sexual moaning sound
As proves to be the case frequently, my children have made me out to be a liar.
Mere hours after claiming I had figured out how to deal with my children’s sexual education (which pretty much resulted in doing nothing), I read them bedtime stories, during which both of them instantly stuck their hands down their pajamas.
I don’t know about your kids, but something about me reading to my kids results in a 50 percent chance that one or both of them will have the Pavlovian response to masturbate.
Coming from a “Free to be you and me” generation, I have never scolded or even addressed this Pavlovian need, am grateful it only occurs in the privacy and safety of our home, and figure they deserve a few more years of self-pleasure before someone makes them feel self-conscious about this.
I continued the evening in my “do nothing about sex ed, but tell yourself it’s because you’re so liberal” way and carried them to their respective beds, tucked them in and said good night.
I returned to my living room to find a beautiful man lying on my floor. I happen to know and like this man, so I joined him in his supine position.
“What’s that moaning sound?” my four-year-old daughter asked from her bed upstairs after half an hour.
“Holy s**t!” I whispered to beautiful man. "I can’t believe she’s awake. They always fall asleep as soon as I tuck them in. What should I say?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged .“But, you need to go up there.”
I readjusted my shirt, tried to think of something savvy to say, but all I could keep thinking was, “How does she know the word moaning?”
It only took me two minutes to reach her, but she must have asked, “What’s that moaning sound?” at least eight times before I crawled into her bed with her.
“Are you scared honey? Because mama’s fine. I’m not hurt or anything.”
She wasn’t scared, she was curious, so she repeated her question again.
“Well, you know how good it feels when I rub your back? When mama feels good, she moans. And we were kissing downstairs, which feels good, so I made some noises. But I’m not hurt, I’m happy.”
She seemed satisfied with this answer and asked for her Curious George book.
“Are you sure you don’t have any more questions?” I asked.
She didn’t, and I falsely assumed this would be the end of the conversation for a while.
The following morning, I staggered into the kitchen in search of coffee to overhear her say to her brother, “You know that ‘mm, mmm’ sound we heard last night? It was mama!”
She cackled with glee and pranced around the house imitating her groaning mama. Her brother looked at me with confusion, having slept through the entire event, so I briefly caught him up.
He too dismissed me by reading a book half way through my explanation. I’m obviously a slow learner, because I falsely assumed (once again) that this meant he wasn’t interested in the topic.
Later that afternoon, I found him poring over "Where Did I Come From?" As the subtitle says, "Where Did I Come From?" is “The facts of life without any nonsense and with illustrations.”
It was published in the early 70s, and I’ve never been more thankful for my packrat ex for keeping it around for 30 years.
Up until this point, only my kids’ friends had seemed to be interested in the book’s clear, but not too scientific, address of genitalia, sex, orgasms, sperm and how they help to create babies, but on this day, my son was reading “the facts of life” to his sister and they were both absorbed in the illustrations.
I hung around to see if they had any questions, they didn’t, but this time I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that would last.
The week progressed with my kids showing an unprecedented amount of interest in my life. Questions about beautiful man and how I was going to spend my time when they were at their father’s were asked for the first time.
Just as before, they seemed to know the answer to their questions and only wanted the briefest of validation or explanation from me and then further questions were asked at a later date.
I thought about surveying friends with older kids or checking out some parenting books to help me navigate this road I unwittingly found myself on, but I never did.
Winging it seemed to be working for me as it always has as a parent because it allows me to stay focused on our needs.
Other parents and parenting books will fill my head with other kids’ needs and the “right” way to deal with those needs. I prefer to take my guidance from my kids when figuring out what they need. Because even when I think I’m unprepared and don’t know what to do, if I really listen to what they are asking of me, the answer isn’t that complicated.
They just want to know the truth “without any nonsense” and illustrations sometimes help as well.
Corbin Lewars (www.corbinlewars.com) is a writing mentor, the founder of Reality Mom (www.realitymomzine.blogspot.com) and author of "Creating a Life "(Catalyst Book Press, 2010) and the forthcoming "After Glow." She lives in Ballard with her two children.
"But I really feel like I'm missing something. In general, is there any way to portray women of color in advertising without assimilating or marking?"
Yes.
Treat us like human beings.
That is to say, treat us the way "human beings" are constructed for and coded for in the West: individuals with individual needs, agency, and voice to express them, who encounter obstacles and puzzles along the way and who surmount or master them (in ads, with the help of X brand's handy dandy product).
The answer is not to represent us in the worst, most reprehensible ways European-ancestry people can be (see Quizno's , above). We don't want to prove our equality that way.
I am not a reader of the Sociological blog, but I skimmed the link you gave me. I understand the impetus behind the poster's analysis, and I'm sure you noted thus comment she made in the comment sections: "And, frankly, if I decide that there is NO WAY to fairly represent people of color, I don’t think that that means my analysis is wrong or pointless." Her point, I believe, is that in an inherently racist society, there is no way to create non-racist ads as a corrective. Interesting and potentially fair point, no?
But my response to her remains the same: short of removing non-Europeans from visibility in advertising and media (which we can most all agree is not an option), the answer is to portray non-Europeans the way the best ads treat Europeans: as individuals (not representatives of a group), as agents and subjects (not as sidekicks and objects), who solve problems, express opinions, and go about their daily lives in ways that prod subsconscious race essentialists into seeing us as "human beings" as opposed to "people of color with a relationship to the [European, male] Human Beings."
I recall a recent commercial in the U.S. in which an East Asian-ancestry woman is trying out a new window cleaner and interacting with a humorous voice-over instructing her on the benefits of Cleaner A over Cleaner B.
I thought it was a good ad because:
-she was alone, not a sidekick
- she was solving a problem on her own, making her own decisions (with help from the handy voice-over man)
- she was not presented as married, mothered, or otherwise linked to the "traditional" reproductive purvue of women
- She was not of aneathnicity that most mainland Americans would stereotype with cleaning/domestic labor/professional housekeeping anyway (that is to say, she was East Asian rather than Chicana, Central American, or Filipina).
- her person was not "othered" and her "East Asianness" (whatver the hell that is) was neither played up nor played down. She wore North American/Western casual clothes (not a kimono, say), but she was recognizably East Asian in phenotype (not the usual European-East Asian ancestry we see in Hollywood a lot).
-she was engaged in an everyday activity all people living in urban/suburban West engage in
All of these things (individualism, agency not limited to reproduction), in the West, have constituted humanity. That's why European men have been the default Human in the West for millenia. Now, we can certainly make a case for why that should NOT be the construction of "human" (i.e. human can mean reproductive, communal, etc.), but if we are playing within the "box" of Western construction, non-European ancestry people need a shot at playing within that box, too.
