such a nice day — dry air, low 80s, sunny, sunny, sunny. Who wants to blog on a day like that? A family day trip was a much better option to exercise. Today, however, I had a boatload of social services meetings surrounding my disabled son’s care, so the “single item” approach still makes sense.
Basically, I want to comment on this “Mama, don’t let your kids grow up to be sex fiends” article that appeared last month. Its backdrop is the appearance of a swinger’s club where one would never expect it, but the author wags a finger at current culture, as if it’s a link to the existence of the swinger’s culture. Swinger culture didn’t originate with the sexual revolution or the wild 1960s; it originated with World War II married GIs — see the recent Pearl Harbor movie; the germ of the idea behind swinging bubbles up in that movie — and while drugs, sex, and rock and roll have been around for several decades now, even that doesn’t explain swingers club. A lot more people smoked pot and listened to acid rock didn’t become swingers than those who did. If they had, swinging would be like oral sex — a common practice. Swinging certainly has its numbers and adherents, but it’s still a minority group.
Now the thing I find most specious about this piece is the suggestions that good parenting will “cure” all this. Well, let’s look at the swinging population. Most are adults 35 and older. I know a lot of swingers in their 60s, so this isn’t the young porn star orgy you might think it is. Think about how culture was for each of these generations. We’re not talking on-demand television, Internet, cell phone, mass consumption childhoods here, folks. Heck, most of these folks can remember when a family had two radios — one in the house and one in the car. And one black-and-white television with all of (gasp!) eight television stations. A bottle of soda was a special occasion purchase, not an item of daily consumption.
I hardly think mass culture is the problem here.
Then there’s people like me, parents who have sexually adventurous lives. No, I’m not a swinger; it doesn’t figure into my “love map,” if I must use a configuration. But I have walked into S/M clubs where nudity, whips, and chains abound, often bound. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) And you know what? My kids have no idea.
Why? Because I’m a believer in strong parent/child boundaries. I do say no to my kids and quite often. They’re teenagers and they’ve seen less than a handful of R-rated movies and when they do, it’s something like Schlinder’s List, not Terminator Whatever. (Hell, we didn’t even watch The Simpson until my youngest was old enough to read.) We have no cable movie channels in the house and we monitor their computer use. Eminem? Get real. My kids know his music and image don’t reflect their lives; they shrugged him off long before he started winning Grammies. And we don’t drink soda every day either.
But where we draw the line in some areas, we open doors in others. My kids are free to talk to us about their maturation. Asking questions about sex isn’t taboo. Talking about sex politics isn’t either. (Recent case in point: Telling them about Katherine Hepburn’s parents and the local contributions they made.) Spending time with our kids is a big priority as well. Recently, while dining out as a family, I looked around and realized we were the only family with teens. It kind of shocked me because I’d been enjoying my kids’ company for so long that I hadn’t even realized that we’d become something of oddity in public eating places.
Is all this working? So far it is. My kids pick cultural offerings that reflect their lives. My son’s in science fiction, CCG cards, RPGs, D+D, Weird Al Yankovic, and TMBG. Geeky? Yes. Big deal. My daughter’s into Avril and other girl bands, computer animation, PG-13 movies, fantasy fiction, and creating hilarious composite art of Invader Zim doing misguided things to Sponge Bob. And so far, she shows no signs of needing boys, sex, and other adult-defining activities.
Will it hold? It likely will for my son; his developmental delays are pretty profound, but with my daughter? Who knows. But you know what? Chances are, if she’s at least 16, then I’ve done my job, getting her to the age of consent without incident. It won’t be the end of the world if she decides then that love and sex have a place in her life, and I’m certainly not going to expect her to wait until marriage. That’s sheer parental folly.
But will she avoid becoming a swinger? Again, who knows. Even if she does, it won’t be for lack of parental supervision during her youth. And chances are, I’ll never know. Parent-child boundaries die hard. Forunately.
