents and teachers, I was expecting a punctuation mark for my first period, and I thought my breast buds were tumors. By the time I rolled a condom onto a banana in my high school health class, I knew I wouldn’t be repeating the exercise anytime soon. My parents had told me they waited until marriage to have sex, and judging by the slinky cat costume in my mom’s pajama drawer, their love life hadn’t suffered. My inexperience didn’t stop me from having boyfriends in high school, but my one earnest attempt at fellatio sent my beau into convulsions of laughter rather than throes of ecstasy. (I’d been thinking corn on the cob, not popsicle.) Certainly nobody on the yearbook committee nominated me Dr. Ruth’s protégé. Maybe more like her cat sitter. And that made me perfectly happy. But as I got older, my naïveté kept me from questioning the lopsided culture I cheerfully called my own.

I met my future husband in college, where it never crossed my mind to enroll in a women’s studies class or to join in Take Back the Night marches. It failed to strike me as odd that he got to know my anatomy better than I did. As we signed our marriage license, I took his surname without a second thought. I rather liked that Dan took care of lawn mowing, gutter cleaning, and snow shoveling. I figured he was happy I oversaw flower gardens and everything kitchen-related. (We took turns brushing the cat.) Eventually we had a baby, and that’s when the inequity of traditional gender roles began to sink in for me. You might think years of street harassment and condescension at work would have clued me in, but for a long time those dynamics hid in plain sight, too normal to notice. Yet how come, in a modern marriage of equals, Dan and I never discussed how having kids would affect my career—or how my default child care role as a mother meant becoming a father would not affect his? Now and then I vaguely wondered what my daughter, by virtue of being born female, was in for. Four years later, our second daughter was born. And some time after that, it finally occurred to me to look up the answer to a pesky little question: What is the difference between a vulva and a vagina?

All I can say is that gender equality wasn’t something I’d spent much time thinking about, and the birds and the bees just weren’t my focus. As a youngster I had gotten by, and as a parent, I figured those details would somehow sort themselves out for my kids—perhaps with a nice pamphlet on a day when I planned to be out of town. I never set out to be a champion of the facts of life.

So what sparked my curiosity? How did I become passionate about exploring attitudes toward sexuality and especially the way we teach our kids about this still largely taboo subject?

Looking back now, I can see that the journey began with my first pregnancy. I felt deep in my body that I knew how to carry, give birth to, and nurture a child, and I was surprised how many controlling (and conflicting) messages came my way about how to behave and look while pregnant, how to give birth in the best possible way, and how to be a good parent. Once my daughter was born, trying to be a perfect mother—even by standards I hand-picked myself—made me stressed and miserable. The other parents I knew in our Minneapolis neighborhood—especially the mothers—seemed just as frustrated and overwhelmed. Our babies were fine (if maybe a tad demanding), but we, their caretakers, were barely hanging on.

When Caroline was almost two, Dan’s airline job relocated to the Netherlands, and we moved to the heart of Amsterdam—a city world famous for its openness and tolerance. It was uncanny, but almost as soon as we arrived there, something felt better. As a parent, I felt expected to be human, not superhuman. As a woman, I no longer felt examined and judged—and therefore I soon became newly comfortable in my own skin. I marveled—and sometimes puzzled—at the openness and pragmatism with which Dutch families raised their kids. At first I couldn’t put my finger on why things felt so different. But as I eventually learned, this was simply how it felt to live in one of the world’s most gender-equal societies.

Shortly after we moved back to the United States, this time to our hometown of Seattle, Caroline’s little sister, Libby, was born. No longer angsty about how to take good care of babies, Dan and I now found ourselves worrying about how to raise two happy, healthy daughters as we perceived American gender norms with fresh eyes: pink and blue toy and clothing aisles, early and even earlier sexualization (baby bikinis? “chick magnet” onesies?), and a ubiquitous, withering male gaze. It had always been there—that constant sense of being watched and appraised that every American girl finds a way of living with—but after we’d spent a year and a half without it, the gaze and its wounding power were much more obvious now.

More than anything, I wanted my daughters to grow up without shame. I wanted them to be at home in their bodies and to always speak their needs, desires, and ambitions (except at bedtime, when I just wanted them to go to sleep). I wanted them to always love and be loved in healthy, secure relationships. It turned out that my friends raising sons had analogous concerns as they, too, tried to teach their children to honorably navigate a culture that objectifies bodies, normalizes rape, and rewards a cramped idea of masculinity.

It took time to figure out my next move, but eventually I understood that I needed to relearn how to think about sexuality. I needed to dramatically change my approach when it came to bodies, relationships, and love—urgently, while my children were still young. And once I became aware that raising happy, healthy children would mean acknowledging sex in a whole new way—and might mean dealing in unfamiliar ways with my own uncertainties about intimacy and pleasure—it only took a few conversations with friends to confirm that I wasn’t alone in asking questions at the edge of my comfort zone and hoping to find fresh, modern, and realistic answers. Clearly, it was time to bring the birds and the bees into the twenty-first century.

But how?

I had lived in the Netherlands long enough to notice what my Dutch friends and their children experienced: super-low teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infection (STI), and abortion rates; more positive, consensual sexual encounters; better parent-teen relationships; and far more respect and cooperation among genders. But now I wanted to grasp how they accomplished all that.

So I decided to take a closer look at what actually goes into raising children to be familiar, comfortable, reverent, and responsible with their bodies—children whose sexual lives are acknowledged, accepted, safe, and not so warped by shame. What had the Dutch been teaching that I was on the verge of leaving out? How, as a parent, could I balance my children’s need for health and safety with their right to freedom and pleasure?

