>From: "Luke Weiger" <lweiger at umich.edu>
>In my experience, anti-sex lefties are few and far between.
Normally I would agree with you Luke, but just 3 weeks ago I had one of those rubber-hits-the-road life experiences that made me question whether or not I knew myself and my own beliefs. Long story short, we came home from a Saturday afternoon of shopping to find that while we had been out our 12-year-old son had been surfing web porn sites. Rationally, I had the "its just sex, he's obviously ready to comprehend this stuff, don't you remember finding Dad's stash of Playboys at about the same age?" reaction. However on a more emotional side it was the equivalent to a 5 alarm blaze "Oh my God - he's way to young to see that." After searching for and failing to find the Men In Black memory eraser we received in a Burger King kids meal some time ago. (Hey it might work) I tried to reason my way out of this internal dichotomy. My mistake was turning to my Catholic-raised partner for help out of the abyss. Unlike me she saw no moral dilemma between her own experiences of finding and perusing her Dad's porn collection and siting our son down for a "chat". Her decisiveness took me off the hook.
If it isn't too late, the moral of this tale is that social attitudes toward sex are very deeply ingrained and can override more logical thought. Perhaps my internal outrage was not that he saw women giving blow jobs. I mean really what is the substantial difference between a blow job and a tonsil tasting kiss?? If you want to claim that the blow job usually results in climax, then maybe your perceptions of sex have been shaped by conservatives too. The more time I devote to thinking about this, my concern probably came from a cowardly place. It might become public that he saw pictures of blowjobs and every member of our family's social status might suffer. His for being a child with sexual knowledge (i.e. the boy your Mother told you about) and my Partner and I for being the type of parents who don't "...love their child enough to protect them from this trash." Don't know if this post is meant as info for the group or as a catharsis for me. you are welcome if you think it is the former, my apologies for wasting bandwidth if you determine the latter is the case.