The Birds, the Bees, the Ark, and Why Noah Needed to Have “The Talk”

The Birds, the Bees, the Ark, and Why Noah Needed to Have “The Talk”

“Don’t let boys touch you down there” is what I remember of “The Talk” with my mother. Dad never, ever got involved in that conversation. I got most of my information about sex, pleasure, and relationships from pop culture (the film Ghost and the song “Darling Nikki” figure heavily in my memory). Add in a heavy dose of Catholic shame and misogynist influences, and mix with sneaking into my parents’ bedroom to pore over the masturbation section of that lifesaving book Our Bodies, Ourselves and you’ve got a pretty good idea how this queer rabbi’s early ideas about sex and sexuality were formed.

I don’t blame or resent my parents for this lack of helpful, honest education. They sure weren’t given the tools to engage me or my sisters about puberty and sex in a complex way, and my Catholic elementary school offered woefully inadequate, not to mention woefully late, information. A Catholic nurse from a Catholic hospital came to my eight-grade classroom to teach about the changes our bodies would experience during puberty, a completely unhelpful three entire years after I started menstruating. Her information about pregnancy was so alarmist and confusing that I worried I might “fall pregnant” — an expression she indeed used — if I was…