To find out, I embarked on a journey of observation, research, and reporting—all the while trying new things in my own household. I soon learned that Dutch parents ask the very same questions we do when it comes to kids and sex: Must I talk about it? When? How? What should they know? But they come up with markedly different answers: a range of actions and behaviors, often deceptively small, with the power to shape a more just and free society. I discovered how, from babyhood on, Dutch kids are taught by their parents about healthy sexuality as naturally as they’re reminded to eat fresh veggies and look both ways. In Dutch schools, I saw how world-class sexuality education begins with lessons for four-year-olds on body parts, knowing how you feel about being touched (on the arm!), and how to form sound relationships. I discovered the completely unexpected ways in which Dutch adults deal with preschoolers’ normal tendencies to put their hands in their pants and “play doctor” with friends. When I joined Dutch parents gathered in a bookshop to hear experts on dealing with puberty, I expected sex-talk sample scripts. To my surprise, the subject was how to keep parent-child relationships close and lines of communication open. Why? Because body changes and sexuality had always been out in the open, of course.

In these pages I write a good amount about what I have learned from watching and listening to Dutch experts, educators, and families. But this is not a book about them. It’s a book about us: Americans who sense that something’s amiss in our culture’s approach to sexuality—and who suspect that more openness might be part of the solution. This book is written not by an expat waving from afar but by an American parent right here at home who had her own reasons to go looking for solutions to suit the society she knows best. In fact, when my research led me beyond Dutch borders and back to different parts of the United States, I found that plenty of American parents are already doing things the “Dutch” way—but they often keep quiet about going against the norm, which can leave them feeling more alone than they really are.

Allow me to say here that as much as I love giant cheese wheels and bounteous vowels and consummate practicality, I don’t mean to argue that Holland is perfect. For one thing, it’s a great place for tourists to get run over by bikes. Beyond that, though, and more to the point, plenty of Dutch men and women are capable of being sexist, and they often adhere to old-fashioned gender roles. Despite the fact that schools in the Netherlands are required by law to teach about sexual health, including knowing boundaries and respecting diversity, some still don’t. The Netherlands may have been the world’s first nation to legalize same-sex marriage, and the city of Amsterdam may be a top LGBTQ+-friendly place to live and have 180 nationalities, half of whom identify as ethnic minorities, residing more or less peacefully in one place, but like Americans, the Dutch still do—and will probably always—deal with instances of discrimination. Even though the Netherlands perches in fine company at the tippy-top of world racial- and gender-equality charts, my Dutch friends would be the first to say that they’ve still got a long way to go toward full fairness. Dutch people are allergic to pompousness, so if they weren’t embarrassed to hear they’re leading the world in effective sexuality education and egalitarianism, they’d probably be surprised—or skeptical. Still, to me as an outsider, many tantalizing lessons of the Dutch approach stand out. I don’t want to cherry-pick, so in this book I explore social context wherever I can. But it’s my hope that also, sometimes, just knowing there is another way can offer a meaningful beginning.

Some readers may want to know why this book on teaching about sexuality focuses so much on the messages we send to children before they reach puberty. The answer is simple: even for caregivers and educators intent on raising well-rounded, capable children, sexuality is never more neglected than during the crucial foundational years. A child’s early stages of development are the best and easiest times to set a healthy, happy course—with no unlearning required later on. My friend Deb, an early childhood educator and the mother of a high school boy, put it this way: “You can’t learn self-esteem when you’re fifteen. It’s really hard to unlearn shame, even if somebody comes along and tells you that you’re entitled to your sexuality.”

In the end, I came away from my research with an up-to-date, wholly new, and utterly surprising sex education. Certainly fine sexual health, safety, and self-esteem emerge from good sex ed offered early, but so too do respectful relationships, broader opportunities, and gender equality itself. As I searched for a new philosophy, what really caught my interest was the unexpected, the counterintuitive: advice that seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom and yet seemed better at the same time. In the end, the exciting part of this journey for me hasn’t so much been amassing handy data about different types of birth control and which comes first, wet dreams or whiskers, although I did learn plenty of things like that. What excited and scared me most—and still thrills me every day—is the challenge of wanting something different for my kids. Not only protection from unintended pregnancy and STIs, not only safety from sexual assault, but also total body autonomy, freedom from shame, an unquestioned right to pleasure, and relationships full of love and respect and intimacy and comfort and delight. In other words, I wanted to learn to accept and stop fearing my children’s sexuality—starting when they were still little. I wanted to see if I could learn to welcome that side of life with them. At least, I wanted to want those things. This is the book in which I try, and these are the lessons I learned in my better-late-than-never sex education: not the fourth-grade film strip, not the high school boyfriends, and not even the intimacy of coupledom and giving birth, but the new notions that I scrambled to gain when my kids needed a message that seemed to be missing.

Often when I tell someone I’m writing about how Americans teach about sexuality, they’ll snort and say, “I think you mean don’t teach.” And they do have a point. Although there have always been exceptions, we all know that a single, awkward birds-and-bees talk with a tongue-tied grown-up is practically an American rite of passage. But that is the past, and this book is about the future. It came about not because I’m a condom-flinging sexpert or an Alfred Kinsey acolyte or even much more adventurous in bed than a beached jellyfish. I wrote it because life handed me a revelation so big, so surprising, and so darn useful that I don’t dare keep it to myself. I hope this book can revolutionize—or at least advance—the ways we think, act, talk, and teach about sexuality in America. Because to my great surprise, that’s what we’re really talking about when we peek in the stroller—or drop off at college—and name those simplest of wishes for the future: health, happiness, security, equality, and love.