The Cut - How Do I Talk to My Kids About Sex?

Recently I learned, through no fault of my own and without wanting or trying to, that one of my own progeny — I won’t say which, to protect his last shred of dignity — thought that the balls were the part that went into the vagina during sex. He had been reliably told this, he informed me, by one of his fellow young elementary-school-aged boys. He had not thought to question it. And then, unfortunately for me, I had to figure out how to tell him why that not only wasn’t the case but just wouldn’t work, which was actually the most difficult part (note that I did not say hardest). I went out the next day and bought It’s So Amazing!, which is the book that freelance sex educator Rachel Lotus recommends for his age group, because at this point I’d do anything Rachel tells me to.

I asked Lotus to answer some crowdsourced questions garnered from parents with kids of all ages, as well as some questions of my own.

Furniture used to last generations; why it doesn’t anymore. The only Guinness Records we care about are the world’s oldest animals. On listening to Taylor Swift in prison. A surgical tool “the size of a dinner plate” has been discovered inside a New Zealand woman’s abdomen a year and a half after she underwent a C-section. Bake Off is doing away with the tone-deaf cultural theme weeks. And if it wasn’t a stroke or a seizure, what the hell was it if not this?

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