The Bitch's buzz on the birds and the bees

La Petite Bitchette was tormented by secrets of the forbidden adult world. Too many questions were answered with the frustrating words: "You'll find out when you're old enough to understand." She wasn't old enough to understand that, and it was infuriating. She wanted nothing more than to be "old enough" to be her captivating self mingling with the adults, trading witty banter, tippling cocktails, nibbling hors d'oeuvres, glamorously smoking cigarettes, jingling charm bracelets and ice cubes, in stunning Dior New Look gowns. It was 1958, and she was six, crabby in her itchy pink organza party dress and sick and tired of always getting the brush-off from grown-ups in conversation.

It wasn't as if Bitchette was asking the really tough questions! No, no, not "Where do babies come from?" She was so Not Interested in that. She'd already figured it out to her satisfaction. She had a baby at the house, called it "Brother," it came from "the hospital," and it got far too much attention as it was.

Far more intriguing was, "What's that metal box marked 'Kotex' on the ladies' restroom wall?'" Did it have anything to do with those strange ads in the ladies' magazines for mysterious products called "Modess" and "Tampax" which involved "freshness" and swimming in white bathing suits, somehow related to the manic-depressive girls in ads for the equally mysterious "Midol"? Bitchette curiously perused her grandmother's cast-off "Ladies' Home Journal" and "Redbook," which in 1958 were rife with those oblique ads, as they are today. When asked point blank, "What's Tampax-Kotex-Midol?" Bitchette's mother was embarrassed, flustered and flatly refused to answer. She just stalked off blankly into the kitchen and began passive-aggressively rattling pots and pans.

Constantly confronted with this enigma, Bitchette could have been forgiven for believing "Tampax," "Kotex" and "Midol," were names of sci-fi movie aliens (like her favorite, "Klaatu"). She might easily have speculated that a girl in a magazine ad was in a bad mood because she had been menaced by the hulking alien, Kotex, but, freed by the spell of Space Empress Midol, she could joyfully swim the Red Sea in her sparkling white bathing suit, protected by Tampax, the friendly stealth alien. Maybe all this would happen on the planet Uterus in the Menses galaxy. After all, there were no other, more plausible explanations offered Bitchette. And the answers finally produced were grotesque disjointed, and ludicrous.

It wasn't until Bitchette was in the sixth grade in public school, when she and her reluctant, dutiful mother made the onerous trek to a "mother-daughter" assembly. There, in the same auditorium where all of us had attended so many innocuous school plays and spelling bees, would be revealed the monumentally icky "Facts of Life!" under the supervision of our chirpy school nurse, in full regalia for the occasion. First we were treated to one of the more obscure works in maestro Walt Disney's oeuvre, "The Story of Menstruation" (c.1946), a lovely animated film short with the delicate, lyric quality of his "Cinderella" and the charm of frog dissection. After squirming through the sappy menarche cartoon I was thoroughly confused and not a little grossed out. I had never heard Peep One about these "perfectly natural" menstrual periods (what happens every month?). The horror; the horror!

When the fluorescent lights flashed back up in the utterly silent room, exposing our shocked, blood-drained faces, the nurse perkily passed out booklets, conveniently supplied by the Kotex company (who, in a stroke of marketing genius, also sponsored the original film production). The nurse had instructed us to write any questions on index cards and to pass them to the front. She read some upstart's card which dared her to tell us: "How do babies get made? Is it with the eggs?" We could feel the mothers crumpling around us on their metal folding chairs, as if until that moment they hoped they might have been able to make an early, clean exit. But, no, their torture had only just begun, and the word "sperm" had yet to be uttered. The nurse girded her loins and began, "Well, dear ... when a man and his wife love each other very much … "

That Night of Disney, Shame and Sanitary Products was in 1964. By the '70s, when the ravishing and charismatic Professor Melinda was growing up in the college town of Iowa City, women's collective consciousness was being raised and sex education was changing, especially for her, the 10-year-old daughter of a hippie feminist, (who, as it happens, was reading the same books the 16-year old Bitch was hiding in her knapsack with her birth control pills). Melinda said, "My very progressive Mother, then in her 30's, had always encouraged my voracious reading. At 10 I was reading at 8th-grade level, so kiddie books about 'where babies come from' weren't going to cut it!," the Professor laughs. "I had already learned the sperm and egg stuff in biology class, so that wasn't an issue. There were the new books about sex everywhere around the house which my mother knew I was reading anyhow -- "The Happy Hooker" and "The Sensuous Woman," which taught me to masturbate). Mother also pointed me toward other women's self-empowerment literature like the lesbian coming-of-age novel "Rubyfruit Jungle".

Apparently mothers are big on handing their daughters books to escape the prickly chore of personally explaining reproduction. Jen, 29, tells the Bitch that:

My dad was a minister in a pretty strict denomination that I'm thankfully no longer a member of. One day when I was about 11, my mom gave me a really dorky book called "Wonderfully Made" that introduced sex from a "Christian perspective." After I read it, she asked me if I had any questions, but I blurted out, "Oh, Mom, I heard about all this stuff from the babysitter when I was 8!" which was true. Good old 13-year-old Babysitter Beth. She was a much better teacher than "Wonderfully Made."

After that, my younger sister, Kim had a similar initiation with a book called 'Susie's Babies' about some sort of rodent (gerbils, maybe? Now that I think about it, maybe there was more to that book than I thought -- Richard Gere, anyone?).

Some sort of rodent, indeed. According to a private reviewer on Amazon.com, "Susie's Babies" is "a book about a teacher that sends her hamster to be mated with a male hamster and she teaches the children in her 4th grade class where babies come from and she does it on a level that the children would enjoy and the parents would feel comfortable with."

Well, the Bitch is none too comfortable with that scenario! Why, children exposed to that trash are being told it is morally acceptable for Susie to "mate," (a.k.a. "fornicate") with any male who'll "do the deed," then scurry back to her own treadmill, having been used as a vile receptacle, now impregnated with her "babies" (a.k.a. "bastard, demon spawn"). And who is to take care of said spawn? The burden will no doubt fall to "society," the entire 4th grade class, due to the criminally bad judgment and moral turpitude of one ill-suited teacher who couldn't resist the revolting urge to turn her own, innocent, cedar-soiling she-hamster into a common whore.

Thanks to the intervention of Babysitter Beth, Jen and Kim grew up undamaged by such sensational claptrap. Though, at least one of them does keep tiny pets in a glass enclosure today. Time will tell whether or not it will affect her sex life to hear those odd scratchings or to see those tiny eyes peering out.

Properly introduced, moral animal behavior can be instructive. My deliciously earthy partner, Susan, 35, explains:

Having grown up in rural America, I learned about the "birds and bees" from the "birds and bees." Okay, it was mostly from the cattle ranchers adjacent to us. Every summer they'd round the cattle up and make "Rocky Mountain Oysters" - a.k.a., make steers out of calves (cutting the balls off, for you city folk). Once I even saw a rancher stick his whole hand inside of a cow, attaching a chain and pulling out a dead calf with a winch, sewing shut the cow afterward. Here's news for Bush: If that didn't work for abstinence education reinforcement (and it didn't), nothing will! The most entertainment for the year was when they brought in the bulls and ALL the kids gathered to watch them naturally impregnate (read "fuck") the cows. Horses were more exciting because they would rear and bite and kick!

New York City girl Lolita, a leather activist/educator, is the Bitch's beloved mentor and often a rollicking, wicked partner. She and the Bitch had a similar sex ed experience, with both their mothers being abashed about discussing sex.

In seventh grade, my mother handed me a book and told me "go to your room and read this. If you have any questions, ask me. Don't ask your friends." It was about my period, and I didn't know anything about that, so it was really scary. Later that week a friend told me this -- that "a man puts his thing in a woman's thing and later a baby comes out!" I was horrified. Then my mother gave me another book and told me the same thing as before. This time it was about how babies are made. It confirmed the baby story my friend told me -- it was so creepy!

Lolita's father died a while ago, but she visits her mid-80-ish mother regularly, who's becoming poignantly forgetful and vague. Here's a conversation they had during a recent visit, when her mother was talking about Lolita's relationship with her 23-year-old boyfriend:

Mom: You two live like you're married
Me: What's that mean, 'like we're married?'
Mom: You make love.
Me: Yes, we do.
Mom: I remember. I used to do that.
Me: Well, yah? You and Dad had me!
Mom: I made love with your Father -- and also with my boyfriends before him.
Me: Cool!
Mom: It's very important, you know.

This is National Family Sexuality Education Month, sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) and other organizations.

As it's October, Halloween is frighteningly close, so for you horror freaks, here is tale uniquely calculated to scare the pants right ON you:

"The first player spins the cylinder, points the gun to his/her head, and pulls the trigger. He/she has only one in six chances of being killed. But if one continues to perform this act, the chamber with the bullet will ultimately fall into position under the hammer, and the game ends as one of the players dies. Relying on condoms is like playing Russian roulette." -- "Me, My World, My Future", revised HIV material, p. 258.

That's from an actual "Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education" curriculum text, along with other snappy gems like, "There is no way you can have premarital sex without hurting someone." There are more jaw-slackening quotes on the same page above a table comparing the core principles of that curriculum with "Comprehensive Sexuality Education."

The Bitch wants to know: In 2003, do parents still just hand their kids a book to teach them about sex? Why waste time arguing about what schools will teach about sex when they don't want to talk to their own kids? While Mom and Dad are bickering at PTA meetings, the kids' hormones are boiling over, they're one verboten condom-free-blowjob-and-a-buttfuck away from pregnancy or an STD; and TV, MP3s and Babysitter Beth will finish the job of "educating" them anyhow. So, hey, Mom and Dad -- Deal with it! Your kids are going to do "it." So, let it be safely.

It has always been thus. Buzz, buzz. Tweet, tweet.

About Elizabeth F. Stewart

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Talk sex at The Water Cooler

Past Columns:
November 4: The Bitch gets into fishnets and codpieces
October 27: Nasty tricks and delicious treats
October 21: A hairy question
October 13: "Orange Alert" for gay rights and pro-choice issues
October 6: Bitch's buzz on the birds and bees
September 29: Beating the sexual doldrum conundrum
September 22: Not your Mama's polite dirty pictures
September 15: Nipples jubilee
September 8: Bitch's bawdy bio bonbons
September 2: Size batters
August 25: Bitch boots Bush from boudoir
August 18: Nurse Bitch's forsaken femme asylum
August 11: Sperm gotta swim, eggs gotta die
August 4: The Bitch plays pretend
July 28: Touched for the very first time